Letting Them Talk with Will Harris - Ep. 45 - Spencer Garrett (Dog Day Afternoon / Air Force One / Winning Time / 21 Jump Street / Star Trek: The Next Generation)

This time I’m letting Spencer Garrett talk. I’ve been watching this guy’s work since he made an appearance in a season four episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “The Drumhead.” No, I didn’t know who he was at the time, nor should I have, since he’d really only just gotten started at that point, but in short order he began to appear in everything. No, but for real: Spencer Garrett truly is “that guy who was in that thing.” His list of credits is well into the 200s – and rapidly heading toward 300 – and if he hasn’t been in everything, it often seems as though he has, particularly when you start scrolling through his filmography and see how many one-off episodes he’s done over the years. As of when we recorded this episode, it had been just over a week since Spencer had wrapped a very successful run on Broadway in Stephen Adly Guirgis’ adaptation of the 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon, and I literally managed to catch him the day before he headed off for a well-deserved three-week vacation. In fact, even though we’d been talking about doing an interview for awhile, in the end it came together so quickly that I had less than 24 hours to get ready for the conversation. Fortunately, I was able to reach out to a few of our mutual acquaintances to get some suggestions for topics to discuss…so thank you to Jim Beaver, Xander Berkeley, and the ubiquitous Richard Kind for chiming in. Between their ideas and my research, we ended up having a wealth of material to cover during the course of the conversation. Among the topics tackled: Spencer’s mother, who – in addition to having been a cast member on The Real McCoys – is a former president of the Screen Actors guild, which put him in some pretty impressive company well before he ever became an actor himself; getting some significant screen time in  Air Force One; working with David Milch and Michael Mann on Luck; being part of the Sorkin-verse by appearing in Sports Night, The West Wing, and the Aaron Sorkin-penned Charlie Wilson’s War; how his episode of 21 Jump Street has a notable connection to his work on the HBO series Winning Time; and, yes, we talked about playing a part-human, part-Romulan character on Star Trek: The Next Generation. And given my history with Random Roles, I particularly enjoyed getting to hear about the formation and membership of the CADs, a.k.a. the Character Actors Dining Society. Well, that’s probably enough of an intro. It’s time to let Spencer Garrett talk.