Interview: John Lithgow and Jeffrey Tambor

John Lithgow and Jeffrey Tambor are together at last! Okay, maybe this isn’t the most in demand pairing of talent, but it may have been karmically predestined. The two veteran actors play 60-year-old friends vowing to live their last Twenty Good Years to the fullest. Their paths had crossed many times over the years.

“We have a long, long history together and yet we’ve never worked together and barely knew each other before we started,” said Lithgow. “Mainly because we’re the same kind of actors. We were in rep[ertory theater] at the same time, we were on Broadway at the same time. Uncannily, we’ve worked within 50 yards of each other about four or five times. In the ‘70s I was in Anna Christie on Broadway when he was in Sly Fox. Last year I was in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels when he was literally across the street in Glengarry Glen Ross. The whole time when I was on 3rd Rock, he was two soundstages away doing Larry Sanders. Yet if you put it all together, Jeffrey and I probably had about three minutes of conversation in all these years.”

Both actors return to television from the hit shows Lithgow mentioned, and the critically acclaimed Arrested Development in Tambor’s case. The sitcom Twenty Good Years shoots before an audience, which Lithgow is used to, but it was an adjustment for Tambor. Both Sanders and Arrested were shot like movies with a single camera at a time.

“I have to retool a little bit honestly and I was a little daunted and still daunted by it,” said Tambor. “But I come from the theater. I started in repertory theater and I like it. First of all, there’s an instant rapport and you know exactly where you are. The other day, two episodes ago, we were doing a scene, John and I, that we were really having a wonderful time and John tapped me and said, ‘Look behind you’ as we were walking off stage and the audience was standing on its feet. I thought they were leaving but we were mid-episode. They were just enthusiastic and wonderful. There’s nothing like that, so I’m happy. It’s a bit of retooling but I’m getting there.”

The show’s humor will put Lithgow and Tambor in physically outrageous situations like horseback riding, skiing and other adventure sports. But there will be more to the show than jokes.

“This is incredibly rich material,” said Lithgow. “It is about growing old and fearing that your life isn’t as full as it could be, but it’s also about the nature of friendship, something that is completely part of the human condition at every age. This kind of imperfectability of friendship and relationships. You have to accept things in another person to have a long friendship. It’s an unfathomable subject for either drama or comedy and that’s the best kind of comedy. To give you an example, last week’s episode was about one friend being jealous of the other. That is just a fantastic subject. These writers, we have this staff of writers who are ready, willing and able to go into these areas and treat them in a comic way but also with a degree of wisdom and always with a measure of reality.”

Even though the title refers to the last years before the inevitable collapse of the human body, Tambor feels the subject can apply to any age. “I don’t think it’s about aging,” he said. “I just think it’s about twenty good years and who doesn’t want twenty good years and who doesn’t want friendship? I never think of the paradigm of aging as what this is about. I really think it’s about how do you get through the day with being meaningful and having friends in your life and changing and having meaning?”

If the show’s a hit, perhaps the title could suggest its ultimate run. “I don't think I’ll last twenty good years because it’s tremendously hard work,” said Lithgow. “But you’re talking to us in our honeymoon period of course. We’ve just started this and we’re having a deliriously good time. I did six years on 3rd Rock and it went shooting by. It was a completely wonderful experience. I could easily imagine staying with this a long, long time. There is also the fact that Jeffrey and I are character men starring in something. It doesn’t happen for a lot of 60-year-olds. If we’re 68 years old and we’re still starring in something, it’ll be even luckier.”

Twenty Good Years premieres Wednesday on NBC.