‘Kominsky Method’ takes on age with humour
The show follows the story of a once-famous actor and his longtime agent, played by Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin
Without a screenwriter in sight, Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin are trading wisecracks just like the kibitzing longtime pals they play in The Kominsky Method.
Arkin got the ball rolling when the pair was asked if they knew each other before making the Netflix series, a dramedy about the longtime friendship of an actor and his agent and the indignities of ageing.
“No. A few weeks before we started the show, I insisted on having lunch with him. He refused about 55 times. He finally agreed,” a deadpan Arkin said.
“I like to keep it fresh,” replied Douglas, smiling.
So what did Arkin think of his costar? “I expected you were going to be more rigid,” he told Douglas, sitting with him in a hotel restaurant booth. “But working with him from day one, I just found him incredibly flexible and a little shy, interestingly.”
Douglas replies in kind. “I was a little in awe of him as an actor,” he said, then was interrupted.
“Get [expletive] out of here,” Arkin said.
Douglas smoothly carried on. He lauded his co-star’s “great sense” of comedy, which earned him an Oscar for Little Miss Sunshine, and the chance to study his impeccable timing. Exercising his comedy muscles was one reason Douglas signed on for his first small-screen series since The
Streets of San Francisco police drama made him a TV star in the 1970s. He went on to become an Oscar-winning movie actor (Wall Street) and producer (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest).
That sitcom hit maker Chuck Lorre (The Big Bang Theory, Mom) was
stretching creatively with The Kominsky
Method was another draw for Douglas.
Creator-producer Lorre took full advantage of being freed from network commercial breaks and a rigid halfhour format, Douglas said, and he upped the ante on heartbreak. “It was a freedom for him at this point in his extremely successful career that he really enjoyed,” Douglas said.
Douglas plays Sandy Kominsky, who had a middling career as an actor but is lionised as a coach by young students at his modest school. Arkin is his gruff but patient (to a point) agent and friend, Norman Newlander.
Norman is married to cancer-stricken Eileen (Susan Sullivan), Sandy is divorced and not averse to taking up with an ageappropriate student (Nancy Travis) — but only after he announces to the class, in proper #MeToo fashion, that she asked him out.
The jokes skew generational, sparing neither young or old. Sandy targets fledgling actors dedicated to fame and oversharing, while he and Norman commiserate about ageing and its toll, such as the fallout from an enlarged prostate.
“I urinate in Morse code — dots and dashes,” Norman says.
Lorre’s “magic” is to make getting older funny, in contrast to its usual depiction as depressing or something to be caricatured, said Douglas.
Identifying the worst part of ageing is easy, said Lorre, 66. “Your body’s falling apart. It simply doesn’t care that there’s things to do and places to be, and you’re caught inside this meat costume,” he said. “You catch a glimpse in the mirror and go, ‘Sweet Jesus,’ who is that old guy?’”
To observe Douglas, 74, and Arkin, 84, grab hold of the material was both an “education and its own form of entertainment,” Lorre said. “You’re sitting there watching actors of this calibre take your words and make them far better than you could possibly imagined.”
“Working with [Douglas] from day one, I just found him incredibly flexible and a little shy, interestingly.”
ALAN ARKIN | Actor