Ray Romano plays poker with his celebrity friends in real life, but in the poker comedy The Grand, he didn't even get to sit at the table. He plays the husband of a poker champ living frustrated in her shadow. Director Zak Penn got to him too late, so all the poker player roles were taken.
Romano Out a Grand
"He actually knows my lawyer," Romano said. "He plays poker with him. So he called me and said Zak had a treatment for an improv movie and I read it. Funny. I liked it. He came to my office and we met. The only role that was left was this husband."
Disappointment only fueled Romano's creativity. Without cards, Romano came up with lame slogans and more backstory. "I was hoping I could play in the game. I wanted to play but we ended up coming up with all these things and it ended up being good. I thought up that he’s a lightning survivor and all these sayings he comes up with, that kind of thing. That was fun to do that. I got to come up with those little things. My character wasn’t really written at all. It was just 'the husband.' So we had to come up with these quirky little things that we came up with a couple of weeks before. Every time I would think of something weird, I’d call up Zak. 'What about this? What if he has a tail?'"
Already in the outline was an obsession with Fantasy Football. "I’ve never been in fantasy football. I was in a fantasy golf league, believe it or not. I’m still in one. We made it up, just a bunch of idiots, 12 of us. I’ve been in it for about 12 years. I have four players. We play with Tiger but he’s so good you have negative points. You start out with like negative 200 points. I had fourth round draft pick and he was still available so I took him."
Playing an annoying husband might be familiar territory to Romano. "My character wasn’t as bad as my character on Raymond. He’s the real selfish kind of guy. I didn’t think of my character [in The Grand] as selfish, but kind of lost. He was trying to find out who he was because his wife was working. He a better guy and aware of the relationship than Raymond."
Add to Heffee!
