Explore every episode of the podcast Letting Them Talk with Will Harris

This time I’m letting Parker Young talk.

Parker basically got his big break as an actor when he secured a role in the hilarious ABC sitcom Suburgatory, and although he’s been working steadily ever since, he’s had to endure being a part of too many short-lived series, which is particularly disappointing when those series invariably tend to be pretty great. As such, I for one am rooting for his luck to change, because his new series, CBS’s vampire comedy Eternally Yours, is already starting out very solidly.

I interviewed Parker late last year when I did a piece for Vulture that took a look back at Suburgatory, which at the time had just found its way back to streaming services after having been MIA pretty much since it was canceled. The interview was via Zoom, and it was with Parker, his co-stars Jane Levy and Carly Chakin, and series creator Emily Kapnek, and after we finished our conversation, I got an email from Parker, thanking me for a great reunion, and since I’d also been a fan of his short-lived Fox sitcom Enlisted, I pitched him on being a guest on the podcast. He said he’d love to do it, but he asked if we could wait until he had something else to promote…and now he does, so here we are! Mind you, we had to get past a tiny technical issue when Zoom asked him for an access code that I neither sent him nor asked to have on there, but once we did, things went swimmingly.

During the course of our conversation, we of course talked about all three of the series I’ve already mentioned, so expect solid sections on Eternally Yours, Suburgatory, and Enlisted. We also talked about Imposters, a series which you have to buy outright to watch nowadays because it’s not streaming anywhere, the underrated Chuck Lorre sitcom The United States of Al, and his one-off appearance in season one of Fox’s Best Medicine which finds him emerging from the woods, baring his chest. It’s decidedly memorable. In addition, we talk about the experience of doing an episode of Mad Men, and – because I couldn’t resist the title – I even asked him about being in the film Gingerdead Man 2: Passion of the Crust.

This is another one of those conversations where you’d think we’d known each other for ages when, in fact, this is only the second conversation we’d ever had. But Parker’s just a nice, earnest, hardworking guy who does whatever he can to provide for his family while delivering solid comedic and dramatic performances on the regular. And if you aren’t a full-on Parker Young fan by the time you reach his reaction to my question about a failed pilot, then you’re clearly made of stone.

All right, that’s probably enough of an intro. It’s time to let Parker Young talk.

This time I’m letting Mike Viola talk.

I’ve enjoyed Mike’s music even before I knew he was the one doing it. It all started with an amazing little movie called That Thing You Do! It was – and remains – one of my favorite movies of all time, about the brief life and times of a ‘60s one-hit wonder band called the Oneders, a.k.a. The Wonders. Big thanks go out to Tom Hanks, of course, since he wrote and directed the film, but when you’re doing a film about a one-hit wonder, you’ve got to have a song that can be played over and over and over again without anyone growing tired of it. That’s what the late, great Adam Schlesinger gave us…and Mike took it, sang it, and hit it out of the park.

Long story short, I’ve been a Mike Viola fan ever since, but it wasn’t until a few years later that I stumbled upon his band, the Candy Butchers, on the soundtrack to the 1998 film Zero Effect. By the next year, the Candy Butchers had put out their full-length debut album, 1999’s Falling into Place, and they were off and running.

By the time you’re listening to this, Mike will have released a book, Superkid, about the earliest years of his music career, and on October 30th he’s releasing his latest album, Chum. Just to clarify, these days Mike is releasing his music under his own name, but if you aren’t familiar with his band catalog, let me assure you that there are several great Candy Butchers albums out there that you should familiarize yourself with first, after which it’s time to bask in the full Mike Viola catalog. But it’s all great stuff, I can assure you.

Mike and I ended up having a wide and ranging conversation that lasted longer than most episodes – you guys, I really have been trying to start wrapping things up by the hour mark, just to keep it easily digestible – but it’s a really enjoyable chat in which we discuss his additional soundtrack work on Walk Hard and Get Him to the Greek, his stint as an A&R guy for Verve Records that led him to sign a particularly wicked artist, teaming up with Adam Schlesinger to record an Andy Partridge song for the Monkees, writing for Panic at the Disco, working with Mandy Moore, covering a plethora of Paul McCartney songs, and much more. Oh, yes, and in addition to reading him a note that my 21-year-old daughter wrote for him about the importance of his music in her daily life, I reveal how his music was part of the soundtrack for my wife and I as we worked through the in vitro process and got our daughter into the world in the first place.

Okay, that’s probably enough of an intro. It’s time to let Mike Viola talk.

This time I’m letting Neil Flynn talk.

Neil always surprises me when he actually agrees to talk, even though he’s done several interviews with me at this point. In my defense, though, he’s made a career out of playing characters who tend to be men of few words.

Take Mike Heck on The Middle, for example: the guy spent virtually the entire run of the series actively trying to avoid conversation, and when he was invariably forced into having to talk, he generally only spoke as much as was absolutely necessary to get the conversation over and done with.

The first time I interviewed Neil, it was in the bar of the Langham Hotel in Pasadena, and although it lasted for 45 minutes, it concluded with him being surprised that we’d talked so long. In fact, he made note of having read my Random Roles with Lily Tomlin for the AV Club and said, “That thing went on forever! I was, like, ‘I’m never gonna have that much to say!” But it turns out that Neil Flynn is actually a pretty great interview if you can get him talking about things that he actually enjoys talking about, which is to say things that he actually cares about. I’ve also discovered that it helps if you can keep him guessing a little bit with what you’re going to ask him about. And it certainly doesn’t hurt if you let him take whatever tangents he decides he wants to take, because wherever he ends up going, you can count on it eventually being pretty funny.

I’d been wanting to invite Neil onto the podcast ever since I started it, but when I reached out to him after hearing that he was going to be in the first season of the Scrubs revival, he downplayed how much he was going to be in it…and rightfully so, since he only ended up being in a single episode. For season two, however, I ‘d heard he was going to be in more than one, so I reached out to him early,  and that’s why you’re getting the interview this week: because if you’re downloading this on the day of its release, then you’ll be able to see him in tonight’s episode.

So of course we talk about Scrubs and we talk about The Middle. This is the first time I’ve interviewed him since he made his debut on Shrinking, so we talked about the fact that this is the third time he’s worked with Harrison Ford, and he reveals how memorable those previous occasions were to Mr. Ford. We talk about his early acting career, which started in Chicago, led him to Los Angeles, then back to Chicago, and then back to Los Angeles, where he remains to this day. He’s got stories about popping up briefly in the unsuccessful pilot for Kung Fu: The Next Generation, kinda sorta making out with Laurie Metcalf, being unable to tell if Norm Macdonald was kidding or not, working with Amy Sedaris in Girls5Eva, and having someone question whether or not he’d really been part of Second City and the UCB.

For the record, the conversation starts with Neil not being able to figure out how to get his audio to connect, and by the end of the proceedings, he literally admits to being the living embodiment of Old Man Yells at Cloud. But that’s just who he is, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Well, that’s almost certainly more than enough of an intro. It’s time to let Neil Flynn talk.

This time I’m letting Brittany Ishibashi talk.

Brittany absolutely qualifies for the descriptor “that gal who was in that thing,” because when you look at her filmography, you quickly notice that she’s been in an episode of just about every hourlong drama of note that’s been on the air in the last decade or two.

Here’s just a brief list of shows on which she’s appeared over the course of her on-camera career, which started in 1999: Felicity, Charmed, Angel, 24, Grey’s Anatomy, CSI, The Office, Veronica Mars, Nip/Tuck, Supernatural, Desperate Housewives, House, The Mentalist, Bones, Castle, Major Crimes, Parenthood, This Is Us, and Scrubs. This is in no way a complete list, but it gives you an idea of how busy she’s been and how high profile that busyness tends to be.

Currently, Brittany is working with two of the most high-profile actors in the business: Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. She plays Woody’s wife on the Apple TV+ series Brothers, and we talk about how they’re everything you’d ever want them to be, and more. But, of course, that’s not all we talk about. We discuss several of the series I cited in that laundry list of past credits, and we talk about some that I didn’t mention in there, like her recurring role on Grace & Frankie, working with Dennis Hopper on the NBC series E-Ring and Sigourney Weaver on the USA series Political Animals, the opportunity to be part of the MCU via the Hulu series Runaways, and the fun of doing a Hallmark movie. I also enjoyed the opportunity to blow her mind a couple of times during the course of the conversation by asking her about some obscurities from her back catalog, but I regret nothing.

In fact, this was just an absolutely delightful conversation from start to finish. Being as she is indeed a “gal who was in that thing,” you might not know Brittany’s name, but once you’ve listened to this episode, not only do I think you’ll remember it, but you’ll probably want to actively seek out her work, as well you should.

Well, that’s probably enough of an intro. It’s time to let Brittany Ishibashi talk.

This time I’m letting Renny Harlin talk.

This man’s films have been part of the pop culture fabric of my life dating back to the late 1980s. I’m not going to lie and pretend that I saw his first two films – 1986’s Born American and 1987’s Prison – when they were initially released, but I did rent A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master on VHS, and I most definitely saw both Die Hard 2 and The Adventures of Ford Fairlane in the theater, so…I guess you’ve gotten the idea by now that I’m very much a Renny Harlin fan, and I was thrilled to have the opportunity to talk to him, even if it was only for a little over 30 minutes.

Harlin’s latest film is his fourth collaboration with Samuel L. Jackson, but it’s decidedly unlike any of the films they’ve previously done together. It’s called The Beast, and if you’re any sort of presidential historian, then you’ll recognize that the film shares its title with the highly-fortified state car that serves as the vehicle of the President of the United States. Well, in this case, our man Sam is the Commander-in-Chief, he’s inside the Beast, and he’s under attack from virtually the moment the film starts, so…buckle up. By the time this episode is release, the film should be in a theater near you, and if you’re listening to this a little bit down the line, then hopefully it’s available for purchase for you to enjoy in the comfort of your own home.

Of course, there was no way that I was going to have a conversation with Renny Harlin without asking him about some of the films that I mentioned earlier, so we chat about the budget battle of Nightmare on Elm Street 4, the rock and roll adventure of making Ford Fairlane, and how little he’s bothered by the aviation inaccuracies of Die Hard 2. We also discuss his shift to directing episodic television a few years ago, the time he had dinner with Billy Wilder, and the experience of working with Burt Reynolds on Driven, which was…definitely an experience.

No, I didn’t get to ask him about everything I would’ve liked to ask him about, but at the very end, I managed to make a closing comment that led him to tease me with a story that I sincerely hope will result in us doing a sequel sometime down the line, hopefully sooner than later. After all, he’s got a podcast now, too – Harlin House, which he does with his wife, Johanna – so it’s got cross-promotional opportunity written all over it!

Well, that’s probably enough of an intro. It’s time to let Renny Harlin talk.

This time I’m letting Mykelti Williamson talk.

I’ll just go ahead and admit it: this is someone whose name I had somehow never actually heard spoken aloud before until mere moments before starting my conversation with him. As such, I discovered that I’d been mispronouncing his name wrong in my head for the entirety of the time I’ve been watching his work…and I’ve literally been watching this guy for decades now.

Mind you, if I’d seen some of his earliest credits, when he was actually listed as “Michael T. Williamson,” I would’ve known better, but for years I just figured it was pronounced “M’Kell-tee,” and I was very, very wrong.

But better we should focus less on how you pronounce his name – even though that’s important – and focus more on his work, because Williamson’s current series, FX’s The Drop: A Snowfall Saga, is a fantastic piece of work, a spin-off from Snowfall that’s set in 1990 and blends a family drama with a fictionalized-but-familiar look at the rise of the west coast rap scene. Williamson plays a character called Big Daddy, the patriarch of the Kinsey family, and it’s a multifaceted role that gives Williamson the opportunity to play a number of different emotional beats. We recorded this episode with an eye toward releasing it after the fifth episode, so if you haven’t started watching the series yet or you’re not up to episode five, then you may want to hang tight and play catch-up before you listen to the interview.

That said, and I’m not saying you should just suck it up and suffer through the spoilers, but after we finish talking about The Drop, we start delving into other items in Williamson’s filmography,  and there are definitely some good stories awaiting you on the other side. Yes, we talk about some of the more obvious points of interest – reciting shrimp recipes in Forrest Gump, sitting next to Nic Cage on Con-Air, and playing alongside Pacino in Heat, just to name a few – but beyond that, he offers up a no-holds-barred explanation about his departure from The New WKRP in Cincinnati, details an awkward moment with Ed Asner on The Bronx Zoo, and reveals the remarkable amount of support he received from George C. Scott after working with him on the Showtime remake of 12 Angry Men. And along the way, we make brief stops on Soul Train, Streets of Fire, Bay City Blues, and… Hell, this man even has a Joey Travolta story!

Well, that’s probably enough of an intro. It’s time to let Mykelti Williamson talk.

This time I’m letting Jeneva Rose talk.

Jeneva is an author who became a full-fledged phenomenon when she released her novel The Perfect Marriage during the pandemic and found that TikTok was an amazing marketing tool. As a result, the thriller sold millions of copies, thereby making her into a pretty big deal and someone whose name immediately became one of those that you include on your lists of People Whose New Books I Always Want to Check Out.

Jeneva’s work isn’t just limited to thrillers, however, as you can quickly discover if you check out her website, which is – you guessed it – JenevaRose.com (and that’s “Jeneva” with a “J,” by the way). In fact, she’s just released her first proper horror book: “Sometimes I Scare Myself,” a collection of three tales which take some familiar concepts and turn them on their head.

Mind you, as I discuss with Jeneva, that’s a trademark of her work: taking established concepts and scenarios and tweaking them in ways that you might not necessarily expect. We talk about that and various other aspects of her career, including her origin story, various other books in her back catalog, and what’s coming up in terms of adaptations of her work.

For the most part, however, we spend the conversation unabashedly asking her about her favorite horror stuff, from books to TV to films, and sharing a few recommendations with her along the way. It’s what I was always planning to do with the conversation, and when her publicist found out that I was interested in doing that, the instant response was, “I can’t wait for you two to nerd out together.” Mission accomplished.

Well, that’s probably enough of an intro: it’s time to let Jeneva Rose talk.

This time I’m letting John Ross Bowie talk.

Yes, that’s right: I’m letting John Ross Bowie talk again…although in my defense and his, you may recall that during the course of his initial appearance on the podcast, he was promoting the premiere of his HBO Max series “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe,” a series which – at the time we recorded the episode – I hadn’t actually seen. As such, at the very end of that episode, I said, “We’ll need to do a follow-up after I’ve actually gotten my screeners,” and he said, “I was about to suggest the same.”

And here we are.

HBO’s publicity department was kind enough to send out the entire 10-episode first season of the show, and I promptly devoured them, so once John got finished with his promotional duties at Comic-Con, we regrouped and went through the season episode by episode…and so as not to make it chock full of spoilers, I vowed to wait until after all of the episodes of the season had dropped before I dropped my episode.

Just a few things to mention before we enter into the proceedings, the first being that due to a slight scheduling hiccup on my end and not wanting to have to ask John to reschedule, I actually started recording the episode while I was in my car, driving back to my house and – more importantly – to my computer. Trust me, you can tell that I’m not in my usual surroundings from the sound quality on my end, but John sounds great…and don’t worry, I made it home before we were finished talking about the second episode, and it’s instantly evident when I’m back on my proper microphone.

The other thing is that, as of when we recorded the episode, “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe” had yet to be renewed for a second season…and now it has, so hooray! But at the end of our conversation, you can hear my ridiculous optimism as well as John’s realism. Needless to say, however, we’re both thrilled about it now, so again I say, hooray!

All right, that’s probably enough of an intro: it’s time to let John Ross Bowie talk…about “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe” – Season One.

This time I’m letting Allan Havey talk.

I was introduced to Allan way back in the days when there were two cable stations devoted to comedy: The Comedy Channel and HA! In short order, they combined to form a single entity known as – you guessed it – Comedy Central. If you were watching back then, you may remember a quirky talk show called NIGHT AFTER NIGHT, and if you do, then like myself, you presumably also remember Allan.

That’s not to say that he hasn’t been continuing to work since then. In addition to being a well-respected stand-up comedian – perhaps you’ve seen one of his many appearances on Letterman, or maybe his HBO special – he’s more recently become recognized for his work as an actor. For me, it was particularly interesting watching his acting career evolve, having known him from that earlier incarnation of his career, but he’s really mixed it up a lot over the past few decades, doing both comedy and drama in relatively equal measure.

Perhaps you remember him from playing Lou Avery on MAD MEN or Karl Allard on BILLIONS. Maybe his face stands out to you because you saw him on SEINFELD or CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM. If you’re a Prime Video aficionado, you could’ve seen him on THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE or BOSCH. Or you could’ve seen him on GOOD LUCK CHARLIE, like my daughter did.

Most recently, however, the best place to catch Allan has been on Peacock: in addition to having done a couple of episodes of THE OFFICE in  2013, he’s also part of the recurring ensemble cast of THE PAPER, playing Marv Putnam, the CEO of the company that owns The Toledo Truth Teller. In addition, Allan’s got his own YouTube channel – @allanhaveycomedy – and he’s got a continuing series of videos called “Best Stand-Up Advice.” He’s up to 43 of them so far, and the overwhelming majority of them are under three minutes in length, but they’re all worth a watch.

To be honest, I could’ve spent a full hour just talking about NIGHT AFTER NIGHT, but I tried to mix things up as much as possible during the course of the conversation, and I think it’s a fun one.

All right, that’s probably enough of an intro. It’s time to let Allan Havey talk.

This time I’m letting Tommy Stinson talk.

Tommy was busy touring the world and elsewhere when he was still in his teens. Of course, that necessitated dropping out of school, but considering the journey that he went on as a member of the Replacements, it’s easy enough to argue that he made the right decision.

Of course, the Replacements haven’t really been a going concern – at least as a full-time band – since the early ‘90s, so Tommy  has had to make his own music, something he’s been quite happy to do. First came the band Bash & Pop, which was followed by Perfect. Then came Tommy’s unexpected stint as a member of Guns ‘n’ Roses, after which he finally made his belated debut as a solo artist in 2004 with the album Village Gorilla Head.

Since then, Tommy has continued to do some solo stuff, but he also did a stint as a member of Soul Asylum, reteamed with his Replacements bandmates for a few years to do some shows, and unexpectedly revived Bash & Pop for a second album in 2017. His most recent solo album was 2023’s Wronger, but he’s got plans for new material that we’ll hopefully be hearing in the near future.

I must admit that the reason that Tommy and I did this interview was to promote an intimate live show in Norfolk, but before the original planned drop date for the episode, I got word that the show was canceled. The reason? By unfortunate coincidence, it ended up being the same day at a free Dinosaur Jr. concert in Virginia Beach, which… I mean, it’s virtually the same demographic, and it’s free, so of course everyone opted to go to that show instead. But don’t worry, Tommy will almost certainly be back, and hopefully after listening to this episode, you’ll be inspired to go see him on his next tour.

Well, that’s probably enough of an intro. It’s time to let Tommy Stinson talk.

This time I'm letting Mark Sheppard talk.

Mark's availability for an interview came up with a press release for his latest film, a horror movie called EVER AFTER, but my reasons for asking him to do the podcast were admittedly tied to the fact that he plays a key role on my wife’s favorite TV series of all time.

Yes, Mark Sheppard plays Crowley on SUPERNATURAL, and given that my wife is part of that show’s substantial fanbase and has attended SUPERNATURAL conventions here in Norfolk, Virginia as well as in Rome (shout-out to JIB!), I’ve heard his name more than a few times. But I was already well aware of him as a character actor thanks to his work on a number of other series, including Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, Doctor Who, NCIS… The list goes on. I was also aware of him because of his father, Morgan Sheppard, who I first discovered on Max Headroom but who I remember most fondly for playing the Klingon in Star Trek VI who delivers the rules of Rura Penthe to Kirk and McCoy.

What I wasn’t aware of until I started prepping for our conversation, however, was the depth of Sheppard’s musical history. I knew that he was a musician, yes, but I hadn’t realized that he’d been a member of the Television Personalities in the early ‘80s and been one of Robyn Hitchcock’s live drummers.

Mark is a man who was made for a podcast called “Letting Them Talk.” Indeed, when I told his SUPERNATURAL cohort Jim Beaver that I’d talked to him, he simply asked, “Did you get to say anything?” Spoken like a man who’s been on more than a few panels with him, but it’s a fair question. To be honest, I made good on the name of the podcast and let Mark talk. As a result, he brought up most of the topics I’d planned to ask about before I could ever get to them, and it felt a bit superfluous to return to them, so if you’d like a sequel to this episode that involves more specific questions, let me know, and I feel like it’s something we could make happen.

As you’ll soon hear, we talked about the aforementioned EVER AFTER, which in theaters now (and I confirmed this via Fandango, because it’s playing in my area), we talked about his music career, as well as how his return to music was the direct result of his connection to SUPERNATURAL and its conventions. This is definitely not a conversation that’s heavy on SUPERNATURAL minutiae, but if you’re interested in Mark and his life and times, then I think you’ll enjoy it, and if you’re coming into this episode without knowing much about Mark, I think you’ll find him to be a fascinating individual.

One minor technical note: during the course of the conversation, there were a few occasions where the video hesitated, making us both think that we were frozen, but the audio seemed to be fine throughout, so when you hear those moments of slightly confused conversation, that’s what was going on.

All right, that’s probably enough of an intro. It’s time to let Mark Sheppard talk.

This time I'm letting Christopher Plummer talk...because, yes, that's right, it's another stopgap episode, owing to the fact that I have no new episode in queue and I am currently in the process of trying to stockpile some additional episodes for your listening enjoyment.

I suppose there are worse times that I could find myself in this situation than after dropping the 50th episode of the podcast. I had intended to draw attention to this pretty significant milestone when I recorded the intro to last week’s episode, but I got so focused on making sure you had the episode in your hands to enjoy over the weekend that I completely forgot. So let’s consider that accomplishment now: I started this podcast in November of 2025, and we’ve now hit 50 episodes. That’s 36 more episodes that I ever managed to record of my previous podcast, Obscurity Knocks. If you’re doing the math, that podcast effectively stopped after its 14th episode, which dropped in September of 2019, and over the course of that time, people have continued to download those 14 episodes on occasion, bringing its grand total of downloads to 4,400. Meanwhile, I’ve done 50 proper episodes of this podcast since November, and we’re currently sitting at 6,400 downloads, so even if I never did another episode…

Well, there’s no point in continuing that sentence, because I obviously am going to do another episode. Several more, in fact. As many as I can manage. But having said that, I should also underline a couple of key points, the most important being that I have a mortgage to pay, and this podcast is not currently earning enough to pull off that task, so I’m definitely having to continue writing for various outlets. The other important thing at the moment is that I’m also in the process of working on a new book project, one that I’m excited to tell you about as soon as I get the go-ahead from my publisher, but suffice it to say that if you enjoy this podcast, there’s an extremely strong likelihood that you’ll think that it’s a very cool and extremely interesting topic…and to my knowledge, there’s never been another book that covers this topic quite like this, which makes it particularly exciting.

I guess what I’m saying is, if you’re currently supporting Letting Them Talk with Will Harris through a paid subscription to my Substack or via my Patreon campaign, I really appreciate it, because even if it doesn’t pay the mortgage at the moment, it does help pay for gas or groceries or the occasional bill…and in some cases it provides enough to keep my account from going into overdraft, in which case it’s really, REALLY appreciated. And if you aren’t currently supporting me in either of those ways, well, this is the week of my birthday, so next to sometime in December, this is the best possible time to offer your support in that fashion. I’m working on some sort of gifts for supporters – I could maybe send you some DVDs for your trouble, because God knows I need to get rid of some of these things – so if that interests you, let me know when you make your pledge, and I can make that happen.

For now, though, I’ll just go ahead and offer you an interview from my archives: it’s the audio for the interview I did with Christopher Plummer when he attended the Television Critics Association press tour in support of Stephen Frears’ HBO movie, Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight. Yes, it was a Random Roles interview at the time, but you’ve most likely never heard any of the audio from the conversation…unless you’ve heard him talk about Starcrash, a film so classic that it was covered in an episode of How Did This Get Made? – one that included Paul Scheer reading a quote straight from my interview and giving me a shout-out. Otherwise, though, this is all previously-unheard material, so I hope you enjoy it.

Well, that’s more than enough of an intro. It’s time to let the late, great Christopher Plummer talk…but brace yourself, because it was recorded in a hotel room on a handheld recorder, so it won't be up to the usual audio standards. The stories, however, are worth turning up your volume to hear!

This time I’m letting Wesley Stace talk.

Wes is a singer-songwriter whose work I’ve enjoyed since the release of his debut LP for Sire Records, Here Comes the Groom. That LP, his first full-length studio album, came out in 1990, so not only have I been a fan for 26 years, I’ve even seen him through the loss of his musical pseudonym, John Wesley Harding, in favor of his birth name.

Wes has consistently remained prolific with his releases, and he’s got another one that’s coming up fast: One Last Heist, which comes out on September 2. He’s already teased the record with a couple of singles – the title track, “A Funny One,” and “I Say Lots of Things” – but I’ve had the opportunity to hear the whole thing, and I can testify that it’s great from start to finish and one of the best albums he’s released in recent memory.

The last time Wes and I talked was when I was briefly a senior editor for Q Magazine, and it was a conversation that was focused heavily on his then-impending tour of the UK, so this time we were able to mix things up a bit more. Of course we talked a fair amount about the new album, but we also discussed some of the other records in his back catalogue, including the recent vinyl reissue of Here Comes the Groom and a couple of other albums that’ll hopefully be joining it on that format. We also talked about some of his songwriting collaborations outside of his own work, including Eleanor Friedberger and Tanya Donnelly, and his recent opportunity to serve as one of the recurring frontmen for The Smithereens.

If you ever get a chance to catch Wes in concert, either with a band or without, I highly recommend the experience. He always puts on a good show and chats with the audience during the course of the performance. And I’m not just saying that because I might be doing some writing for him sometime in the semi-near future…but you’ll have to listen to the podcast to find out what that means.

All right, that’s probably enough of an intro. It’s time to let Wesley Stace talk.

This time I’m letting Robin Shorr talk.

I hadn’t actually seen or talked to Robin since the summer of 2013, but despite the fact that 13 years had passed since our previous conversation – which was, in fact, the only conversation we’d ever actually had – you’d never know it from the way she and I were chatting about her life and career.

But there’s a reasonable explanation for that connection: Robin used to write for The Middle, I used to review The Middle, we’ve got a bunch of friends and acquaintances in common, and – perhaps most importantly – she’s the credited writer on “Stormy Moon,” the episode of The Middle which was partially inspired by a real-life incident experienced by the Harris family.

The quick nutshell summary for anyone who hasn’t listened to the previous two Middle-centric episodes of this podcast: our family once got a summons from the sheriff’s department because of library fines – it happened because we lost a disc from a book-on-CD set, and the cost to replace it was just over the amount that causes a summons to be issued – and when my wife and I visited the Middle writers room, she told that story, and we were informed that anything said in the writers room was fair game. Fast forward a few months later, and “Stormy Moon” aired.

I really only tell this story again because it comes up almost immediately in my conversation with Robin, but don’t worry, we talk about a lot of other things besides The Middle, including our mutual love of the ‘80s sitcom It’s Your Move and her being in awe of Jason Bateman, attending sitcom tapings in the late ‘80s and going to college with Seth and Josh Meyers, writing on the MTV Movie Awards with the guys from The Lonely Island, coming up with The Hills: A Staged Reading, writing for Samantha Who?, working on short-lived – but very funny – Fox series like Sons of Tucson and Traffic Light, her friendship with David Hornsby and Adam Goldberg, being a part of Galavant and The Carmichael Show, and much more.

Oh, and she also has a podcast of her own, Los Feliz: The Podcast, which she does with Morgan Murphy, and which I can assure you is entertaining whether you live in Los Feliz or not…although if you live in Los Feliz, I can only imagine that it’s an absolute must-listen.

Anyway, that’s probably enough of an intro. It’s time to let Robin Shorr talk.

This time I’m letting Michael Hampton talk.

Michael has been a professional guitarist since he was in his teens, earning his place in one of the most influential funk bands of all time by being able to reproduce a ridiculously difficult solo when he was 17. By the time he was done, there was no chance that he wasn’t going to be in contention for a spot in the lineup in the musical collective known as Parliament-Funkadelic.

Michael has mostly kept his work within the ranks of the group, but recently he’s been making a concert effort to step out on his own and do some solo material. Last year saw the release of the album INTO THE PUBLIC DOMAIN, and he’s just released a new album, KING KONG.

It was a lot of fun talking to Michael, and it was absolutely entertaining, although I’ll be the first to admit that I sometimes lost the thread of the conversation.  That said, I don’t think he ever did, because as you’ll hear, there are a couple of occasions where he goes on a tear about this or that, but when all’s said and done, he comes right back to the original question. You know how a certain politician refers to his manner of speaking as “the weave”? Not only does Michael Hampton put him to shame, but he’s a thousand times more enjoyable to listen to, even if you don’t always follow where he’s going. It’s all about the journey, baby.

During the course of our chat, we talk about how he felt about having been crowned Kidd Funkadelic, whether it was weird for him when Eddie Hazel came back to sit in with the group, why he thinks funk remains such a popular form of music, and for my part, I was thrilled about how excited he got when I asked him what he remembered about recording with the Golden Palominos. I think I also threw him a bit when I referenced a quote about him from George Clinton’s memoir, but he gave a hell of an answer to my question anyway.

Well, that’s probably enough of an intro. It’s time to let Michael Hampton talk.

This time I’m letting Chris Loggins talk.

Chris is someone I’ve been describing as an outside-the-box guest for this podcast. In realty, though, he isn’t, since he’s squarely within the realm of pop culture. It’s just that the pop culture in question is for a slightly younger demographic than most of the folks who’ve been guests thus far.

Chris is supervising producer for Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, and if you haven’t been around little kids very much in recent years – or unless you were still a toddler circa 2012 – then there’s a decent chance that you may not be familiar with this series, but it’s a predominantly-animated spinoff of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood that revolves around Daniel Tiger, who was a puppet in Fred Rogers’ original PBS program. It maintains a number of staples from that program – the Trolley is still very prominent – and  in addition to Daniel, there are also other animated adaptations of classic puppet characters, including Prince Tuesday, son of King Friday and Queen Sara Saturday.

When PBS sent out a press release about how new episodes of Daniel Tiger would be dropping in the near future, it was right around the same time that my wife, an RBT who works with children with autism at a local ABA clinic, was telling me about one of her clients who is absolutely obsessed with Daniel Tiger. That got me thinking about the idea of interviewing someone from the show and finding out a bit about how someone gets into working for a PBS program and what it’s like to be part of a program that carries on Fred Rogers’ legacy, and then when I found out that Chris had also been a part of the PBS series Odd Squad, I decided to reach out and see if he’d be up for an interview. Thankfully, he was.

We talked about both of these PBS shows, of course, and as you’ll hear, I took a few moments up front to talk about my own connections to PBS, but I also asked Chris about his unique office décor, which included both baseball and sci-fi. I also asked him some of the burning Daniel Tiger questions that listeners asked me to pose to him, and I’ll let you be the judge, but I think he was mostly amused by them.

Well, that’s probably enough of an intro: it’s time to let Chris Loggins talk…and P.S. Ugga mugga. (If you don’t know what that means, your kids will.)

This time I’m letting Josh Joplin talk.

I’ve been enjoying Josh’s music for 25 years now. He’s actually been making music longer than that, but I don’t mind admitting that it wasn’t until the release of his single “Camera One” that I first found myself listening to Josh Joplin and his Group.

Josh actually released his first single in 1989, and while it isn’t available for streaming on Spotify or anything like that, you can find it online, and you can hear just how much of an unabashed folk singer he was at the time. That was released under his own name, as was his debut album, 1990’s Facts of Fortune, but in short order he formed the Josh Joplin Band, which eventually evolved into the Josh Joplin Group.

The release of 2001’s Useful Music was a major turning point for Josh, thanks to the aforementioned “Camera One” becoming the first independently-released single to hit #1 at Triple-A radio. The Josh Joplin Group promptly toured the world and elsewhere, and if the band’s next album, The Future That Was, didn’t necessarily hit the same commercial heights as its predecessor – and as we discuss, it did not – it hasn’t stopped Josh from continuing to write, record, and tour in earnest.

During the course of our conversation, Josh and I talk about the various periods of his career, getting the opportunity to be produced by Shawn Mullins and Jerry Harrison, making a memorable appearance on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, having close encounters with Pete Seeger, P!nk, and Jay-Z, being influenced by Dan Zanes, and doing a bit of musical reinvention with Among the Oak and Ash.

At the moment, Josh is proudly revisiting Useful Music for its 25th anniversary, having issued it on vinyl and also releasing what would be best be described as a companion piece: Useful Music: The Silver Anniversary Sessions, which includes a variety of demos as well as a gorgeous piano version of “Camera One” which really does serve to reinvent the song.

Well, that’s probably enough of an intro. It’s time to let Josh Joplin talk.

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.

This one's a bit of an experiment, folks: since I knew I wasn't going to have two episodes available for download this week, I decided that I'd venture into the archives and find the audio from an interview that you've hopefully read but certainly have never heard. In this case, it's what I'm guessing is probably the last third of the Random Roles that I did with Alex Rocco for the A.V. Club when he was part of the cast of Starz' Magic City. Not that we talk about that series in this portion of the interview. In fact, my advice to you is that you don't go into this episode with any particular plans to hear about specific projects. Instead, just go in expecting to hear the voice of Alex Rocco, because you get that in spades for about 20 minutes. He seemed legitimately fascinated to talk to me, and you'll be able to hear that, just as you'll hear that that fascination required me to keep him on track, lest the conversation become more about me than him. He wanted to let ME talk! That's the complete antithesis of this podcast, for God's sake! Still, it's worth it just to hear him say that I'm ostensibly "pretty hip." I don't buy it, but it sure sounded good when he said it...

Anyway, I just wanted you to have a little something to keep you happy until the next proper episode is live, which should be by the end of the week. But if you enjoy this, let me know, and I'll see what else I can find. The quality of these pre-Zoom interviews vary wildly, but they're still pretty fascinating... 

Today I’m letting John Ross Bowie talk.

John has a true gift for comedy, but he’s also a gifted actor. Case and point: when he’s playing Barry Kripke, you often want to punch him in the face, but by the end of this podcast, you’ll want to buy him a drink just so that you can keep hanging out with him and having him tell you stories.

John got his start in the theater, but you almost certainly know him best for his work on the small screen…and occasionally on the big screen as well, mind you, but it’s his TV credits that you know the best, and your list probably starts with The Big Bang Theory, where – as was just mentioned – he plays Barry Kripe. John is reprising that role in the new HBO Max series Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, and I for one freaking love it and can’t recommend enough.

That said, one of the first things that’s said in our conversation is that, as of that point, I hadn’t actually seen the show yet. Now I have – predictably, the screeners showed up later that day – and I can rave about it. And we’ll have a follow-up bonus episode where John and I talk about it, just as soon as we can figure out when to record it. But make no mistake, it’s coming. But don’t let that stop you from watching it, because it’s an absolute blast.

Fortunately, we had other things to talk about during our time together, including how he made it onto Big Bang in the first place. I also casually suggested a Speechless revival that he’s all in on. We talked about his memoir, NO JOB FOR A MAN, which I also highly recommend, and that led us into some fun music talk connected to his band Egghead. Other topics included the very odd film What The Bleep Do We Know?, some of his one-off episodes over the years, including Girlfriends and The League, and a great definitive Hollywood story to wrap things up. Oh, and when the conversation starts, I should clarify that you’ll hear him reference his invitation to the Zoom call, where it suggests that he should politely tolerate my questions, something which he adamantly refuses to do.

Okay, that’s probably enough of an intro. It’s time to let John Ross Bowie talk.

This time I’m letting Jane Seymour talk.

Jane has been a staple of TV and film since the start of the 1970s. Having gotten her start as an uncredited extra in the 1969 film Oh! What a Lovely War. By the following year, she was actually being credited, and by 1973, she was a Bond girl, so it’s fair to say that she moved up the ranks pretty quickly as an actress…and she’s yet to stop moving or acting.

At the moment, she’s starring in the fifth series of the Irish detective dramedy Harry Wild, which you can check out on Acorn TV, and although it’s been a fun watch from the very beginning, this season is particularly eyebrow-raising for those who’ve been fans of Seymour’s since her Dr. Quinn days, as she’s reteamed with Joe Lando, a.k.a. the good doctor’s old beau Sully. Suffice it to say that the twosome still have the same chemistry that they used to, so if you’re a fan, you’ll definitely want to see how they’re playing together as this new pair of characters.

Given that that’s Jane’s current project, that’s of course where we start our conversation, but we made our way through as much of her career as we could during the time that we had allotted for our conversation. Mind you, as you’ll hear pretty quickly into the conversation, Jane has a memoir on the horizon, and once I heard her say, “There’ll be more in my upcoming book,” I knew that I might yield better results if I tended to ask about a few things that aren’t necessarily asked about on the regular, like working with Elizabeth Montgomery on The Awakening Land, or playing Jensen Ackles’ mother on Smallville, being friends with Johnny and June Carter Cash, or playing against Ian McKellen in The Scarlet Pimpernel.

I also asked how she ended up having her home turned into a recording studio for Radiohead and the Cure, which resulted in a fun answer. But, yes, of course, we did still spend a few moments here and there on things like Live and Let Die, Battlestar Galactica, Somewhere in Time, Oh Heavenly Dog, and even the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders movie. Oh, yes, and she’d do a sequel to Dr. Quinn: Morphine Woman in a heartbeat.

Okay, that’s probably enough of an intro. It’s time to let Jane Seymour talk.

This time, I’m letting Bruce McGill talk.

I’ve talked to Bruce many times in the past, and it’s because he’s always got stories to tell. In fact, he’s got so many stories that I continue to try to talk him into letting me help him write his memoir. To date, it has not happened, but he says that if he does it, the only person he’d collaborate with is me, and by God, Bruce McGill is a man of his word.

Bruce and I first talked when he was part of the cast of TNT’s Rizzoli and Isles, and he was so pleased with the end result of that interview that we’ve stayed in touch ever since. As such, I always knew that I wanted to have him as a guest on this podcast, but I wanted to wait until he had something to promote. And now he does: in addition to being part of the cast of the Paramount+ series Lioness – season three premieres on August 2 – he’s also part of the cast of Netflix’s upcoming Scooby-Doo: Origins. And while he obviously couldn’t tell me much more about the actual plot of the series beyond the fact that, yes, it’s an origin story, he did go into detail about the experience of filming it.

I won’t claim that this is a fully comprehensive interview with Bruce, mostly because I’ve talked to him so many times over the years that we’ve tackled a lot of subjects, some of them more than once. But having said that, this is the first time you’ve actually been able to hear me talk to him, so I did touch on a few of the greatest hits, so to speak. So we talked a bit about Animal House, we talked about his iconic episode of Miami Vice, working with Michael Caine and Oliver Stone on The Hand, befriending Wilfred Brimley, doing one of his first films with an up-and-comer named Jonathan Demme, and much more.

So, no, we didn’t hit on everything that folks asked me if I’d ask him about, mostly because you asked me to ask him about a LOT. But Bruce is always game for another conversation, so when Scooby-Doo: Origins is actually on the cusp of coming out, don’t be surprised if you hear from him again. And that’s “hear from him,” not “see him,” by the way. He’s old-school. He doesn’t love Zoom. He once said that he doesn’t turn on the camera unless he’s getting paid. Mostly I think he just doesn’t love screwing around with the computer. But, hey, he’s been in enough things that you already know what he looks like anyway.

And that’s plenty enough of an intro. It’s time to let Bruce McGill talk.

Today I’m letting Bill Lawrence talk.

I first interviewed Bill because of his ties to my area: he’s an alumnus of the College of William & Mary, which provided me with a local angle and an excuse to talk to him for The Virginian-Pilot. Or was the first time for PortFolio Weekly? Either way, I’ve known Bill Lawrence for quite some time at this point, and yet despite that, it somehow always surprises me that he still remembers me.

But he does, in fact, remember me, and when I shot him a line on Facebook a few months back and suggested that he should do this podcast, he promptly wrote back and said, “Will, I’d be a bad guy if I didn’t.”

The thing is, Bill Lawrence is a very busy man. But if you watch much TV, then you probably already knew that. You know him from SCRUBS, of course, but lately you might also know him for TED LASSO. Or perhaps SHRINKING. Or most recently for HBO’s ROOSTER. He’s also executive producer of BAD MONKEY. So as you might imagine, just because Bill’s willing to do your podcast doesn’t mean that he’s necessarily available to do your podcast. And when one of the reasons why he’s not available is because he’s busy directing the first episode of the next season of SHRINKING, then by God, you can accept that. And when you find yourself waiting for him to pop on the line for the interview and you discover that he’s still in the writers room and that he’s got a call scheduled for as soon as your interview is over, you start wondering if maybe this interview isn’t actually going to happen today after all.

And that’s when Bill pops onto the Zoom call, and he’s ready and willing to talk up everything he’s got in the pipeline at the moment, things he’s done in the past that you might remember fondly, and he even offers up a George Clooney story that a) he realizes he’s never actually told before, and b) tells you that it makes him happy that he was able to tell it to you.

So, yeah, long story short, Bill Lawrence is a pretty swell guy. And when you listen to this conversation, you’d never guess that it’d been years since the last time we actually talked, because he’s one of the best talkers in the business.

Okay, that’s enough of an intro. It’s time to let Bill Lawrence talk. 

This time I’m letting Jamie Hector talk.

Funny thing is, I actually interviewed Jamie for the AV Club, even if I didn’t entirely remember it at first. In my defense, I’ve done so freaking many Random Roles interviews over the years that the relatively few non-Random Roles interviews I’ve done with actors often slip past me, although I really should’ve remembered the fact that I interviewed Marlo from the freakin’ WIRE!

Yes, that’s right: Jamie played Marlo on HBO’s THE WIRE, and he so quickly became a defining figure of the series that you may not even remember that he wasn’t even an original cast member. These days his character is so closely associated with the show that Marlo came in at #2 on Rolling Stone’s Greatest TV Villains of All Time in 2016. That’s a pretty bad guy right there.

Currently, however, Jamie back on the side of the good, playing Ray Rawlins on the Apple TV+ adaptation of CAPE FEAR, which continues to unfold until its 10th and final episode airs on July 31. And it’s not as if he wasn’t keeping busy between these projects, y’know.

After THE WIRE, he stepped straight into an arc on HEROES, and he also did a stint on FX’s THE STRAIN. More recently, he’s been busy playing Jerry Edgar on BOSCH as well as reprising his role on the various spinoffs of the series. And we also talked about how exciting it was for him to appear in WU-TANG: AN AMERICAN SAGA, how he enjoyed the rare opportunity to do comedy in an episode of ARE WE THERE YET? (where he played a character named Arlo, which, y’know, probably just a coincidence), and oh, yes, we talked a lot about THE WIRE, too.

Well, that’s probably enough of an intro. It’s time to let Jamie Hector talk.

This time, I’m letting Graham Parker talk.

Graham is a singer-songwriter who’s been plying his trade since the ‘70s, steadily touring and regularly writing, recording, and releasing new music. He tends to get lumped in with such so-called “angry young men” as Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson, but as it happens, he was already out there with his debut album before either of those guys…and thanks to author Jay Nachman, there’s now a book that properly documents it.

Appropriately, the book is called “Graham Parker’s Howlin’ Wind,” and Nachman had full access to Graham while he was putting it together…and, indeed, it was Nachman who helped set up this interview. We actually did it a few months ago, as you’ll be able to tell from a few remarks that he makes during the course of the conversation, but I wanted to hold off on releasing it until Graham released his latest live album, Quality Footwear (Live at the Brook), and it finds him teamed with his road-tested backing band, the Goldtops, as well as backing vocals from the Lady Bugs. The end result is 11 solid performances that are available now through the fine folks at Big Stir Records.

So of course we talk about his live shows during our conversation, and we start off by doing a deep dive into his early years, including how he went through a prog period and his thoughts on being labeled “pub rock.” God forbid I should’ve actually asked him that question, but I did tell him that someone suggested that I ask him that question if I wanted it to be a short interview, and as a result I got a much more amusing answer than I know would’ve gotten if I’d asked it outright. Plus, I actually got to ask more questions afterwards rather than just receiving a flurry of obscenities

I also asked him about some of the other records from throughout his career, including the one that got me started as a Graham Parker fan (the very ‘80s Steady Nerves), and I got him to regale me with the tale of how he got Bruce Springsteen to provide backing vocals for him. It’s a fun conversation that goes all over the place, but if you’ve ever been a Graham Parker fan, it’ll remind you to go back and listen to his music, and if you’ve never been a Graham Parker fan, well, hopefully this’ll be the kick in the ass you need to make you one.

Well, that’s probably enough of an intro. It’s time to let Graham Parker talk.

This time I’m letting Jon Cryer talk.

I’ve interviewed Jon more than a few times over the course of the past decade or so, and  I’m always pleased to have a chance to talk to him again. That’s mostly because he’s a swell guy and we have a nice chemistry whenever we chat, but if I’m being honest, there’s always that little voice in the back of my head that’s going, “Dude, you’re talking to Duckie.”

Yes, Jon Cryer was Duckie in PRETTY IN PINK, and he was arguably the most relatable movie character of my teenage years, the poster boy for guys who were perpetually enduring unrequited love. I mean, I once made a mix tape that started out with a snippet of dialogue that still echoes in my head even now…

“I love this woman, and I have to tell her…and if she laughs, she laughs…and if she doesn’t love me, then she doesn’t love me. But if I don’t find out… Oh, I love her too much!”

But Jon Cryer is about so much more than PRETTY IN PINK, obviously, which is why – although of course we talked about it – we talked about a wide range of topics during the course of our conversation, starting with his current endeavor: a production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, in which he plays Vice Principal Douglas Panch. As of this recording, you can catch him at the New World Stages – Stage 3, located at 340 West 50th Street in New York. So if you’re going to be in NYC this summer, check and see if tickets are available, because I have it on good authority that it is a hoot.

Beyond that, we talked about his Broadway origins, how his movie HIDING OUT ended up having a duet between Roy Orbison and k.d. lang, why so few people saw MORGAN STEWART'S COMING HOME, how his big plans for a specific career arc led him from a punk rock western into what turned out to be the lowest-budgeted SUPERMAN movie ever, and how the latter experience kinda sorta resulted in him getting to play the baddest, baldest DC villain of them all. He also regaled me with stories of being up for Ferris Bueller, auditioning for BACK TO THE FUTURE, and not auditioning for RESERVOIR DOGS.

And,  yes, we talked about PRETTY IN PINK, including his audition for Howard Deutch, his first meeting with John Hughes, how he and James Spader planned out their quote – fight scene – unquote, and, yes, how Duckie was robbed.

Well, that’s probably enough of an intro. It’s time to let Jon Cryer talk.

This time I’m letting Sally Timms talk.

Sally is a singer-songwriter who – since 1985 – has been a member and one of the lead singers of one of the longest-running bands to emerge during the UK punk explosion, even if it’s been quite a while since one would readily describe their sound as “punk.”

She recorded her first album in 1980 with the help of Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks – if you’re curious about how it sounds, you’re in luck, because it’s out there for streaming – but even after she released that record, it still never occurred to her that she might actually end up pursuing a proper career in music. That situation changed after she joined the Mekons in ’85, but even then, she probably never imagined that she’d still be part of the band’s lineup more than 40 years later. Granted, the band’s tendency toward cult status means that she hasn’t always been able to make music her full-time career, but she’s certainly been continuing to make music ever since.

Last year, the Mekons released HORROR, and this year they released an album of dub remixes called HORRORble (mekons v.s Tony Maimone in Dub Conference). If Tony’s name rings a bell, it’s because he’s a member of Pere Ubu, and he’s really transformed the songs in some unique ways. We talked about that collaboration, and we talked about some of Sally’s other work with the Mekons, too, of course, including the differences between major and indie label life and her thoughts about the documentary about the band. But beyond the Mekons, we also discussed her work with the Aluminum Group, her duet with Marc Almond, being Cowboy Sally, and even when she provided a voice for Cartoon Network’s Toonami.

That’s probably enough of an intro. It’s time to let Sally Timms talk.

This time I'm letting Lukas Haas talk.

Lukas was still in single digits when he made his film debut, managed to make it through his teen years without succumbing to any sort of scandal, and is currently in the cast of a series that’s sitting at a 91% rating on Rotten Tomatoes…and that’s on both the Tomato-Meter and the Popcorn-Meter.

Not bad for a guy who – given that he only just turned 50 a couple of months ago – ostensibly still has an awful lot of acting ahead of him.

Lukas made his aforementioned film debut in the 1983 film TESTAMENT, starring alongside my former podcast guest Jane Alexander and our guest star on Jane’s episode, Ross Harris, who I met as a result of his work in AIRPLANE! When I told Jane that I was going to be talking to Lukas, I half-jokingly offered her the Zoom link, saying that if she was free at the time of recording, I’d love to have her do a pop-in. As it happened, she’d already gotten a better offer: at almost the same time as we were going to be recording, she was going to be doing a TESTAMENT panel with the film’s director, Lynne Littman. By an even more enjoyable coincidence, the panel ended up being moderated by another acquaintance of mine – fellow journalist Tim Grierson – so Letting Them Talk got a shout-out. What are the odds?

I bring all of this up because, as you might expect, the first thing I mentioned to Lukas when he hopped on the call was that I’d had Jane as a guest and Ross as a guest star, and when I explained how Ross and I had first met, I discovered that Lukas is a huge AIRPLANE! fan himself. Instant bond achieved.

And just as a quick sidebar, after the interview I texted Ross to tell him how well it had gone, and he wrote back, “Brilliant human. Just straight out of the gate an incredible artist.” And then after a few minutes, he added, “Okay, maybe his drawing needed work straight out of the gate…” And with that, Ross sent me a drawing that Lukas had done for him when they were working together on TESTAMENT. Naturally, I instantly wrote back and said, “Holy shit, can I post that when I release the episode?” He said, “Absolutely.”

In other words, if you’re not currently subscribed to my Patreon or Substack, then you’re probably going to want to remedy that…

Getting back to the episode, Lukas can currently be seen in SPIDER-NOIR on Prime Video, so of course we started out by discussing his work on the series with co-stars Nicolas Cage and Brendan Gleeson, but from there his whole career was fair game. Lukas admitted that he often found himself remembering more about his early work than his later work, so we talked about working with Harrison Ford on WITNESS without having any idea who he was at first (and then revealing the moment when he really figured it out), having Alex Rocco play his dad in THE LADY IN WHITE, roller-skating his way through SOLARBABIES, and having an amazing time working with Steven Spielberg. We discussed BRICK a bit, as well as CRIMINAL MINDS including the role he initially auditioned for on that series; how he basked in the big-budget bizarreness of MARS ATTACKS! and the more reasonably budgeted bizarreness of BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS; being on Broadway with Steve Martin and Robin Williams; getting a rare chance to do comedy on THE RIGHTEOUS GEMSTONES; having a close encounter with Paul McCartney; and, yes, we even discuss RAMBLING ROSE and his feelings on how a particular scene probably wouldn’t play today…and why that’s not necessarily a good thing.

Okay, I’m not sure I could possibly do any more teasing on this thing. It’s time to let Lukas Haas talk.

This time I’m letting Kevin Rowland talk.

He's been a recurring figure on the UK charts since the early ‘80s, and on the US charts… Well, okay, he hasn’t exactly made any headway there in quite some time, but even in 2026, the sheer inevitability of “Come on Eileen” has continued to keep the name “Dexys Midnight Runners” a familiar one.

Rowland founded Dexys Midnight Runners in 1978, with the band releasing their debut album, Searching for the Young Soul Rebels in 1980. It was a massive success in the UK, climbing into the top 10 and spawning the #1 hit “Geno,” but neither managed to chart in the States. Knowing this makes it a little more startling that the band’s next album, 1982’s Too-Rye-Aye, spawned a song that topped the Billboard Hot 100…and, yes, of course, I’m talking about “Come On Eileen.” The album even made it to #14 on the Billboard 200 Albums chart…and they haven’t had another album hit the charts since.

There’s just no accounting for taste, is there, folks?

But just because Dexys’ albums haven’t charted doesn’t mean that they haven’t continued releasing them, albeit with some gaps in there while Rowland was recording solo LPs. During the course of our conversation, we talked about all of them at least briefly, including their latest album, Love, which is due for release later this year. You can check out the first single, “My Life in England, Pt. 1” right now, and it’ll give you an idea of what to expect from the band’s sound nowadays…which, to be fair, isn’t so dramatically different than it’s ever been. Yes, there’ve been some changes along the way, but Rowland’s voice is still immediately familiar even after all these decades.

I’ve talked to Kevin a couple of times in the past, but it’s been long enough that I’d kind of forgotten that sometimes he’s got quick answers to questions and sometimes, if you ask the right one, he’s got lengthy answers to questions. Thankfully, I managed to ask enough in the latter category to result in an interesting conversation…but with that said, brace yourself for the occasional moments of silence as well, mostly because I wanted to make sure there wasn’t more to come.

Well, that’s probably enough of an intro. It’s time to let Kevin Rowland talk.

This time, I’m letting John C. McGinley talk.

I’ve wanted to interview John for many years, so the fact that that dream came true just as he’s delivered not one but two Emmy-worthy performances made it all the more exciting.

I no longer remember where I first saw Mr. McGinley, mostly because he was in so many films throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, but like most people, he made the jump from “character actor” to “actor I know by name” when he picked up the role of Dr. Cox on  Scrubs. It’s a role he recently picked back up when the series was revived for a new season on ABC, and it’s since been renewed for a second season, thank the lord, but what’s also been keeping him busy is another Bill Lawrence-created series, HBO’s Rooster, where he plays Walter Mann, president of Ludlow College and boss to Steve Carell’s character, Greg Russo. I’m not kidding around about McGinley’s performances being Emmy-worthy, either; he’s great on Rooster – as well he should be, as you’ll soon hear – and Scrubs has taken Dr. Cox in a direction we haven’t seen before, giving McGinley a chance to flex his acting muscles in a different way with the character.

As I mentioned, however, McGinley was acting well before he got that first full-time prime-time gig with Scrubs, and we talk about as much of that career as time would allow…and when time started to run out, I read him all of the various things that you folks wanted me to ask him about, and it’s clear that he’s got stories yet to tell. During this conversation, however, we managed to discuss Stan Against Evil, Platoon and his relationship with Oliver Stone, Watch It (a personal favorite of mine), Car 54, Where Are You?, Office Space, and Three to Tango. Oh, yes, and we sort of talked about Point Break and On Deadly Ground, but…you’ll, uh, have to listen to find out what I mean by that.

Okay, that’s enough of an intro. It’s time to let John C. McGinley talk.

This time I’m actually letting two people talk. One of them I was expecting, one of them I wasn’t, but I was thrilled to have the opportunity to chat with them together, even if it had only been a little over a week since I’d last talked to them separately.

To try and make that slightly confusing sentence a bit more comprehensible, I should explain that my wife and I recently took a trip to London to visit our daughter, who’d just wrapped up a semester abroad and was on the cusp of heading home. Having already finished her semester, she met up with us in Reading, where all three us stayed with family friends (hello, Toni and Stu, and thanks again for the hospitality), after which we spent some time in London, did an overnight trip to Galway, Ireland to see the Cliffs of Moher, and – most importantly for this story – headed to York to see Haircut One Hundred in concert!

I must admit that I never would’ve expected that I’d ever have the chance to see them live, mostly because Nick Heyward parted ways with the band in 1983! But against all odds, the guys mended whatever fences they needed to mend, started playing together again, and not only are they back together full-time and touring, but they’ve even got a new record coming out on June 19! And owing to a combination of the band having a wonderful publicist and having interviewed Nick during my brief tenure as a senior editor of Q Magazine, my family and I were not only able to see the band live in York (along with openers Stone Foundation, who were also pretty damned great), but we met up with them after the show. And while I was of course thrilled to have a chance to meet Nick, as a proper music nerd, I was also excited to meet the band’s drummer, Blair Cunningham, who was sitting behind the kit the first time I saw Paul McCartney in concert.

Nick and I were originally going to do an interview before my trip to London, but then it became clear that it would be easier to do it once I was back home and Haircut One Hundred was done with their tour. What I was not expecting, however, was for Blair to pop in a few minutes after we started and join us, but talk about a pleasant surprise. Plus, it kept me on my toes as an interviewer, having prepped questions about Nick’s solo career to fill the hour. Instead, I got both of their perspectives about the Haircut One Hundred experience, Blair had some amazing stories of his own, including some great McCartney tales as well as a hilarious story about working with Echo and the Bunnymen, and I still managed to get a question in about Nick’s songwriting collaboration with the late, great Terry Hall.

Well, that’s enough of an intro: it’s time to let Nick Heyward and Blair Cunningham talk.

This time I’m letting Kevin Dunn talk.

Kevin is a gentleman who’s been working in front of the camera since the mid-1980s, but it’s arguable that the role that transformed him from “oh, that guy” to being an “oh, that guy” from a very specific thing was playing White House Chief of Staff Ben Cafferty on VEEP. At the moment, however, he’s doing press for Tyler Kornack’s new film, MERMAID, which premiered at last year’s SXSW Festival, received a brief theatrical run earlier this month, and is on the cusp of receiving a digital release.

I made this remark to Kevin during our conversation, but it bears mentioning here as well: MERMAID is a weird fucking movie, but it’s a weirdness that sucked me in and kept me glued to the screen until the very end. SPLASH it is not, nor is it THE SHAPE OF WATER, but all three films share a certain amount of DNA, and… Well, I don’t really want to say much more about it, except that Kevin’s role, while relatively small in the grand scheme of things, is one that provides him with a moment that would be a must-add to any actor’s clip reel.

Of course, we talked about other topics as well, although I’ll tell you right now: Kevin’s a guy who has plenty of stories, and given the name of this podcast, it should go without saying that I didn’t get to ask him about everything that you rowdy lot wanted me to ask him about. This, of course, means that a sequel is a must if we can get it scheduled. For now, though, just know that we discussed VEEP, of course, along with MISSISSIPPI BURNING, LUCK, THE PRACTICE, SNAKE EYES, MARKED FOR DEATH, THE BEACH BOYS: AN AMERICAN FAMILY, and HOT SHOTS! And I’m sure a few other things came up as well, but suffice it to say that there’s a lot of great material to be found within those topics.

And with that said, I think that’s plenty enough of an intro. It’s time to let Kevin Dunn talk.

This time I’m letting Sam Anderson talk.

Sam is someone who’s been a working character actor since the 1970s, popping up in dramas and comedies alike. At the moment, he’s living the character actor’s dream, in that he’s a series regular on one of the most entertaining dramas on network television, playing Kathy Bates’ husband on CBS’s extremely creative reboot of Matlock.

Like so many actors, Sam got his start in the theater, but once he made the move to California, he jumped in front of the camera and has rarely found himself without work. As far as where you might know him from, it’s virtually impossible to know, given the width and breadth of his filmography, but some key moments from his career have found him playing an obstetrician obsessed with Arthur Fonzarelli on Friends, being stranded for several seasons on Lost, playing principal to a young Forrest Gump, and sparring with just about every doctor at Cook County General on ER. From Perfect Strangers and Growing Pains to four episodes of WKRP in Cincinnati, each one of which found him playing a different character, Anderson has been all up and down your TV dial and then some.

Basically, if you look at this man’s list of credits, you’ll realize that he’s been in just about everything at some point, and while that might be hyperbole with some actors, with Sam Anderson, it’s way closer to the truth than not. As such, there was never any chance that we’d get to everything that you folks asked me to ask him about, but I did my best, and he offered up some great stories to go with all the things that I threw at him.

Well, that’s probably enough of an intro. It’s time to let Sam Anderson talk.

This time I’m letting Jay O. Sanders talk.

Jay started in the theater, quickly found his way in front of the camera, and has successfully forged an extremely substantial career as a character actor. Before that, though, he made his New York theater debut in a “Shakespeare in the Park” performance of Henry V alongside such fellow cast members as William Hurt, Meryl Streep, Michael Moriarty, and Bruce McGill, which – all things considered – is a pretty amazing way to kick off a career. Thankfully, he didn’t stop there, but since it’s statistically unlikely that most listeners have had the opportunity to catch Jay in his various theater performances, don’t worry, you’ll almost certainly recognize him from any number of TV or film appearances.

For me, as I mention in the course of our conversation, he’s instantly Kevin Costner’s right-hand man in JFK. If you’re a fan of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, you might recognize him either from his first appearance, which was as a bad guy working alongside a funeral home owner played by Jim Gaffigan, or you might remember him when he stepped in to keep Goren and Eames in line for the series’ final season. More recently, you might’ve seen him on NBC’s Blindspot, Prime Video’s Sneaky Pete, USA’s The Sinner, or Discovery’s Manhunt: Deadly Games, i.e. the season about the Unabomber.

But Jay’s done so much stuff that there’s really no telling where you might’ve seen him. AfterMASH? Crime Story? Roseanne? Eddie Macon’s Run? Okay, that’s kind of an outlier, but if you’re from my generation, they played that thing incessantly on HBO back in the day. He’s also in The Young Riders, Angels in the Outfield, The Big Green, Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider, The Day After Tomorrow… He’s definitely an actor where you can comfortably use the phrase, “And the list goes on…” And suffice it to say that he’s got at least as many stories as he’s got roles in his back catalog.

That feels like a more than sufficient intro. It’s time to let Jay O. Sanders talk.

This time I’m talking to someone who was once named People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive.

Not that it came up in the conversation, but it just feels like a real pop culture badge of accomplishment, so I felt like I needed to mention it.

Mark Harmon has been acting since the ‘70s,  but while he earned an Emmy nod for his work in the 1977 miniseries Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years, it really wasn’t until the ‘80s that he started to hit his stride in terms of mainstream popularity. From Flamingo Road to St. Elsewhere, playing Ted Bundy in The Deliberate Stranger to playing against Kirstie Alley in Carl Reiner’s film Summer School, he was a major figure on both TV and film.

In the 1990s, however, despite working steadily in film and on TV, Harmon struggled to find a long-term foothold on the small screen. That situation changed in a big way in the early 2000s, when an arc on The West Wing led to a backdoor pilot on JAG that turned into the most popular role of his lengthy career: playing Leroy Jethro Gibbs on NCIS.

In the series 19th season, Harmon stepped away from NCIS, and although he’s kept a foot in that world by narrating the prequel series, NCIS: Origins, and continued to act when he’s of a mind to do so, he’s spent more time writing of late, collaborating with Leon Carroll, Jr. on a series of books: Ghosts of Honolulu, Ghosts of Panama, and the just-released Ghosts of Sicily. Military history buffs will particularly enjoy the series, and as I mention to him during the course of our conversation, the latest book could be subtitled Military and Mobsters. It’s a great read.

Given how carefully Gibbs used to choose his words on NCIS, it may surprise you that Harmon is a talker, and as a result, I didn’t get to hit on every topic I would’ve liked, but I’ll say that just about anything we didn’t touch on in this conversation, we talked about it in my Random Roles interview with him, which can find in the AV Club archives. Suffice to say, however, that we had a great chat that makes for a fun listen.

And with all of that said, it’s time to let Mark Harmon talk.

This time, I’m letting Corbin Bernsen talk.

As one of the leads of NBC’s long-running legal drama L.A. LAW, Corbin was one of the biggest TV stars of the ‘80s, and he’s managed to maintain a significant career ever since, not only as an actor but as a director as well.

On paper, he seems to be someone who was always destined to work in Hollywood, given that his mother, Jeanne Cooper, was a soap opera star on THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS, and his father, Harry Bernsen, Jr., was a producer. But as you’ll hear, Corbin really wasn’t all that enthused about the idea of becoming an actor. Obviously, he changed his mind, but it took a little while for him to come around.

Currently, Bernsen is busy talking up his latest film, THE YETI, a horror movie that centers around – you guessed it – a yeti, but it’s a period piece, and even with all of the horror movies emerging nowadays, it stands out both in its look and its substance. But don’t worry, there’s plenty of blood, too.

Our conversation starts with the new movie, of course, and from there we delve into various other highlights from his career, including as many listener requests as we had time to tackle. I also reached out to a couple of his former co-stars – including two of his PSYCH castmates – who I’ve interviewed over the years and got some questions from them. One of them is so well-considered and absolutely unlike the relationship he has with that actor that it completely blew his mind, but his response proved to be so philosophical that it blew my mind.

Anyway, yes, we talked about MAJOR LEAGUE, and, yes, I asked him about guest-starring on STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION…and he teased that he has something else STAR TREK-oriented coming up. We also talked about his appearance on SEINFELD, some of his other horror films, most notably THE DENTIST and TALES FROM THE HOOD, briefly popping up in the blaxploitation classic THREE THE HARD WAY, how his version of faith-centered films doesn’t necessarily mesh with the general definition of that genre, and why he thinks the never-aired attempt at an L.A. LAW revival didn’t work. No, we didn’t hit everything that I would’ve liked to have hit, but that just means there’s plenty of material left for a sequel.

That’s probably enough of an intro. It’s time to let Corbin Bernsen talk.

This time, I’m letting Thomas Dolby talk.

Thomas Dolby is a musician whose output throughout the ‘80s and into the ‘90s was part of the soundtrack to my life. Of course, anyone who came of age during the early days of MTV knows his music whether they know his name or not. Just play them a snippet of “She Blinded Me with Science,” and the memories will instantly come flowing back.

I had the opportunity to chat with Mr. Dolby some years ago when I was writing for Bullz-Eye.com and he was in the midst of doing a flurry of press for the reissue of Prefab Sprout’s STEVE McQUEEN album, which he produced. Of course, I completely nerded out, as any proper music geek would, and believe me, I wish I could produce the audio of that conversation, because if I could, I’d include at least a portion of it with this episode…at least partially because, as you’ve probably noted if you’d look at the length of this particular installment, it’s a bit shorter than usual.

That’s because I didn’t know until it was too late to do anything about it that I’d accidentally only been allotted 30 minutes for our interview, and he didn’t know that I thought I’d been allotted an hour, so when we hit the 30-minute mark, I found myself a bit blindsided by the sudden end of the conversation. I mean, it’s all fine and well, these things happen, but I’m sorry for you, the listener, that it didn’t go on longer.

Still, during the course of our half-hour together, we talked about as much of his career as I could manage, we discussed a bit about his soundtrack work, which resulted in a particularly great Ken Russell story, and we talked about some of his session and production work over the years, including a Thompson Twins song you may not have realized that he had a hand in. If you’re a fan of his work, I think you’ll enjoy it, and if you don’t know much about his career, I think you’ll find it fascinating.

And with that said, I’d say it’s time to let Thomas Dolby talk…and after you're done listening to him talk, maybe you'd like to go see him on tour. Here's a list of his upcoming tour dates!

This time I’m letting two – count ‘em – two people talk: DeAnn Heline and Eileen Heisler.

They’re the pair behind Blackie and Blondie Productions, which should ring a bell if you’re a diehard TV fan, but in case you’re still drawing a blank, DeAnn and Eileen are the duo responsible for creating The Middle.

Yes, you may recall that we’ve had another duo on this show in the past, and they, too, were part of the Middle family: Eden Sher and Brock Ciarlelli, a.k.a. Sue and Brad, not to mention the host of the Middling podcast. When I interviewed them for the show, I made a comment about how I was planning to interview DeAnn and Eileen, and I said that my plan was to focus on their career before they created The Middle, thereby giving me an opportunity to discuss an era that I didn’t know that much about while also leaving the Middle stories to Eden and Brock. As it happens, Brock instantly said, “No, but you have to ask them about The Middle!” Almost as instantly as DeAnn said, “Uh, we created it, we can talk about it if we want!”

So there you go: we talked about The Middle. But we also talked about Blackie and Blondie: The Early Years. In addition to the inevitable secret origin of their long-running friendship and creative work together, we also discussed the various stages of their career, including their work on Roseanne, Murphy Brown, Ellen, Lipstick Jungle, and a few other short-lived series in their back catalog. They offered up stories about working with Norm MacDonald, Garry Marshall, Tom Poston, and another past guest, Peter Tolan, plus many others over the years.

And, yes, there was a decent amount of conversation about my personal connection to The Middle, how my family helped inspire a storyline in one of the episodes, and more.

Okay, that’s probably enough of an intro. It’s time to let DeAnn and Eileen talk.

Unabashed plug: WE HAVE MERCH!

https://www.teepublic.com/user/lettingthemtalk

This time I’m letting Peter Tolan talk.

Peter is one of the best TV writers in the business as well as one of my favorite storytellers, either of which would be plenty enough excuse to have him as a guest. But when I traded emails with him a few weeks back, he said he was confident that I’d be able to come up with a legitimate reason to bring him on as a guest, and he was right: as I record this intro, which will also be the day that I release this episode, it will be the 25th anniversary of the premiere of the ABC series THE JOB, a.k.a. the first collaboration between Peter and Denis Leary.

Maybe you remember the series, maybe you don’t, but as Peter and I discuss, it was definitely an anomaly on ABC’s prime-time landscape at the time, in that it was a half-hour single-camera comedy with occasional dramatic elements. It was also a pretty great show, but despite that, it only lasted for two short seasons…although to be fair, the fact that it lasted for more than a single season was a legit shocker to everyone involved, so there’s that achievement, at least.

So, yes, Peter and I discussed THE JOB at length, but of course we talked about other things from his back catalog as well, including his subsequent collaboration with Denis Leary – RESCUE ME – as well as his work on THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW, including his favorite guest-star story and why he feels like he was able to get along with Garry Shandling when others weren’t. We also talked about a couple of his screenplays, including MY FELLOW AMERICANS and WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM, with the latter leading to some great Mike Nichols stories. I also got him to talk about the Dave Chappelle pilot that led to a major squabble with Fox, his recent experiences with a pilot for FX that were a little disappointing, to put it mildly, and he even teases a new series that he and Denis Leary are trying to get off the ground, one that would reunite them with a former RESCUE ME guest star…

Well, that should keep you listening for the long haul. It’s time to let Peter Tolan talk.

http://willharris.substack.com

https://www.patreon.com/LettingThemTalk

This time, I’m letting Jane Alexander talk.

Jane is a four-time Academy Award nominee, a seven-time Tony nominee, and a two-time Emmy winner (with six additional nominations to her credit), so…there’s really no good reason why she should be talking to me for this podcast.

The only explanation I can offer: she and I got along swimmingly when I did a piece for Smithsonian about the play and film versions of The Great White Hope and chatted with both Jane and her co-star, the late, great James Earl Jones. Since then, we’ve stayed in touch, and when I found out that one of the films that scored her one of those aforementioned Oscar nods – Testament – was being added to the Criterion Collection, I pitched her on the idea of this conversation, and she was kind enough to agree.

I also took advantage of the opportunity to do something I’ve never done before during an interview: spring a special guest on someone. As you may or may not know, I did all of the interviews for the book Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!, and one of those interviews was with Ross Harris, who – in addition to being the boy who visits Peter Graves in the cockpit – also played Jane’s son in Testament. This is another one of those moments that plays particularly well if you’re a paid subscriber and have access to the video, but even without it, you can hear the unbridled joy in Jane’s voice when Ross joins us for a portion of the conversation.

Of course, Testament isn’t the only thing we talk about during the episode. Jane has plenty of stories about other projects, including meeting Muhammad Ali while doing The Great White Hope, acting alongside Johnny Cash and being invited to introduce him at one of his concerts, working with Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood in City Heat, and – more recently – being part of the runaway Apple TV+ hit Severance.

Well, that’s probably enough of an introduction. It’s time to let Jane Alexander talk.

This time, I’m letting Dennis Quaid talk.

Dennis has grinned his way through an acting career that started in the ‘70s and has continued unabated ever since. Sure, he’s had a few ups and downs over the decades, as he’ll freely admit (and, indeed, does so during the course of our interview), but he’s still going strong and acting up a storm.

The project that brought us together for this conversation is  “I Can Only Imagine 2,” the sequel to a biopic about Bart Millard, lead singer of the band MercyMe, and if you’ve seen the first film… Well, no spoilers, but suffice it to say that you’re probably a little surprised to see Quaid back in this film. Yeah, it’s not what you’d call a big role this time around, but it’s big enough that he was still up for doing some press for the film, so of course I put in a request. I’ve talked to him before, but it’s never been for long enough to work as a Random Roles, so you can imagine my surprise when I got the go-ahead to talk to him for this podcast. No, we don’t share the same politics, but his films have been a major part of my life, so I was psyched to have the opportunity to talk to him for such an extended period of time…and, better yet, as you’ll hear at the end of the conversation, he was pleasantly surprised at how quickly the time passed.

What did we talk about? A ridiculous amount of stuff, ranging from his earliest work – we’re talking an episode of Baretta and a role as a bellhop in an early Jonathan Demme movie – to things like The Right Stuff and Innerspace. We discussed how important the career of his brother Randy was to his own beginnings as an actor, and he offered up stories about working with Mickey Rooney to teaching mandolin to Marlon Brando. And, yes, we did talk about his work on Reagan, so of course I had to ask him what it feels like to be canceled…and, yes, he actually answered.

Well, that’s probably enough of an intro. It’s time to let Dennis Quaid talk.

Today, I’m letting C. Thomas Howell talk.

I’ve been watching this man’s work since I was 11 years old and went to see “E.T.” with my family. A line like that might make some actors feel old, but given that Tommy – and I’m not being overly familiar here, this is actually how he’s listed on his official Facebook page –  was only 12 years old himself when he was hired for that particular film, I think he’ll probably be cool with it.

I first interviewed this gentleman when he was in the midst of his run on the cop drama Southland, and we did a lengthy Random Roles that, if I’m being honest, included a discussion of decidedly more projects that we managed to hit in this particular conversation. By which I mean to say that if you’re looking for tidbits about Kindred: The Embraced or Soul Man, you’ll want to head over to the A.V. Club and read that piece after you’ve listened to this episode. And, yes, there were a couple of encore stories that I knew from that interview that I pointedly asked him to tell in this interview because I knew listeners would enjoy actually hearing them straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were. But what we had was, for the most part, an extremely organic conversation where I was able to easily jump from one topic to the next…and that’s on the occasions when he didn’t do that himself. He’s done more than a few interviews at this point in his career, and given that the name of this podcast is “Letting Them Talk,” well, you know exactly what I opted to let him do.

We started our chat by talking about his latest project, “One Mile,” which is available for your digital purchasing pleasure as of this recording, and since it’s a villainous role, that led into talking about “The Hitcher” and “Criminal Minds.” A question about how he’d considered following in his father’s footsteps and becoming a stuntman led into talking about “E.T.,” which in turn led to talking about “The Outsiders.” But talking about his dad also led to some great stories about how he got to visit some of the film sets that he worked on, including one of the “Planet of the Apes” films.

Oh, sure, we talked about other stuff, too. But that’s probably enough to keep you listening for the long haul.

It’s time to let C. Thomas Howell talk.

Today, I’m letting Nathan Rabin talk.

I used to read Nathan’s work on the A.V. Club long before I began writing for the site myself, and every once in awhile it still strikes me as a little weird that he and I have become a mutual admiration society. And it’s not just me: during the course of the conversation, you’ll hear me mention that my daughter considers it her favorite low-key brag that her dad is friends with the guy who created the phrase “Manic Pixie Dream Girl.”

Nathan’s a legend amongst pop culture writers, thanks to his work not only at the aforementioned AV Club, but also the late, great Dissolve. These days, he splits the majority of his time between his Substack newsletter Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas and his website, Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place, a.k.a. NathanRabin.com. That said, he also spent a little time recently in the hospital after a car accident, which we talk about during the course of our conversation, but thankfully he’s long since back home and recovering nicely, even if he’s still working his way back from the physical and financial damage it caused.

Not that Nathan and I need a reason to chat, but what brings us together for this particular conversation is his latest book, THE FRACTURED MIRROR, which is devoted to as many American movies about filmmaking as he could fit into its pages before he finally had to just stop and publish the damned thing. We’re talking almost 550 pages, and even though – as I freely admit to him – I haven’t finished it yet, I’m loving every page of it thus far, and I’m excited to keep working my way through it and, God help me, watching a lot of the films covered within its pages.

Well, I think that’s enough of an intro. It’s time to let Nathan Rabin talk.

This time I’m letting Raymond Ian Burns talk…although you’d know him better by his nom de punk: Captain Sensible.

As a founding member of the Damned, he’s a proper punk rock legend and a member of the band who famously released the first punk single in the UK and was the first UK punk band to play in the US. Mind you, he hasn’t been a consistent member of the band throughout the entirety of their existence, but it’s because of that absence from their roster that he was able to forge a solo career, one that provided him with some huge hits in the UK, including “Wot” and the still startlingly-successful cover of the Rodgers and Hammerstein song “Happy Talk,” from the musical “South Pacific.” No, for real, it was a #1 hit. Go figure.

These days, however, the good Captain is indeed back with his bandmates in The Damned, and they’ve just released a new album of covers called Not Like Everybody Else, with the songs selected as a tribute to their fallen Damned comrade Brian James, who died in March of last year. It’s a fun album, featuring songs by everyone from the Lovin’ Spoonful to Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd…and, indeed, the cover of “See Emily Play” provided the perfect opportunity to for me to ask the Captain about how the Damned once tried to get Syd Barrett to produce an album for them.

During the course of our conversation, we obviously talked a great deal about the Damned’s career as well as the Captain’s solo work, including his songwriting collaborations with Robyn Hitchcock. As someone who’s been a fan of the Damned since purchasing and absorbing every bit of the band’s two-disc best-of collection, The Light at the End of the Tunnel, this was a bucket-list interview for me, and I enjoyed every minute of it. I hope you do the same.

And with that, it’s time to let Captain Sensible talk.

This time, the person I’m letting talk is Kathleen Chalfant.

Kathleen is an actress who got her start in the theater, moved into on-camera acting through the wonderful world of soap operas, and has become a familiar face in films as well as on television, most recently on the Peacock series “The Copenhagen Test.”

In the series, Kathleen plays the elusive character known as St. George, and while I’m not the first person to use that particular adjective to describe her, it’s accurate enough that she agrees with it, too. During the course of our conversation about the series, I tried my best to discuss it in such a way as to avoid spoilers, which means that we danced around a lot of things, but suffice it to say that if you enjoy a good thriller, you should definitely give it a watch.

We talked about a wide variety of other projects from Kathleen’s back catalog as well, including her recurring presence on the various Law & Order series as several different characters, playing the mother of the titular character in Bob Roberts, her stints on The Guardian and Rescue Me, being directed by Bob Balaban and Stephen Frears, and a number of her past theater projects, including Jules Feiffer’s Hold Me!, Angels in America, and Wit.

That’s probably enough of an intro. It’s time to let Kathleen talk.

This time, I'm letting Kyle Vincent talk.

Kyle is someone whose music I’ve been enjoying since the release of his self-titled 1997 album. Appropriately, it’s that very album that brings us into conversation today, since it’s finally made its way to streaming services for the first time.

Kyle has a deep history in music, but things really got rolling for him when he was fronting the band Candy, who you may remember for their single “Whatever Happened to Fun?” It’s arguably one of the catchiest power pop singles of the ‘80s, which makes it all the more cruel that the band never really made the commercial impact that they deserved. From there, Kyle went solo, and although it took awhile for him to find his footing on his own, it helped significantly that he found himself serving as opening act for none other than Barry Manilow.

That aforementioned self-titled album spawned a hit single, “Wake Me Up When the World’s Worth Waking Up For,” and if you didn’t hear it on the radio when it was originally released, you might’ve heard it in some TV series or film, because it’s popped up repeatedly. Kyle’s continued to release solo albums on a regular basis – the most recent, “Sunshine Soul,” came out in 2024 – but he’s also kept busy in other ways, including fronting a latter-day incarnation of the Bay City Rollers. Kyle’s got stories about all of these aspects of his career and more.

And with all of that said, I’d say it’s time to let Kyle Vincent talk.

This time, I’m letting Chris Mulkey talk.

Chris is a character actor whose work I’ve been watching since well before I actually knew who he was, but I do know when I actually started paying attention to him: after he started playing Hank Jennings, the deceitful husband of Double R Diner owner Norma Jennings, on Twin Peaks.

He first stepped in front of the camera in the mid-1970s, and he’s been working steadily ever since, perpetually mixing things up between film and television but always keeping busy. The amount of TV series he’s been in is kind of ridiculous. We’re talking about a list that includes Baretta, M*A*S*H, Charlie’s Angels, The White Shadow, Magnum P.I., and even the short-lived Vincent Price series Time Express, although I literally had to send him a link to the episode to prove to him that he’d done it, because he had zero memory of it.

During the course of the conversation, we hit on topics including – but not limited to – The Long Riders, First Blood, The Hidden, Patti Rocks (as well as its prequel, “Loose Ends,” and the sequel he’s hard at work on getting into production), Gas Food Lodging, Ghost in the Machine, Bulworth, Radio, Captain Phillips, Whiplash, and a bunch more. He’s a guy who’s full of stories, and he’s happy to share them. There’s definitely enough untouched material for a sequel, so definitely let me know how you enjoy this.

Just a couple of notes up front: Chris did the interview in a cabana, and he shows off his surroundings, so only  those watching the video will really appreciate that. Also, at one point he froze and vanished, and I’ve edited it down so that the downtime isn’t significant, but I kept in the moment, so when it happens, don’t worry, it won’t last long, and he explains what happened, which is pretty funny and the direct result of where he was doing the interview.

And just to speak off the cuff, since this is the last new podcast episode of 2025, with many more to follow in the new  year, God willing, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who’s listened and supported me in this endeavor. It’s already lasted longer than my last podcast, and it’s because I haven’t been limiting myself to a particular niche or gimmick, I’m just been inviting people whose work I enjoy onto the podcast and, like it says, letting them talk. As of this writing, we’re less than 25 downloads away from hitting a grand total of 1,600 downloads, and for a podcast that has zero advertising budget and is strictly being discovered by word of mouth, that seems pretty decent to me. And I have you to thank, so…thanks. And please keep it up. Please share an episode whenever you’ve listened to it and liked it. And rate the podcast. I hear that’s important, too.

Okay, that’s enough of an intro and a thank-you. Happy New Year, everyone. It’s time to let Chris Mulkey talk.

This time, I'm letting Angelo Moore talk.

Angelo is a force of nature, one of the most gregarious individuals I’ve ever had the good fortune to interview, and – it must be said – one of the greatest self-promoters you’re likely to ever come across. And I mean that as a compliment. I need to take notes from this man.

In addition to having been the frontman of Fishbone since the band’s inception, Angelo also works under the guise of Dr. Madd Vibe. I interviewed him years ago, way back in 2001, and it was a decidedly freewheeling conversation, but it was also one that led to him signing my copy of Fishbone’s The Reality of My Surroundings with the words, “Thanks for the accurate article.” Accuracy should be pretty easy when all you’re doing is literally transcribing what someone said, but you’d be surprised how many people are grateful for you simply for typing out their actual words.   

During the course of this freewheeling conversation – and truth be told, I’m pretty confident that freewheeling is the only sort of conversation that Angelo is capable of having, but I’m 100% good with that – we talked about as much of Fishbone’s career as possible, including John Cusack’s support of the band, the time Fishbone opened for the Beastie Boys, Angelo’s appearance in Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, and much  more.

I should probably mention a few things up front, however.

First of all, this is inarguably the most visual episode of the podcast that’s happened to date, so if you’ve ever thought about joining the ranks of the paid Substack subscribers or the Patreon supporters, this is the one. Angelo spends the early part of the conversation taking me and his camera on a tour around the entirety of his new apartment, and then he later takes me on a visual tour of some of his more recent releases, which are pretty amazing. Given that he’s talking the entire time, it feels wrong to trim it from the audio version, but just know that you’re definitely not getting the full experience without seeing the video.

He also gets a few calls during the course of the interview, but I kept those in as well, since he proceeds to introduce the people who are calling, even holding the phone up to the camera. How could I cut those out? That’s gold, Jerry! GOLD!

The other thing is that when I asked Angelo one of my stock questions – the one about the first person who ever made him have to fight to keep from going full fanboy – he thought I was asking about Fishbone fans who went full fanboy on him. Given the title of this podcast, I didn’t interrupt him, I just let him answer it the way he thought was accurate, and the end result was still a really great story, so…no complaints whatsoever.

Okay, that’s enough of an intro. Now brace yourself accordingly, because I’m going to let Angelo Moore talk.

This time, I’m letting Rizwan Manji talk.

Rizwan has successfully carved himself out a career as a character actor, one who’s frequently comedic but has also had the opportunity to show off his dramatic chops on occasion. I first met him when he was in the cast of the NBC sitcom Outsourced, which was set in a call center in India. It met with a decidedly mixed reaction at the time, but I enjoyed it from the get-go, for reasons which I explain during the course of today’s episode. But I interviewed Riz and his co-star Parvesh Cheena at the TCA tour, and I’ve stayed connected with the both of them via social media ever since. As such, when I saw that Riz was in the cast of a new Adam Saunders film called Re-Election and was doing virtual interviews to promote the film, I immediately reached out to get on the list to chat with him.

Since our initial meeting, Riz has been a part of a ridiculous number of impressive projects – these days, I think most people may recognize him from his recurring role on Schitt’s Creek – but he’s been doing high-profile stuff even before I met him. During the course of our conversation, we talk about his work with Mike Nichols and Tom Hanks on Charlie Wilson’s War, auditioning for Scorsese for his role in The Wolf of Wall Street, and his reflections on having done a few episodes of 24.

Of course, we also talk about Schitt’s Creek and the surrealness of working with two of his comedic idols on his very first day of shooting, his love of the underseen sitcom Perfect Harmony, his son’s reaction to his appearance in the opening credits of Peacemaker, embarrassing himself in front of Antonio Banderas, and much more.

Okay, that’s probably enough of an intro. It’s time to let Rizwan Manji talk…

This time, I'm letting Jerry Ordway talk.

Jerry is one of my favorite comic book artists and writers, going back to the early ‘80s. If you listened to my interview with Mike Carlin a few episodes back, then you already know that I’m a certifiable comic book nerd, but I will admit that I got even nerdier while talking with Mr. Ordway.

If you came of age with DC Comics anywhere within the ‘60s through the ‘80s, then you’re aware of the existence of Earth-2, a parallel version of Earth where superheroes started to emerge in the late 1930s, i.e. when DC Comics first started publishing their adventures. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, then…you probably never even started listening to this episode in the first place, so let’s just keep moving.

Suffice it to say that my formative years of comic book reading involved falling head over heels with the characters of Earth-2 thanks to an ongoing series of crossovers with the Justice League of America and the Justice Society of America, so when DC decided to launch a book about the World War II era adventures of Earth-2 called “All-Star Squadron,” I was all-in. And a few years later, when they decided to spotlight the children of some of these heroes in a series set in the present day called “Infinity, Inc.,” I was even more all-in.

This is how I became a fan of Jerry Ordway,  and it’s why I’ve remained a fan of his for lo these many years. In addition to being a great writer and artist, he’s also one of the best inkers in the comic book business. You’ve seen his work in comics for both DC and Marvel, including inside and on the covers of titles like The Adventures of Superman, The Power of Shazam, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Fantastic Four, the Avengers, Maximum Security, and more.

Jerry is a talker, and given that the name of this podcast is “Letting Them Talk,” I was happy to fulfill his destiny throughout this episode by allowing him to do just that. If you’re a comics nerd like I am, you’ll love his stories. If you’re not a comics nerd… Well, like I said before, you’re probably not even listening at this point anyway.

As such, I’m going to go ahead and let Jerry talk…