It’s been a while since the last TV project Paul Reiser was mad about.
The actor-comic has taken it relatively easy since 1999, when he ended his seven-year run as star and producer of the series “Mad About You.” He returns to the small screen as a New York psychiatrist diagnosed with leukemia in the Showtime movie “Strange Relations,” premiering Sunday.
Reiser plays Dr. Jerry Lipman, suddenly in need of a bone-marrow transplant, who receives more shocking news courtesy of his mother (Oscar winner Olympia Dukakis, “Moonstruck”): He is adopted.
Lipman is able to track down his biological mother (Julie Walters, “Educating Rita,” “Billy Elliot”) and two brothers he didn’t know he had (Tony Maudsley, Ian Puleston-Davies) in England, initially keeping his condition a secret from them. Things get even more complicated when he falls for the ex-wife (Amy Robbins) of one of his newfound siblings.
Reiser says he agreed to star in “Strange Relations” largely because of the script by “Saturday Night Live” alumnus Tim Kazurinsky. “When I first read it,” Reiser recalls, “I thought, ‘Hmm, that’s nice, but I don’t know.’ Then, I found myself thinking about it. It moved me in ways I didn’t expect, and for the next day or two, it just kept resonating with me. When I was told that Julie Walters was going to be in it, that was pretty darned tempting. Finally, the combination of those factors made it hard to say ‘No.’ “
Having put so much work into “Mad About You” on both sides of the camera, Reiser was glad the “Strange Relations” teleplay came to him already finished. “It wasn’t like, ‘We have an idea, but we have to flesh it out,’ ” he recalls. “It was all polished and really sweet, and because the story was already there, it felt easy to relax into. You don’t start this with a guy who’s dying, you start with a guy who’s fighting against dying. With great actors like Julie, what comes back at you tells you what you should be doing.”
Still, Reiser had to keep the physical aspect of the role in mind. “I went on the Tom Hanks diet,” he says, referring to Hanks’ weight loss for the film “Cast Away.” “I could have afforded to take off some pounds anyway, so I did the best I could in four weeks. Though you didn’t want to be chunky, you didn’t want to walk onto the set and hear people say, ‘He looks good!’ On the surface, this sounds like something that could be a badly done TV movie, but I feel it’s done tastefully and with subtlety.”
British audiences evidently agree, since Reiser reports the film was “a huge hit, with something like a 55 share” when it was televised in England.
A big bonus for Reiser was the on-location filming in Liverpool. “The first time I was in London almost 20 years ago, I did my Beatles tour. I took the train to Liverpool, and being a big American knucklehead, I was sort of shocked to see that life had moved on there. People weren’t just sitting outside John Lennon’s old house; they actually had jobs to go to. Actually, we did a scene for this where we drove by Ringo’s house, but it was cut.”
Working in England also let Reiser sample British television’s version of “Mad About You.” “They cast it with Gordon Sinclair, who played the kid in (the 1981 movie) “Gregory’s Girl,”” Reiser says, “and it was mind-blowing to watch these basically unchanged scripts done with British accents. Of course, instead of having rude English neighbors like we had, they had rude American neighbors.”
