Jon Cryer has been a part of the pop culture landscape since the early '80s, thanks in no small part to his role as Duckie Dale in the John Hughes-penned, Howard Deutch-directed Pretty in Pink. Since then, of course, he's endured the same sort of highs and lows as any actor, but it's fair to say that the highest high that he's had in recent years was his 12-season run playing Alan Harper on the CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men.
Since Men wrapped its run in 2015, Cryer has kept as busy as he's been of a mind to, which is to say that he's had a bit more of an opportunity to pick and choose his projects based on what he's of a mind to do, but he's now back in the land of sitcoms, starring in NBC's Extended Family, which airs Tuesdays at 8:30 pm ET. Q had the opportunity to chat with Cryer about the new series and how he's enjoying being back in front of a live studio audience again, and we also chatted about the original ending of Pretty in Pink and his stint playing Lex Luthor in the CW's Arrow-verse, but we also asked him to select The Record That Changed My Life, resulting in far more conversation about My Chemical Romance than likely any previous Cryer interview to date.
Jon Cryer stars in the new NBC sitcom 'Extended Family.'
I've checked out the first several episodes of Extended Family, and I'm really enjoying it.
Oh, good. Oh, I'm so glad! We're having a great time doing it. It's lovely to be back in front of an audience. We actually shot the pilot almost two years ago. We were the first sitcom that was back in front of an actual live audience post-COVID, and it just felt so nice. It felt so good, and we all realized that we'd missed it.
I know it's a Mike O'Malley creation, but how did you come into the mix? Did Mike reach out to you?
Yes, he reached out to me. I was not looking, actually, to do a multi-came right away, and he and Tom Werner approached me... Actually, they approached me about playing the owner of the Boston Celtics on the show, the character played by Donald Faison. And I read it, and I said, "Well, Mike, let's you and I get together, and I'll read it with you." And my agents were not thrilled about that, because agents strive mightily to get you to be offer-only, so you don't have to read for things. And I threw it all away and said, "Oh, I'll read for it!" [Laughs.] So I met with Mike over Zoom and read the owner of the Boston Celtics part, and I said, "Hey, let me read some Jim stuff for fun, let's see how that turns out." And it was just a much better fit right away. It just felt like fun, and I thought, "Okay, well, there's something there for that show."
I like the way that it's both relatable and yet very much not.
Yes, it is a very specific situation. Not everybody can share an apartment with their ex-husband or ex-wife, and not everyone's ex-wife is marrying the owner of the Boston Celtics! [Laughs.] As you probably know, though, it was inspired by the real situation of the owner of Boston Celtics [Wyc Grousbeck], who does in fact... He and his wife share an apartment with her ex-husband, so that the kids don't have to go back and forth between two apartments. And as you said, it's specific, but it's also relatable. Everybody can sort of relate to something like when your marriage falls apart. Trying to find a positive to that is a really powerful idea, and trying to look at the situation anew and say, "Okay, what would work for us? What will work for our kids?" In this particular case, this is what they came up with.
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Obviously, you, Donald, and Abigail Spencer are established in comedy, if Abigail a little less so, but did you still have to do chemistry reads to determine if you could all play well off each other?
Oh, yes. Oh, yes, I read with a lot of actors. The thing with finding the character of Julia was that these had to be people that you could watch argue for hours. [Laughs.] Because that's what was going to end up happening! And that was the wonderful part of Abigail: there was this sunniness and this vulnerability that she had. Even though she could play this go-getting crisis manager, there was still a little chink in the armor. And that's why she ended up getting the part: you could enjoy these people just giving each other relentless sh*t. Which is what happens in real life! George Geyer, the guy who Jim is based on, he and Emilia Fazzalari, they fight all the time still! But it's a pleasure to watch, because they're both hilarious.
You've worked with a son on TV before, but I think this is your first time out with a daughter.
Yes! Yeah, now that you mention it. And, yeah, we did multiple chemistry reads with a bunch of kids. Actually, the original plan was to do more of an Everybody Loves Raymond situation, where the kids... You know, they pop in for a quick scene at the beginning, but then they're kind of off in another room for most of the show. But Finn Sweeney and Sofia Capanna ended up being so good that the writers were, like, "Oh, well, let's lean into that!" And that's actually a huge part of making any kind of comedy: seeing the elements that you have and finding what works for that. Because everybody starts with a conception of what the show is at the beginning, but invariably you cast and life takes whatever weird turns it takes, and things change in a way that you go, "Okay, well, what do we have now? Let's take what we have now and make the best thing for that."
How much of a trip is Lenny Clarke, who plays your dad?
Lenny Clarke is a force of nature. He's so much fun to hang out with and has a million stories and is politically incorrect but loving life and so happy to be able to do a show in front of people. Because, y'know, he comes from standup. Actually, his character originally didn't come into the show until the second episode, but the network loved the character so much that we shot some stuff and said, "We'll put him in the first episode, too!" And he's been just an indispensable part of it ever since.
I shot Mike O'Malley a message and asked, "What question do you want me to ask Jon?"
Uh-oh. [Laughs.]
No, no, what he asked was - and I was very impressed by this question, because with that request, he could've gone anywhere - "Why do multi-cam sitcoms endure? Why are they shows that people watch again and again?"
Because comedy is a communal experience in many ways, and hearing the live audience enjoy the show... There's something comforting about that, I think, and that understanding that there's a little bit of artifice here allows the actors a little more license to have fun with things. And... I don't know, there's just that agreement like you have when you go to the theater: we've all come here to enjoy this pretend thing, and you're actually being churlish if you don't enjoy this pretend thing! [Laughs.]
So I think that's why they endure, and it's why people love Friends and Seinfeld and I Love Lucy almost more now than they did when they were first on the air. There's a comfort to it. But the amazing thing was that when we first started Two and a Half Men, there were people who... Well, this was at the dawning of the comments era on the internet, when everybody read the comments, and the comments were, like, "What's with the laugh track? We don't need a laugh track! Why don't you shoot it single camera and have no laugh track?" Uh, it's because this is how we do this thing. It's, like, "Why don't we have a ballet with no dancing?" [Laughs.] And yet there's still comments on social media: "Why is there a laugh track? Why are people laughing?"
And it's interesting, because they confuse canned laughter with a laugh track, when they're actually two different things. A laugh track is just the recorded sound of an actual live audience watching the show and enjoying themselves. Canned laughter is when they add recorded laughs to things that didn't have laughs because they're not necessarily funny. [Laughs.] But on wonderful shows like M*A*S*H, that was all canned laughter. It's a single-camera show, it was shot in front of a crew without people necessarily there to add laughter to it, and they just added it later. But what we do is, we try to step out in front of an audience and see what works...and, more importantly, we see what doesn't work, which is very helpful.
So my daughter re-watched Pretty in Pink today in honor of my interviewing you, and then she proceeded to call my wife and I on FaceTime and once again tell us how terrible the ending is.
[Bursts out laughing.] She's still in pain about that...
She said, "I'm not even saying she should end up with Duckie. I'm just saying that I don't think she should end up with Blaine."
Well, that's very interesting for her to say that, actually, because I went back and re-read the script. I was talking to somebody on a podcast about that ending and about how culturally people perceive that movie, and I re-read what's actually in the text, that John Hughes actually wrote of the original ending of Pretty in Pink. And I realized it was less about... [Hesitates.] You know, people have said, "Oh, I wish that she'd ended up romantically with Duckie at the end instead of being romantically with Blaine at the end," so this whole legend has come around that the original ending was, she did end up romantically with Duckie, but the test audiences didn't like that, so they reshot the ending. And that is to some degree true, except that the original ending wasn't that she necessarily ended up romantically with Duckie.
The original ending of the thing was much more about the solidarity of the poor kids against the rich kids than about who she ended up with romantically. Duckie still shows up at the prom, and she's still thrilled to see him, and she dances with him to the moonlight dance with David Bowie's "Heroes" playing, and Blaine realizes the mistake he's made by having his fealty to his rich friends and his parents and his world, as opposed to loving this wonderful girl who was right in front of him. And that was the end of the movie. It wasn't about Duckie and Andie ending up together romantically, it was about them just being friends. As a matter of fact, the final shot was her jokingly lifting me off the floor and laughing about it!
But I can see what happened was, let's face it, Andrew McCarthy's a dreamboat, and the audience really invested in that love relationship, and because he was so sensitive, they want him to overcome the pressure of his class and to understand what he was losing by not being with Molly [Ringwald's] character. But it was interesting to me that that first ending wasn't about them being together romantically, really.
Before we move on, I just wanted to touch on your experience of playing Lex Luthor.
Oh, yeah, that was a part that I never seriously considered not taking. [Laughs.] And the whole thing came about in a very funny way. I got these weird, cryptic messages from a friend of mine in New York saying, "You're gonna get a request for something really interesting..." And I was, like, "Oooooookay... Why can't they just send the request? Why does this have to be a treasure hunt?"
So I went to a memorial service for a friend of mine who had passed away, and he was a gifted pianist and director, so all of the mourners at the memorial were actors and creative people who all had incredibly lengthy recollections to impart...and, obviously, we love drama. [Laughs.] So this memorial service ended up lasting... Well, when it hit the three-hour mark, I started getting these texts from Jessica Queller, who was running Supergirl at the time, and I'm trying to ignore the texts and be respectful of the memorial, but like I said, once you pass the three-hour mark, it's anybody's game at that point. So I finally just answered my phone in the middle of the memorial service! [Laughs.] And they said, "Would you want to be Lex Luthor in the Arrow-verse? Because DC Comics is finally allowing the Arrow-verse to use that character." And I pretended that I had to think about it, but...I didn't.
I loved the character as a kid, I'm a total comics aficionado. I'm collect original comic art. That stuff is incredibly meaningful to me. And it was, like, "It's gonna be three episodes, and then you're gonna die." So I was, like, "Oh, okay, good. It's a limited thing that I can get a handle on."So I did my three episodes, and I died - spectacularly, if I might add - but, of course, thankfully, the character became very beloved on the show, so they found a way that I came back to life, and I ended up doing three seasons on that show, which was lovely.
And it was also fun because when word got out that I was going to be playing Lex Luthor in the Arrow-verse, a lot of people online were not happy about that. [Laughs.] At all. And I understand it, because who wants Alan from Two and a Half Men to play Lex Luthor? I don't even want that! But I knew Lex Luthor so well, I knew the character so well, that there was this part of me that was so sure that I was, like, "Once they get where I'm going with this guy, they're gonna get behind him." And oh my gosh, the turnabout was one of the beautiful things to see: they got that I loved him as much as they did. And that ended up making it a great journey for me.
Okay, so now the time has come to discuss the Record That Changed Your Life, and I was very pleasantly surprised by your pick. So how did My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade change your life?
Well, I had been divorced for a couple of years, and my son... He and his mom had moved away, a great distance from me in Los Angeles. Still technically in Los Angeles, but it was a very long drive! So I would have these long drives with him to take him to school and back from school, and he used to ask me to play music. And it was usually, like, Radio Disney at the time, which...not in any way to insult the intrinsic music value of the Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus back in the day, but it did get very repetitive! [Laughs.]
And once I was listening to a local radio station instead, and they played a couple of songs from The Black Parade from My Chemical Romance, which is this...rock opera, for all intents and purposes, when you listen to it. And it was the first rock music that my 7-year-old son really liked and started asking me to play on the way to school. And it was this lovely bonding moment between the two of us. It was the first time we sort of bonded over art together. So I would play that on our way to his school every morning, and I came to really love the music of it. The entire album is bangers. [Laughs.] Especially "Teenagers," if you listen to it.
But it's just beautiful melodically, it's really interesting lyrically... There's sort of the vague outlines of a story in it, about a young guy who's dying way before his time, and there are a lot of songs with people saying, "I've got to say goodbye, because if we stay together any longer, it's just going to be pain." It's got this grand scale to it, but it's really deeply-felt emotion at the same time. At the time, they were kind of labeled as an emo band, but they were actually much more of a punk band before that, and they were inspired by Queen, apparently, to make this grand, grandiose story with characters and layers, and they have the fun album art where they had all these characters you could imagine in the scope of the thing. So for me, it was always this incredibly theatrical thing I got to imagine every time I listened to the album.
That it forged a bond between you and your son, though, that's amazing.
Yeah! And by the way, he still likes them. He still likes the album. He says, "Yeah, there's a lot of bangers on that album, Dad." [Laughs.] But he's obviously moved on - vastly! - to what he considers more sophisticated music. But what's been really fun is that, over the years, I actually got to meet Gerard Way, who is the lead singer and wrote most of the songs with the rest of the band, Ray Toro and Frank Iero and Mikey Way, and I actually got to hear what some of these things meant to him, which was really fun. But it's so funny, because in your mind, there's this gigantic, grandiose, kaleidoscopic, tragic opera in your head, and I was, like, "So when you wrote 'This Is How I Disappear,' what was that inspired by?" And he was, like, "Oh, I had a bad breakup." [Laughs.] I was, like, "Oh, okay, so literally the oldest inspiration in the book!" I had this whole psychedelic imagination of what actually inspired that.
But also, that album had all kinds of fun lore to it. Like, they recorded it in a haunted mansion, supposedly. And obviously the band went through a lot of interpersonal drama while they were recording that, so that's always fun for fans to talk about. But the thing sounds as fresh today as it did the day it was recorded. Rob Cavallo was the producer on it, and he also did American Idiot, and he had an amazing sense of the purity of the thing. I still listen to it with some regularity. I listened to it a couple of weeks ago on my dog walk! It made for a very operatic dog walk. [Laughs.]
It's funny, when I heard that was your pick, my mind went back to the conversations you and I had about the movie Dudes, and how you and Dan [Roebuck] were the most anti-punk in terms of your music tastes.
[Laughs.] Yes, we were musical theater nerds. And Gerard Way has actually gone on to become a very highly regarded writer of graphic novels and comic books. He wrote The Umbrella Academy. And obviously My Chemical Romance reunited fairly recently. But he started out as a musical theater nerd! Taylor Swift was a musical theater nerd! We all start as musical theater nerds. That's just the natural state of artists.
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