This time I’m letting Neil Flynn talk.
Neil always surprises me when he actually agrees to talk, even though he’s done several interviews with me at this point. In my defense, though, he’s made a career out of playing characters who tend to be men of few words.
Take Mike Heck on The Middle, for example: the guy spent virtually the entire run of the series actively trying to avoid conversation, and when he was invariably forced into having to talk, he generally only spoke as much as was absolutely necessary to get the conversation over and done with.
The first time I interviewed Neil, it was in the bar of the Langham Hotel in Pasadena, and although it lasted for 45 minutes, it concluded with him being surprised that we’d talked so long. In fact, he made note of having read my Random Roles with Lily Tomlin for the AV Club and said, “That thing went on forever! I was, like, ‘I’m never gonna have that much to say!” But it turns out that Neil Flynn is actually a pretty great interview if you can get him talking about things that he actually enjoys talking about, which is to say things that he actually cares about. I’ve also discovered that it helps if you can keep him guessing a little bit with what you’re going to ask him about. And it certainly doesn’t hurt if you let him take whatever tangents he decides he wants to take, because wherever he ends up going, you can count on it eventually being pretty funny.
I’d been wanting to invite Neil onto the podcast ever since I started it, but when I reached out to him after hearing that he was going to be in the first season of the Scrubs revival, he downplayed how much he was going to be in it…and rightfully so, since he only ended up being in a single episode. For season two, however, I ‘d heard he was going to be in more than one, so I reached out to him early, and that’s why you’re getting the interview this week: because if you’re downloading this on the day of its release, then you’ll be able to see him in tonight’s episode.
So of course we talk about Scrubs and we talk about The Middle. This is the first time I’ve interviewed him since he made his debut on Shrinking, so we talked about the fact that this is the third time he’s worked with Harrison Ford, and he reveals how memorable those previous occasions were to Mr. Ford. We talk about his early acting career, which started in Chicago, led him to Los Angeles, then back to Chicago, and then back to Los Angeles, where he remains to this day. He’s got stories about popping up briefly in the unsuccessful pilot for Kung Fu: The Next Generation, kinda sorta making out with Laurie Metcalf, being unable to tell if Norm Macdonald was kidding or not, working with Amy Sedaris in Girls5Eva, and having someone question whether or not he’d really been part of Second City and the UCB.
For the record, the conversation starts with Neil not being able to figure out how to get his audio to connect, and by the end of the proceedings, he literally admits to being the living embodiment of Old Man Yells at Cloud. But that’s just who he is, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Well, that’s almost certainly more than enough of an intro. It’s time to let Neil Flynn talk.
