What: Whose Live Anyway with Ryan Stiles, Greg Proops, Jeff Davis and Joel Murray
When: Friday, 8 p.m.
Where: Royal Theatre
Tickets: $39.50 at rmts.bc.ca, 250-386-6121 or at the Royal McPherson box office (limited number available)
When an actor says during an interview that he’s a “missionary of mirth bringing comedy to the masses,” you half-expect the person to specialize in zany antics.
But given that this particular comment comes courtesy of Joel Murray, whose career includes recurring roles in everything from sitcoms (Dharma & Greg, Still Standing) to high-level dramas (Mad Men, Shameless), standard assumptions don’t apply.
The Chicago native is funny, no doubt — skills he learned from his older brother, Bill Murray — but he isn’t looking for laughs at every turn these days. He’s more of a character actor than comic, despite being hired as “the new guy” alongside Ryan Stiles, Greg Proops and Jeff Davis in the Whose Live Anyway touring troupe.
Fear not, fans of the Whose Line Is It Anyway franchise: Murray’s roots run deep where improv is concerned. The 50-year-old has worked with some of Chicago’s most renowned improvisational theatre troupes, and spent five years with The Second City.
That exposure led to a regular gig on the sitcom Grand, which was being produced by the people who ran The Cosby Show and Roseanne. When that series wrapped, he went from television to film and back again, eventually earning a recurring role on the TV sitcom Dharma & Greg, playing Pete the skirt-chasing lawyer.
Years of mid-level work followed, without much in the way of widespread success. Murray’s life changed for good in 2007, however, when he joined the cast of Mad Men halfway through the show’s first season (as copy writer Freddy Rumsen).
Murray, who was on Mad Men through Season Five, said he learned an important lesson while on Mad Men — that different projects require different skills. “If you’re on a four-camera sitcom in a studio, your improv skills can come in handy when your line didn’t work the first time around. But when you’re working on something like Mad Men, where [creator] Matt Weiner thinks it is Shakespeare, and you have to have it word-perfect down to the comma, there’s no room for improv there.”
He’s getting his fill of improv these days with his Whose Live Anyway collaborators. Murray always prides himself on being prepared for work, but when it comes to riffing on stage in the Whose Live setting, he can only do much in advance.
“We drink a little Macallan’s Scotch beforehand, and depending on the year, be it 18 or 12, that’s the big prep.”
Preparing for an acting role uses more of his dramatic chops, and requires more of him in terms of muscle memory, Murray said. No matter how prepared he is heading into an audition, however, it can be frustrating to lose work to someone who is not even reading for the part.
“When you see Robert Downey, Jr. doing HTC ads — the guy has got four serial movie franchises, and he’s stealing commercial work. There used to be a taboo in that. You would never have the nerve to take that work away from somebody else.”
Murray has lived in L.A. for the past 23 years, but he has never lost the skills he acquired in Chicago. With kids of his own, some of whom are expressing a desire to get into showbiz, Murray suggests they head for Illinois as soon as possible.
“I tell them to go to Chicago. Forget these kids out in L.A. that want everything right away. Go to Chicago where you actually get stage time, and can get up in front of people 300 nights a year.”