Still growling after all these years
Actor Ed Asner puts gruff demeanor to work in ‘A Man and His Prostate’
Ed Asner picks up the phone and doesn’t disappoint my preconceptions.
“Who is this?” he growls.
Informed, Asner immediately warms up from combatively gruff to amiably gruff. “I was ready to ward you off,” he says.
The veteran actor speaks during a break during a film shoot. At 88, Asner offers no indication that he’s winding down vocationally.
“Why not keep working?” he says. “Even if I wasn’t nervous about being out of service, the bucket keeps signaling me. The dollar sign keeps biting at my ass.”
So Asner will break from filming this week to visit Houston for a one-night, one-man play, “A Man and His Prostate,” which will be staged at MATCH on Thursday.
“A Man and His Prostate” was written by Ed Weinberger, a longtime friend who is Asner’s junior by 15 years. Weinberger is one of the true legends of TV, who wrote for “The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson” and co-created and wrote for “The Cosby Show” and “Taxi.” He also was a regular writer on “Mary Tyler Moore,” where he worked with Asner.
“I regard him as a
master,” Asner says. “He’s a clever bastard. Far more clever than I am.”
So Asner will be stepping into Weinberger’s shoes in telling a story about visiting Italy and
collapsing, and requiring emergency surgery. Because the story is Weinberger’s, it balances comedy with contemplation. “As they were wheeling me in, they were wheeling a dead guy out,” goes one line. “And he looked better than I did.”
“When you’re my age, you start examining yourself again for the first time since puberty,” Asner says. “You grow up and you think there are no more surprises in store for you. But no, it’s virgin territory all over again.”
Asner found the project a fitting balance to his last stage work, the touring play “FDR,” in which he played the 32nd president.
“This one gets more laughs,” Asner says. “I tried to find some humor in ‘FDR,’ but you can only make so much soup out of potatoes.”
As a young man, Asner wasn’t sold on acting. He was the editor of his high school newspaper and asked his teacher about a career in journalism. “He said, ‘Yeah, I wouldn’t,’ ” Asner says. “I asked why not. He said, ‘You can’t make a living.’ And that was 1947. So I went on to become an overnight sensation as an actor.”
Asner chuckles at his own arid humor.
His family had no frame of reference for his chosen profession. He was born and raised in Kansas City to two Jewish Russian immigrants. “It’s like I’d fallen off the moon and landed in this work,” he says. “You try to imagine two foreignborn parents understanding that you wanted to be an actor.”
One of his earliest film parts was in “Kid Galahad” in 1962, a vehicle for Elvis Presley. “I found him to be an interesting person,” Asner says. “He had an entourage of good old boys. He was busy learning karate, breaking his hand while doing it. But he was nice and cooperative and friendly. I liked him.”
He found his way to the newsroom, eventually, playing a TV news producer, Lou Grant on “Mary Tyler Moore,” which he describes as “a seven-year education degree in comedy.”
Seven years playing Grant on a comedy gave way to five seasons playing Grant in “Lou Grant,” a drama.
That character and Asner’s work in miniseries like “Roots” and “Rich Man, Poor Man,” brought him more than an armful of Emmy Awards. His gnarled, twisting tree root of a voice made Asner a go-to guy for voice-acting work, most notably in Pixar’s instant classic “Up,” where he voiced the curmudgeonly Carl Fredricksen.
And now he steps into Weinberger’s shoes, Asner says, “with my darling little face and its unripe shape there to get the desired laughs.” He says he’s had more than enough health concerns of his own to relate to the material.
“I mean, we’re all in the same boat. I’ve had five hip operations, transplants … ,” he says. “After one of the hip operations, my doctor was so generous as to say, ‘Unfortunately, one leg is going to be a half inch shorter than it was before. You’ll need something on the bottom of your shoe to stabilize you.
“That’s pretty sweet. Isn’t it?”