Jason Alexander sits in a booth in Dallas’ Inwood Lounge, nervously twisting the napkin that came with his soft drink. It’s the mannerism of a person who hasn’t shed his shyness, despite nearly a decade on one of the most popular sitcoms ever. It’s a shyness he felt as recently as the previous night, when he faced a full house at the Inwood Theatre during a Q&A after a screening of his new movie, “Just Looking.”
“People become actors for different reasons, obviously, and they have different priorities as actors,” Alexander says. “I started acting so that I could get away from being me. I didn’t think I had any particular presentable persona. Left to my own devices and not doing interviews, I’m quiet. I’m not particularly gregarious. I get very shy when I walk into rooms like last night and people start applauding, and I really don’t know what to do. Performing, for me, was an escape from a lot of terrors; (it was) a kind of therapy.”
Alexander, 41, doesn’t do any acting in “Just Looking.” The nostalgia piece, about a teenage boy’s wish to see “an act of love” in 1956 Queens, is the former “Seinfeld” actor’s second feature-directing effort (the first, the 1996 romantic comedy “For Better or Worse,” never received theatrical release). “Just Looking” was written by Marshall Karp, a former advertising executive who is also at the table, and whose association with Alexander goes back to before “Seinfeld.”
In 1987, Karp — a five-time Clio Award winner who created the “Thank you, PaineWebber” campaign — wrote a pilot for a sitcom called “Everything’s Relative,” about two brothers: a neurotic divorcee and a carefree hunk. The show, which was picked up by CBS, lasted barely a month. But it began the friendship between Karp and Alexander, who played the neurotic brother.
“We didn’t quite part company” after the show ended, Karp says. “I’d go to see him on Broadway, we’d occasionally talk, and then he went off to Hollywood and did some stupid show that went into the history books. But the admiration for him as a talent, and also the ability to see him as more than George Costanza — because I knew Jason, I didn’t know George — gave me the idea when we were looking for a director (for “Just Looking”) that this guy would be perfect.”
For the uninitiated, George Costanza — the character Alexander played on “Seinfeld” — was whiny, scheming, lazy and lecherous. He seems to have been based on everything that Alexander isn’t. Alexander is a soft-spoken, self-professed workaholic who has been married to the same woman for some 20 years. Ask what’s on his mind, and he doesn’t bring up worries of whether his movie will be successful — he brings up his anxiety about the Israeli-Palestinian violence in the Middle East.
Well, OK, he’s a little concerned about how “Just Looking” is being received. He wants people to like it. More accurately, he doesn’t want people to dislike it.
“I could never be president, because when they start going, `He did this today, he did that today,’ I’m like, `Y-you don’t like me?”‘ he says.
More than 20 years of stage, screen and television acting — going back to his high school days, when he appeared in musicals such as “Guys and Dolls” and “Oliver!” at Livingston High School in Livingston, N.J. — haven’t thickened Alexander’s skin. He went through the usual series of career burps, starting with a 1981 “Friday the 13th” rip-off called “The Burning,” which also featured the screen debut of Holly Hunter (the movie was co-written by Bob Weinstein, who would go on to be co-chairman of Miramax Pictures). Following that was a series of small roles in movies such as 1986’s “The Mosquito Coast” and “Brighton Beach Memoirs.”
Then came 1989 and ’90, when Alexander scored a hat trick: a Best Actor Tony for Jerome Robbins’ “Broadway”; a role in “Pretty Woman” as Richard Gere’s snake-in-the-grass associate; and “Seinfeld,” which forever linked Alexander with George Costanza and eventually made him worry about his future.
“From the moment I understood what the show was becoming is primarily when I started to think, `OK, start getting a career that isn’t acting,”‘ Alexander says. “My mama didn’t raise no dummies; I know the history of what happens to actors in hit TV shows. They go away. They don’t get to work anymore. I said, `I don’t want that to happen, so I’d better see about directing or producing or whatever else I can do.”‘
Rather than go away, Alexander tried to avoid being typecast by taking on a mixed bag of other projects, including the rude-humored cartoon series “Duckman,” a variety of animated Disney films, the gay-themed movie “Love! Valour! Compassion!” and the TV musicals “Cinderella” and “Bye Bye Birdie.” Despite starring turns in movies such as this year’s “Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle,” however, Alexander would like to take more turns behind the camera.
“I would love to direct a lot more films,” he says. “But I know when I go for any acting part there’s 20 guys on the list as good if not better than me. When I go for a directing job, there’s a thousand guys on the list that are as good if not certainly better than me. So the films have to be a kind of unique match. Otherwise, I’m not the guy. And if I’m not the guy, I know how painful it is to be anywhere in the process where your collaborators start to lose faith in you. Because that’s certainly what happened on my first film.”
While looking for that next unique match, Alexander will keep working as an actor, in the upcoming comedy “On Edge” and the straight-to-video “Hunchback of Notre Dame II.” And he’s aware that no matter how much work he does, George and “Seinfeld” will always be a part of him.
“I walk around with the constant knowledge that the first impression, in my life and in my work, that people will have is, `Oh, it’s George,”‘ he says. “But I would be a very different person if I didn’t take an awful lot of joy in how much that stupid show meant to so many people. It’s not even just our country anymore. Now we’re talking globally, if my fan mail is any reflection of the effect. And not just as, `Hey, good show.’ I mean, this was like a major part of some people’s lives.
“And in some cases, it almost saved people’s lives,” he continues. “They came to look at it as a form of therapy or ritual. I’ve had tons of letters from people who were going through chemotherapy or fighting cancer or there had been a profound death in the family, and this was part of their road back. Most TV shows are just a TV show. This was a phenomenon that I don’t anticipate anything anywhere near again in my career. Ultimately, I have no real reason to disavow it. I’d like to not be shackled to it, as far as perception, but I’m very happy to have been part of it.”
