Paul Reiser
Paul Reiser
Paul Reiseris an American comedian, actor, television personality and writer, author and musician. He is best-known for his role in the 1990s TV sitcom Mad About You. He is ranked 77th on Comedy Central's 2004 list of the "100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time". The name of Reiser's production company, Nuance Productions, is inspired by one of his lines in the film Diner, in which his character explains his discomfort with the word "nuance"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTV Actor
Date of Birth30 March 1957
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
From the minute we're born, boys and girls stare at each other, trying to figure out if they like what they see. Like parade lines, passing each other for mutual inspection. You march, you look. You march, you look. If you're interested, you stop and talk, and if it doesn't work out, you just get back in the parade. You keep marching, and you keep looking.
When my son said, "I can't stop thinking about girls," I said, "That's not gonna stop. Congratulations. You're in the club. From now until the day you die, one way or another you'll be thinking about girls.
Jerry Lewis played on the very first season of Mad About You, and he played basically himself, but he was called some other name. He said he's never done it; he'd never done a half-hour of [sitcom] television. This was 1992 or '93. And I said, "Well how is that?" And he goes, "Nobody ever asked me." It's like the pretty girl at the dance; everybody's too afraid to ask.
We had the boy's name picked out, but we didn't have a girl's. When he turned out to be a boy, we were so relieved. Literally, in the middle of contracting and pushing, and with my wife being drugged - out and half - lucid, we were still coming up with names.
Once in a while you get a moment of clarity -- an inspiration -- and they don't come that frequently,
Once I let the story brew, I was able to sit down and write it in a couple of weeks, ... I always envisioned Peter in the role, because there are few actors like him. I wrote pages and pages of stuff for Peter to do, knowing we wouldn't have time for it. I wrote these long scenes with Peter ordering food in restaurants and things like that, because I know what he can do with material once he has his way with it.
I'm feeling very vindicated that, when I see the audiences laughing and being moved, we were right. This movie was worth making,
Bob, the guy who did 'Big Fat Greek Wedding,' immediately saw what everybody else chose to not see. This is not a little art film. Bob said, 'This is a big commercial hit.' He realized there's something about the movie that really works. It can play everywhere. It's odd when you see the things that are most personal can end up becoming the most universal.
I started writing this before I had kids,
People come up to us and ask how we knew so much about their own family, ... I'm talking about people from faraway places, too. I get people from Turkey and Chile coming up to me and saying I wrote about their family.
Any issues my parents went through are very prominent in the movie, even though they enjoyed a happy relationship, ... The story actually started for me when my mom told me a few years ago that because she got a job, she never made it to the World's Fair in New York, and that's a missed opportunity that always stayed with her.
Thanks for letting me be on the show with you,
The studios didn't know how they would sell it, ... It's not sexy, it has some older actors. But the strange thing is, I'm seeing people in their 20s and 30s walking out of the theaters laughing and talking about the film. And older people want to hug their kids after they see the movie.
People say to me, 'You made both these movies?'