What do you like about Neil? I love that he is good-natured, he is kind, he is so self-absorbed in his little orbit of being a billionaire that he just takes for granted that he can pull off being mayor—and he can’t. He’s in way over his head, but he’s doing it to prove to his daughter he’s still got it. What’s it like working with Holly Hunter, who plays Neil’s adversary, Arpi? It’s like playing tennis with somebody who’s better than you: You end up having to improve your game. Holly’s very much that for me, Ted—and for Neil as well. Neil threw his hat in the ring for a special election, not really prepared to be the mayor. What will we see when he returns in season two of Mr. Mayor? He hires the brightest, youngest minds in California and calls them his Innovation Team. He brings them in to make sure that he starts doing things for the city that are effective, smart and cutting-edge. Everybody in his office is upset with it and it goes off the rails pretty quickly. But it also provides VellaLovell, who plays Mikaela, a love interest. YedoyeTravis plays the head of the Innovation Team, and the two of them start sparring and courting, which is a really fun thing, I think, for her character. Neil also faces a recall. I anger Arpi so much that she starts a recall petition. We butt heads to the point that by the end of the season my term as mayor is in jeopardy, which is also fueled by an influencer. JosieTotah plays this character and she’s just spectacular in it. For a while, she’s even thinking of running for mayor. Neil is doing this to prove something to his daughter. You’re a father. How would you judge him as a dad? A smidge self-absorbed. But you know what? So was I at times. I was self-absorbed with my career. When my kids were young, I was doing Cheers and running off and doing films and stuff like that. You could argue that I wasn’t absentee, but I was gone a lot. But Neil absolutely loves his daughter. The backstory is his trophy wife died and he was left with his 8-year-old daughter, Orly, played by the wonderful KylaKenedy. He quit his job just so he could be around her and raise her. So there’s a lot of love and good intention, but it ended up making her think that he was a complete loser and just hung around watching TV all day. Neil will be reentering the dating pool. Does Mary Steenburgen, your real-life wife, play one of your dates? Also, Fran Drescher will be a guest star. What can you tease? It’s a problem with billionaires who think that they can date anyone at any age, so he’s finally realizing he needs to date age-appropriate women. One episode involves Fran Drescher, who is just in—as she says—a tramp age. She’s recently divorced and has no desire for a real relationship. But Mary comes and plays somebody I just met. She’s gorgeous and I want to change my ways and I want to take it slowly. I don’t want to do my normal jump into things and rush things. So BobbyMoynihan’s character’s having a murder mystery party—which are horrible—at his house. I decide to take Mary there because it’s the least sexual thing happening in Los Angeles that night. So off we go, and she immediately, through the circumstances of having to take on her character in this murder mystery, leaves Neil and falls for somebody else. I won’t say who. And so, I spend the evening being cuckolded by Mary Steenburgen. Anyway, she had the best time, she really did. How has COVID affected filming? This second season, we all fell into more of an understanding of who we were and what the show is about. The first year, it took us a year to shoot nine episodes because of COVID. We would wear masks and shields, and when they said “Action” we would take them off, and then when they said “Cut,” we’d put all of that back on and go to our separate corners. So we didn’t really learn who we were. This year, we’ve had the chance to rehearse without masks and hang out together on the sets, safely in a bubble, and we got to have fun. It was lighthearted this year, and all of us just were delighted with the scripts and delighted in each other because we got to be together. So I think we all learned a lot more this second season. What is one of the craziest things that the mayor tries to do for L.A.? One really silly thing that I’m talked into by the Innovation Team is a space elevator. A literal space elevator to take spaceships up into outer space via this cable and a bunch of other technology. When I first read it, I thought, Oh, Tina [Fey], Robert [Carlock], you’ve gone too far. It’s too silly. Why are you doing this? And then I Googled it and there is actually a lot of information about the development of a space elevator. It’s a little wacky. It’s not around the corner, but it is a real thing. As an environmentalist, you’ve been around politicians. Did any of them show up in any aspect of Neil? I don’t think so. It’s so funny doing a sitcom and doing one with Tiny Fey and Robert Carlock. It’s like you discover along the way who you are, as do they. We were talking about this the other day. It’s like normally in a creation of a situation comedy, you do 22 episodes; that’s what we all used to do. And by episode number 11 you go, “Oh, I see. This is who we are. That doesn’t work, but this works.” You start to gel about who you are halfway through the first season. We had nine episodes the first season, and the background wasn’t, “Let’s discover who we are,” the background was, “Oh, please God, let’s not die going to work.” That was literally what was in the back of your head. This year was a lot different. All of us were vaccinated and felt so much safer. But it’s like if I were doing a play or doing a film, I could talk to you about those things, the choices a character makes. For Neil, I’m discovering the choices are kind of being made on a day-to-day basis. I pick up the script and go, “Oh, this is part of who he is this week, I didn’t know that.” I love that you discover that Neil’s ex-wife, who passed away and who’s the mother of my daughter, in the ’80s had a softcore porn career and that I was madly in love with her. I just loved that. I just loved that the billionaire who made his fortune on billboards in Los Angeles also had this trophy wife that he was madly in love with. You’re a longtime environmentalist. What is your current focus? I’m on the board of directors of Oceana and have been pretty much since its inception. It’s what I’ve been doing since the mid-’80s. Your bread and butter is comedy—Cheers, The Good Place, Mr. Mayor, Becker. But you’ve also had some great drama roles, like CSI and Damages. How do you decide when to go for the drama as opposed to another comedy? I think it’s when I need a break from how hard doing comedy is that I turn to drama. Drama, you can show up drunk, divorced and in a bad mood and the camera looks at you and goes, “Oh, that’s interesting, whatever that is. Interesting.” Drama is created by the directing and the editing and the music. Your job is to kind of show up and be there. If you’re doing comedy, it’s much more of an athletic sport. You really have to have a lot of energy; the ball is in your hand. They can edit and do things to make it better, but basically if you’re not nailing that tone in that rhythm, then it doesn’t work. This is funny, everything else around it is not. And that discovery process is, to me, an incredible challenge. But it’s also a bit tiring and there’s a metronome going. It’s like a musical in a way. You don’t have that ability to let the camera in slowly and to be more reflective. It’s much more of a dance that you have to keep rhythm to, or it doesn’t work, and that’s not true about drama. I find it much more relaxing in a funny way. Fargo is kind of my sweet spot in that, talking about drama, because it is funny as well. Even while being horrific and violent and scary, it’s also funny. The Good Place got people to think about what it means to do the right thing. Are you satisfied with that as its takeaway? Yes: Try to be the best you can every day. We’re not going to become monks or philosophers overnight, but you do know what’s ethically right, especially the longer you’ve been on the planet. You were born in San Diego, and you spent a lot of time in Hollywood. But last time I spoke to Mary when she was doing Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, she talked about your place in Nashville. I was born in California, but then left. Pretty much by 1 year old, I was elsewhere. I grew up in Arizona mostly, and then was back East studying and then working. Since the late ’70s, I moved to California with my family and have been here ever since. As far as the Nashville part, that came because of Mary’s rather sudden introduction to music. A lot of her co-writes were with musicians and artists in Nashville, so it became hard to keep staying at hotels. So we had a home for five or six years in Nashville, which is wonderful. It’s still such a huge part of our life. Our house right now is filled with the [country duo] Brothers Osborne, John and T.J. Osborne. And LucieSilvas, who is John’s wife and an artist as well. We have people come in and they write and hang out, and they’re some of our best friends. It’s such a lovely thing that Mary brought into my life. Body Heat was one of your early credits. You had that fun scene dancing on the pier, such a contrast to your comedies. He was such a smart director, LarryKasdan. He came out of advertising, and he storyboarded, I think two or three times, storyboarded the whole film. So his certainty when we started shooting, he knew exactly what he wanted. You could take the script that we got to audition with to the movie today and conduct it like a score. Everything on the page is up on the screen. It was so very thoughtful. Next, William Jackson Harper on Starring in Season 2 of HBO Max’s Love Life and What He Misses About The Good Place
