John Lithgow and Jeffrey Tambor in Twenty Good Years
John Lithgow and Jeffrey Tambor Talk Being Old in Twenty Good Years
“I think all of us have these moments at every big zero birthday,” said Lithgow. “I suppose at 40 I thought 60 was awfully old but I don’t now. I seem to think of myself as younger every year that passes. It may be desperation but I think it’s basically healthy.”
Tambor can hardly believe he’s still working at 62. “I thought I was going to be reading the great books somewhere sequestered in the public library, but apparently that’s not what’s in store for me,” he said. “I’m having a great time and I also have a 21 month old son, so it’s up and at ‘em.”
Lest the target demographics be worried, Lithgow and Tambor will be joined by some hotties on their show. “Our two characters each have children,” said Lithgow. “I have a 30-something daughter and Jeffrey has a 19-year-old male model son. It is the interaction between real people that I think everyone responds to, young or old. It’s not as if a 25-year-old doesn’t have old people in his life and that there isn’t a lot of comedy there.”
“Comedy is more than about laughs,” Tambor added. “When you do comedy, and I hope I’m not invoking the gods here or their wrath, but you have to have a hard floor. You have to have somebody you can bounce off of. My son, just yesterday I woke up with him and I whispered to him as I was feeding him, ‘I love Gabriel.’ And he whispered back, ‘I love momma.’ So that’s humor.”
In their pursuit of twenty good years, the boys try out all sorts of youthful adventure sports. “My wife reads the scripts and she gloated at me saying, ‘Now, you’re doing all the things that you are so afraid of,’” said Lithgow. “Believe me when I say I’m not a skier or a horse rider. They were all laughing at me the other day because I have an antipathy could be the only word towards horses, and they toward me.”
Horses have challenged both actors. “The horse wrangler came up to me and she said, ‘The horse can sense your insecurity,’” said Tamboy. “And that has become our motto. We have sweatshirts now. Plus my character is insecure, plus I’m insecure on a horse and I’m of Russian Hungarian background and we just don’t take to horses.”
As tiring as the show can be, Lithgow came prepared. “Since the age of 50, I have kind of lived out this show before the show ever came along,” he said. “I sort of desperately tried everything that I never got to try when I was young. I’ve tried skiing and golf and water skiing on one water ski, horseback riding. I have done so much damage to myself, the first time I skied I broke my collar bone. I tore an ACL, I was thrown from a horse, the same horse six times and I kept climbing back on. I don't know, I don’t exactly know what I’m doing but I’m having a wonderful time. And then along came this show. I described this summer before we started shooting, I had a conversation with Tom [Werner] and I told him what I was up to up there in Montana and he said, ‘I know what you’re doing. You’re doing research for your role and you’re angling for a tax break.’”
Twenty Good Years premieres October 11th on NBC.
Stay tuned for updates.
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