KP: Have you directed before?
URBANIAK: I’ve only directed a handful of times. I know a lot of writers, and a couple times just to see their stuff up, I’ve directed downtown at these little evenings where there’ll be like an evening of short pieces and stuff, like one or two nights. I’d stage just, literally, like a handful of one-act plays that friends of mine have written, but I don’t think I’m particularly good at it.
KP: What kind of director are you?
URBANIAK: Just try to keep it pacey and entertaining. Really. You know? I think I’m probably pretty old school.
KP: Which school would you say you’re closest to?
URBANIAK: Your old school kinda pacey and… Just clarity. Clarity, pace.
KP: Yes – “Faster and enunciate.”
URBANIAK: You know, I’m not setting Hamlet on a World War 2 submarine or anything. I’ve been in plays like that, and there were a lot of great directors who think like that, but to me it was just being very simple and clear with the material.
KP: Did you find yourself slipping into any of the idiosyncrasies that other directors had displayed to you?
URBANIAK: Uh, no. It’s funny, I don’t think I really… I mean, whatever a given director has done that I admired, I would… There are things directors have done that I like that I don’t think I would do. I don’t think I’d approach rehearsals in the same way because it just didn’t quite work with me, but… again, this was just basically get these things up quickly. The fun of directing for me was really casting. It was like, “Well, let me get the best actors I know for the best part.” And for many years in New York I had my own theater company, and it was all about the casting for me back then. I didn’t direct the shows, but the casting was a really big deal for me. That’s the fun part of….
KP: Is this the Arden Party company?
URBANIAK: Arden Party, yeah.
KP: What happened to that group?
URBANIAK: Well, that group takes us back to after high school and after being a slacker… (laughing)
KP: See how I circle back?
URBANIAK: Yeah, we’re circling back now. Basically, that’s what brought me to New York. And it was like the mid-80s. I met this director named Karin Coonrod, and she wanted to form a theater company. And it was sort of the right time for me and I thought, “Yeah, I’ll form a theater company!” So I moved to New York, and Karen and I started this group, and I worked exclusively with that company for about six years. And then… I mean, that’s all I did. I temped during the day to make money. You know, a secretary in a suit. And then I would do Arden Party shows at night. And I did that for six years. My first six years in New York, that was my life.
KP: How many productions did you mount in that period?
URBANIAK: We did about four shows a year. Two big ones and two smaller ones.
KP: Any that stand out in your mind?
URBANIAK: Well, we did a great production of The Importance of Being Earnest, which is how I met my wife. That was a good one. Actually, I didn’t meet her at that show, she actually met me later at a fund raiser that we had – but she saw that show and I made a good impression, so she came to talk…
KP: In what role?
URBANIAK: I played Algernon.
KP: Oh really?
URBANIAK: Algey, yes. Which yes, I would be kind of cast to type as Ernest. As the kind of repressed weirdo.
KP: Which is great when you have your own company, that you can cast yourself against type…
URBANIAK: Well, that was the great thing about that company and about Karen the director, was I actually wanted to play Ernest because I though Ernest was a funnier part. And Algernon is kind of a leading man, and at the time I thought, “Oh, I want to be the funny repressed guy.” And she said, “No, you should be Algernon. You should be the romantic leading man guy.” And I thought, “Oh, come on.” Then I thought, “Well, alright, what the hell.” And then I really got a lot out of it and it was a really very important thing for me to do. Because it was a whole other aspect of, you know, kind of my vocabulary as an actor that I realized that I had, and then I ended up using. That is the great thing about having a small company – you can do whatever you want. So in that company, the character actor would play the leading man and the leading man type guy would play the character part, and we all got to kind of stretch which is a great thing.
KP: Without that, could you have foreseen yourself playing someone like Simon Grim?
URBANIAK: Well, certainly doing Simon Grim was informed by a lot of the work I did in the downtown off-Broadway theater world. Because Hal is kind of… you know, kind of a bird of a feather to a lot of those people because he’s got such a specific idiosyncratic approach to performing. And directing …
KP: Never would have guessed that.
URBANIAK: Yeah, I mean, all that stuff I did, all those crazy shows I did downtown, were worth it.
KP: If you were to try and sum it up in a word, what would be the way that you would characterize that period?
URBANIAK: Vital, I guess, is the word that come to mind immediately. Because like I said, that was kinda like my training. That was my acting school, that company, and doing stuff in a kind of off-Broadway world from that time, late-80s, early-90s. And I have an opportunity to do all kinds of stuff, and I’m still drawing from all those different experiences today when I do more kind of arguably mainstream stuff. With the delightful exception of The Venture Bros., which is as wacky and wild as anything I ever did below 14th Street.
KP: And so many parts within it…
URBANIAK: In the episode yesterday, I did four voices on it. Delightful.
KP: It was a joy seeing you at the recording session for the finale.
URBANIAK: That’s right… There’s a secret voice that I do in the finale, but we can’t give that away. I was the voice of a well-known person who they wanted to try to get the person, then I did it. But we can’t give that away.
KP: But I will say you did do that person very well.
URBANIAK: Well, thank you. I hope so. But we can’t go into that.
KP: If you do, you’ll be hearing from that person’s lawyers.
URBANIAK: Yes, that’s right. (laughing) There gotta be some surprises for the fans. I love doing that show. That actually all came about from my downtown days, because I met Jackson Publick, Chris McCulloch, through a guy named Bob Sikoryak, who was my roommate for three years.
KP: And also your underground bootleg tape dealer.
URBANIAK: That’s right. It was all mentioned on the blog.
KP: Yes.
URBANIAK: Just read the blog, people.
Q This entire interview is redundant.
URBANIAK: Sikoryak is a cartoonist who also used to perform a lot downtown. He’d curate and perform in these kind of downtown variety shows. And he was a friend of Jackson Publick’s and he introduced me to Jackson. And then when Jackson had the idea of doing The Venture Bros., he approached me about doing Dr. Venture. And the rest is history.
KP: When you read that first pilot script, what was your take on the material?
URBANIAK: Oh, I thought it was really funny. I really liked Chris… Jackson… whatever his name is. I had wanted to do a cartoon. I thought it would be a hoot to do a cartoon. And as luck would have it, it became a show.
KP: So was that the first voice that came into your mind for the character?
URBANIAK: I remember the first day I went in, we kinda found it in just like the first few minutes of recording. We did a couple of kind of trial takes for the first scene. And I remember when I first went in, I was doing a little bit of a kind of… like, sort of like Billy West’s old professor guy on Futurama. You know that thing? You know, he has that kind of Larry Fine quality to a lot of his characters?
KP: That sort of warbley, trembley quality to it?
URBANIAK: Yeah. Also just, like, you can hear it a little bit in Stimpy. “Yello? Well, gee, Ren!” You know, that thing. That slightly elastic rubbery quality to the voice.
KP: With much more of a stuffed up nasal quality.
URBANIAK: Yeah. So when I first did Dr. Venture – like, the first take I tried on the first day of recording the pilot, or the first minute of recording the pilot, there was just a little bit of a kind of old man thing. You know, kind of old professor thing. And Chris basically said, “Oh, we can make it simpler.” And he just kept kind of telling me to remove things, so it was basically just a more uptight version of my own voice! (laughing)
KP: I was gonna wait for you to say it.
URBANIAK: And that’s really what it is. It’s really just my voice with a different energy. It’s just my voice, with more tension and, uh, angry precision. I think I have a kind of vaguely precise speaking voice, but it’s not fueled by any particular sort of anger. And I think Dr. Venture’s is. (laughing So, it’s just kind of a spikier version of my own voice.
KP: Beyond finding the voice, at what point did the character present itself?
URBANIAK: There were many great comic influences. The two primary ones are Tony Randall and Don Knotts. Now and then, Jackson will say, “Okay, just Randallize it a little bit.”
KP: So that sort of prissy, fussbudget kind of thing…
URBANIAK: (as Dr. Venture) “I’m stopping this X-1 right now!” You know, it’s just kind of Tony Randall’s anger. And then the Don Knotts thing is that kind of bravado. It’s like the Don Knotts vocal slide, where he’d go, “Yeahh, I guess I was doing,” you know, kind of “Yes, science prize 79.” That kind of slide.
KP: So, really, an uptight prissy fussbudget with a massive ego.
URBANIAK: Yeah, exactly. So it’s basically James Urbaniak with Tony Randall and Don Knotts added when necessary. You know, to taste. (laughing)
KP: Or the people who are incredibly critical of you say it’s just James Urbaniak.
URBANIAK: Yeah, but I don’t sound like Dr. Venture. Do I?
KP: No, not at… no. Maybe. A little.
URBANIAK: My voice is much mellower than his.
KP: That’ll be season three’s voice.
URBANIAK: Yeah, I’m much more relaxed. I’m a Jersey slacker dude, come on!
KP: I think the Jersey slacker’s long gone.
URBANIAK: Just gently floating through life. Now and then I get an acting job. Everything’s cool. (laughing)
KP: At what point did the character itself click, beyond the voice? Was there a certain passage that locked the performance for you?
URBANIAK: The pilot was certainly fun, although if you look at the pilot today, all the characters are different. I think it was just over the course of recording the first season. Probably just over the course of recording the first couple episodes, it really started to kind of click. There was a moment this season, when we were recording season 2, and that morning – my wife was pregnant at the time, and we had just come from the doctor, and just had a sonogram done and learned that we were having a boy and a girl. Twins. I was very, very happy! (laughing) And I went off to record a Venture Bros. session, but we weren’t telling people yet about the pregnancy. It was still early. And we were gonna announce it later. But this was the day I found out it was gonna be a boy and a girl, and we found out the sexes. So I go in there quite ebullient, but not… I hadn’t mentioned it to Jackson and Doc yet. And I start recording Dr. Venture. And Jackson says, “James, it’s just… you kinda sound, like, too relaxed. You don’t really have that Venture pissiness.” (laughing) And I said, “Oh really? Oh. Yeah, I guess I’m just in kind of a good mood.” And meanwhile I’m just bursting at the seams. So that was a case where my personal life… my own quality was intruding on Dr. Venture.
KP: How long did it take you to get in synch with the session after that?
URBANIAK: I think right away. I just said, “Okay, I… I thought I was admirably underplaying.” I mean part of what struck me about the first season were some of the funniest moments, I felt, were the kind of things that were completely thrown away. Sort of asides.
KP: Which would be your favorite?
URBANIAK: Oh, I can’t even think of any right now. But just tiny little moments. And the funny thing about doing that show is I’ll record the sessions, read the scripts, record them, and then completely forget what they were about. So when I see them when they air, or they gave me some episodes before they air, on DVD, it’s all like it’s new to me. I go, “Wow, I don’t even remember recording that.” It’s very funny, because… part of it is just, when you record it, you just record your lines in the scenes without the other people, and it’s all fragmented. So, the only time you have a real sense of the whole show is when you read it the first time. And then going in to record it, it’s just this very fragmented experience. Seeing the whole thing with the picture and the sound and the sound effects and the characters doing stuff, it’s all like, “Oh, that’s funny! I didn’t see that coming.” I can never remember that stuff.
KP: In conjunction, obviously, with Jackson and Doc, you three have created quite a memorable character, which will probably have quite a long shelf life…
URBANIAK: I hope it lasts. I would love to keep doing this for a while, yeah. It’s really fun. And the sessions are just a blast. I mean, they’re just such bright, funny guys – as you know. So, they’re just fun to hang out with. And then to go there and get paid for it is just icing on the cake.
KP: If these sessions are anything like the ones I partook in, it must be an incredible change of pace…
URBANIAK: It’s just like us making each other laugh! (laughing) But yeah, I can’t let my personal… if things are good in my personal life, I have to leave them at the door when I go in to record Dr. Venture. Can’t have any mellowness creeping in there.
KP: No no. Particularly when you start recording things for that talking doll.
URBANIAK: That’s right. Pull the string. “You’re supposed to be the smart one!” You know, or whatever he was saying.
KP: You pop a pill in his mouth to get him to say things…
URBANIAK: It’s an idea. I like that idea. Let’s do it.
KP: I’ll have to talk to Jackson and Doc and maybe they can take it to the higher-ups.
URBANIAK: I did record a day for adult swim’s website. They have some game that’s based on the yard sale episode, and Chris and Doc had nothing to do with it. Some other person wrote it. And I had these Venture-esque lines. “What are you picking that up for?” The other thing is, when I’m doing something like this, like talking to you, I do really bad Dr. Venture imitation. I can’t really do him unless I’m in the booth with the script.
KP: I wouldn’t say it’s a really bad Dr. Venture.
URBANIAK: Ah. I can’t do him out of context.
KP: Where does Phantom Limb come from?
URBANIAK: That was just a voice that popped out. The first time I opened my mouth to record that character it just seemed like, you know, a kind of deep, Englishy voice, and the kind of thing to do. And there’s a little bit of the great English character actor George Sanders, who was in All About Eve. He’s Addison Dewitt, the critic.
KP: He was also Shere Kahn.
URBANIAK: In The Jungle Book. He had this very smooth kind of English baritone. But actually, that kind of occurred to me after I recorded it. I’m like, “Oh, that kind of sounds like George Sanders.” But one person who really influenced me when I first recorded it was Ian McKellen. Not so much the Lord of the Rings McKellen, but sort of like… I’ve got some videotapes of some of his old Royal Shakespeare Company performances, like he was in a production of MacBeth…
KP: Which is out on DVD now by the way.
URBANIAK: Oh is it? I’ve got it on VHS. And also his Richard III. Something about the way he sort of pronounces the vowels and also sometimes he’ll have this sort of almost kind of hard, very London kind of A’s – like, you know, “So fair and foul a day I have not seen.” (laughing) There’s just something about the way he kinda caresses the vowels. Phantom Limb caresses his vowels like Ian McKellen. You can quote me on that. (laughing)
KP: It’s a loving caress.
URBANIAK: Yes.
KP: There’s almost the implication that that’s not Limb’s natural accent.
URBANIAK: It’s been suggested. Yeah. I hadn’t thought about that until this season when they talked about his origins and the idea that he’s just some American dork who’s affected that voice. I kind of like that. Actually, one of my proudest Phantom Limb moments is something that no one’s ever commented on, which is in “Trials of The Monarch,” when Phantom Limb slips into the trial, he’s got like a hat on and he’s disguising himself. And I have Phantom Limb doing a bad American accent to try to get into the trial. So I think I thought of him as English, but he’s doing a kind of… you know, a lot of English actors do wonderful American accents, but some of them don’t do it very well, and the bad ones they tend to overstress the R.
KP: Like Michael Caine.
URBANIAK: Yeah, I guess he does. I can’t think of him doing an American character except that John Irving movie, but I didn’t see it.
KP: He also did the Texan accent in Secondhand Lions.
URBANIAK: You hear it on Python. It’s more comic, like when they say, “On the most amazing production in the world!” When they do those little… the Terry Gilliam intro, where they’ll have not Terry but one of the other guys…
KP: Or that entire boardroom sequence in Meaning of Life.
URBANIAK: Exactly! “What do you mean?” I remember Eric Idle did a good one, but the other ones are like, “Yeah.”
KP: Where you can tell that they’re desperate to try to hold on to it…
URBANIAK: Well, they’re trying to hold onto it in this way where they really stress the Rrrrs, and…
KP: “So tell us about it!”
URBANIAK: Yeah, “So tell us about it!” Yeah. And so I have Phantom Limb doing one of those accents in “Trial of The Monarch.” “Excuse me. Where do I sit?” And I thought that was a rather amusing, subtle joke – doing a bad American accent – but no one’s ever mentioned it. It was an under the radar joke. (laughing)
KP: Now you blew the lid off of it. Who was I speaking with… someone who had a long conversation with Jonathan Harris, where Jonathan Harris revealed his original Midwestern accent.
URBANIAK: Of Lost in Space fame?
KP: Yes.
URBANIAK: Yes – “You clanking, cluttering…”
KP: The entire thing was purely an affectation.
URBANIAK: Well! Tony Randall is from Oklahoma I believe, and Orson Welles, of course, is a Wisconsin boy. A lot of these guys with great rolling affected accents are just good old Americans. And meanwhile, you’ve got guys like George Bush who’s an East Coast blue blood who goes around talking like he’s a shitkicker.
KP: I think that’s more from a point of ignorance than anything else. But we’ll leave that to your blog. I’ve already had death threats over interviews before. If you’re looking at stepping back a little ways, you spent a long time doing theater work before you ever did anything in front of a camera.
URBANIAK: Yeah. Yeah.
KP: Was that by design, or just sheer coincidence?
URBANIAK: By choice, I mean, I… Like I said, when I first moved to New York, I just worked with my own little theater company and temped during the day, but I wasn’t trying to get an agent or do kind of mainstream acting work. I was wholly obsessed with running my little theater company. And then after about six years of working with them, I started working with other similar small groups downtown. But that is what I wanted to do. And then… it was only a matter of kind of one thing leading to another. Where I was actually working with a downtown company called Cucaracha Theater Company, which I don’t think really exists anymore. The guy who created it does things now and then and he may call them Cucaracha Productions, but back in the glory days of the early 90s, that was a really vibrant downtown theater company. And Hal Hartley used to go to their plays. And he cast a lot of people from that company – and, in fact, one of the early founding members of that company was Martin Donavan, who is Hal’s leading man in his early films. So I was doing a show at Cucaracha and I remember thinking, “Well, I love working at Cucaracha, but I know that Hal Hartley comes to their show, so maybe he’ll see me in something!” (laughing) And sure enough, he saw me in a couple things there and then. That was a whole social scene, too. After the shows everyone would kinda hang out. And Hal is something of a party animal. He’s a rather reserved, button-down fellow in his way, but he also likes to hang out and throw back a few. So we used to do that. Rolling Rocks. Like, a dollar at the bar in the theater, and I would hang out. So I kind of got to know Hal Hartley socially for a couple years by working with Cucaracha and him just coming to the shows. And then one day he called me up and had a little part for me in a short film. And then he called me up like a month later and had another little part in another short film. And then about a year later, he called me up and said, “I have a new script for a movie, and there’s a part for you, and I’d like to meet you and talk about it.” And I went to go meet him, and on the way I thought, “This is great. I’ll be, like, the funny waiter.” I was very excited about this, thinking, “Oh, I’ll have a really funny little one scene, little small part.” But it’s my big break, you know? And I go and he sits down and says, “Well the movie’s called Henry Fool. There are three main characters and I want you to be one of them.” And then my head exploded. And then I read the script. I remember saying to Hal, “Wow, great.” And he said, “Well, read the script first.” I remember thinking, “Yeah, I don’t need to read the script. It’s a Hal Hartley movie, I’m one of the main characters, I’m doing it.” And a year and a half later, we started making the film. It took him a long time to get the money together to make that movie, and that was a low budget movie.
KP: Did you have any doubts in that interim that, “Oh, he’ll surely recast”…
URBANIAK: No, actually. He kept in constant touch, and it was me. It was always me. It was great. And Parker (Posey) and Tom Ryan, the guy who played Henry Fool. But the great thing was, over the course of a year and a half, I would get a new version of the script now and then. At one point, Simon Grim had a girlfriend early in the film, then he didn’t again. Characters just came and went. New characters came in, and then suddenly they weren’t there anymore. Characters got combined. It’s like… 85% of it was the same, but there were all these little changes, and finally it became the masterpiece that I think it is. I’m very proud of that movie. But the other thing was – suddenly I was starring in a movie that was gonna come out, and did come out. And that was the great leap forward in my mainstream acting career. You can mark it on the calendar – my last week of temping was the week before I started shooting Henry Fool. Which was in, I think, April of 1997. Almost 10 years ago. And from that week on, I’ve made a living as an actor.
KP: Did it feel, when you finished that week, that it would be the final week and you would never have to go back to that?
URBANIAK: I remember feeling that at the time. And the money I made on that film, by my standards today, would be like “meh.” But at the time…
KP: “I won’t even show up for that voiceover!”
URBANIAK: But at the time, it was amazing. I was working 40 hours a week, temping as a word processor, and the idea that I would get paid quite well, all things considered, for a low-budget movie, for acting, was just, like, “Holy shit!” So I was just delighted to be working with Hal, and the fact that I was getting paid to do it was almost beside the point. But I wasn’t even thinking ahead at that point. It was just like, “This is great.” But what happened was, that led to getting an agent and suddenly being seen for movies and TV and kind of uptown type plays and things, and fortunately I’ve been able to carve out a living at it since then.
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