Don’t get confused when Jeffrey Tambor and John Lithgow start calling each other Jeffrey and John in their new show Twenty Good Years. They’re not playing themselves in yet another inside Hollywood show. They just decided to self-name their characters.
Lithgow and Tambor Self-Named for Twenty Good Years
“We just thought it would be too confusing if I was called Jeffrey and he was called John,” joked Lithgow. Tambor added, “It makes it very easy when you underline your script.”
Series creator Marsh McCall explained the names’ history. “That was just my idea and it may have been laziness as much as anything else. There’s a famous quote, I went to Stanford, and there’s a famous quote from Stanford’s first president David Star Jordan who was also a marine biologist and the only thing anybody remembers about him now is that he once said, ‘Every time I learn the name of a student, I forget the name of a fish.’”
Don’t worry. The last names are not Lithgow and Tambor. “My last name is John Mason and Jeffrey’s is Jeffrey Pine,” said Lithgow. “I was actually quite kind of embarrassed about that at first, sort of overly flattered. But now it really does seem like this John is somebody other than me, thank God.”
Even the last names were inspired by others in McCall’s life though. “I had a friend in college named John Mason and he has some of the qualities but I hasten to say not all of the qualities of this character. And Jeffrey’s last name is an homage to a screenwriter mentor of mine, Danny Pine who took me under his wing when I first moved to Hollywood. It’s my little tribute to him.”
Add to Heffee!
