MONTREAL — So with Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ new show The New Adventures Of Old Christine getting renewed by CBS, could the “Seinfeld curse” be over?
No, says Jason Alexander. In fact it will probably never be over.
“What happens is those of us associated with Seinfeld are held to a standard that I would love to meet. But I can’t find another Seinfeld. If anyone knows of one, please, I’ll leave my number,” the man we all still know as George Costanza quipped yesterday at a press conference at this year’s Just For Laughs comedy festival.
“Even Julia (who played Elaine), she has a successful show, and it’s a wonderful show, and I love it ... But it’s not Seinfeld. By that standard, everything seems to fail.”
Alexander, who hosted two galas last night at this city’s Theatre St. Denis, has had two failed sitcoms since Seinfeld finished — one of them, the self-help spoof Bob Patterson, was “a smart-ass, abrasive show that had the good luck to debut 10 days after Sept. 11,” the actor said later in a private interview.
“And now, people are ripping it off. Help Me Help You, that new Ted Danson show? That was one of our advertising slogans.”
The upshot, Alexander says, is that the next time you see him starring on TV, there’s a very good chance it will be in a one-hour drama.
“Ask anybody I went to school with. Nobody would have ever imagined I’d wind up anywhere in a career associated with comedy. I was a classically trained actor, and I saw myself doing the great Shakespearean roles. Unfortunately, Shakespeare did not.
“My best association with Montreal is that we filmed Love, Valor, Compassion up here, one of my more dramatic roles. I love doing serious drama. The stumbling block is that my face is on television 42 hours a day in something less than dramatic.
“It amazes me that they don’t look at Tom Hanks and say, ‘People are going to think of Forrest Gump.’ In fact, a lot of the stuff I’m looking at for television is in the one-hour dramatic field — just to get away from the comparisons with Seinfeld.”
He’s still out for laughs on the big screen, however. Alexander lent his voice to Farce Of The Penguins, Bob Saget’s apparently quite-rude spoof of a certain other penguin movie.
And Alexander is in the middle of filming The Grand — Zak Penn’s Waiting For Guffman-like improvised comedy about a professional poker tournament (the cast won’t even know how it ends until they actually play the final game).
And tonight, Canadians will hear him voicing the role of a dealer in a game of “snuff poker” in the Season 4 premiere of the Comedy Network series Odd Job Jack with Don McKellar (a show Alexander has yet to see). “I did it a while back, and it’s supposed to be wonderful,” he says.
But it isn’t Seinfeld.
More Artists
