Bobby Moynihan moves from ‘SNL’ to sitcom
Bobby Moynihan has seen a lot of changes in quick succession. Fresh from his dream job at “Saturday Night Live” — his comedic home-away-from-home for nine years — he’s shifted to “Me, Myself &I,” a sitcom on CBS due Monday.
As if that weren’t enough, Moynihan married in 2016 and soon after became a father. His casting in “Me, Myself & I” was swiftly followed by a move to Los Angeles, which came with its own adjustments for the native New Yorker. Such as, say, having a yard for the first time.
“I don’t know what’s going on here,” Moynihan begins by phone. “But people just are on our lawn all the time. People just walk their dogs and are physically on our lawn to the point where they were right near our front window this morning.
“I don’t know if it’s just socially acceptable in L.A. to just stand on someone’s lawn and let your dog go to the bathroom or if we’re just soft targets,” he adds with a laugh. “If you come within 10 feet of someone’s property in New York, there’s going to be words.”
It’s the stuff of reaching a new place in his life, and it’s that sense of watching big moments unfold that makes Moynihan uniquely qualified for “Me, Myself & I.” Created by Dan Kopelman (“Malcolm in the Middle”), the series explores one man’s life — would-be inventor Alex Riley — at ages 14, 40 and 65 and plays with the pivotal decisions and coincidences.
Played as a teenager by Jack Dylan Grazer and a wealthy recent retiree by TV veteran John Larroquette, Moynihan, 40, portrays Alex at midlife: a father whose life has run aground amid a divorce and work struggles.
Though Moynihan’s life is considerably more in order, he still felt an immediate kinship to the character.
“My whole life completely changed in a matter of weeks,” he says, recounting his whirlwind year. “There’s definitely this feeling of ‘I’m just glad we’re here, we made it, and everyone’s happy and healthy. This is it, this is a whole new thing now.’ That’s definitely where Alex is on the show.”
Grazer, who made his bigscreen debut in the recently released adaptation of Stephen King’s “It,” said he also found parallels to his character.
“We’re both in middle school, we both have our awkward moments with girls and stuff,” he said. “We’re both creative, I’m an actor, and he’s an inventor. It’s kind of the same.”
For Kopelman’s part, he was drawn to the unconventional idea of depicting a single life in three stages as a byproduct of an addiction to reading and watching biographies, which can depict the ripple effect of a single moment in a person’s lifespan. While the show’s time-skipping quality drew early comparisons to Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood,” Kopelman found inspiration in the 2014 movie “Love & Mercy,” which featured John Cusack and Paul Dano both playing Beach Boy Brian Wilson at different stages of his life.
“At no point are you like, ‘Oh, I believe one character’ or ‘I believe the other.’ They were both Brian Wilson in their own way,” he said, speaking by phone in a separate interview. “I thought, hey, maybe we could do that with a pilot.”