“I’m a big teddy bear.” ‘I’m Wood’: Showbiz star Richard Kind talks about making shows you can watch from space | stage

RIchard Kind has played everything from a child’s imaginary friend in Pixar’s fantasy Inside Out to a neighbor infected with an antibiotic-resistant rose in Only Murders in the Building. He was a physicist with a sebaceous cyst in the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, Joaquin Phoenix’s final tormentor in the nightmare film Beau Is Afraid, and Larry David’s insufferable cousin Andy in Curb Your Enthusiasm, where he bickers over the correct direction of a Lazy Susan’s travel and becomes an accomplice in the murder of a swan. “everywhere?” He’s trembling cutely, his mailbox mouth open. “I’m everywhere! No one works harder than me.”

We meet at the Garrick Theater in London, where the suave 69-year-old actor begins a seven-week stint in Mel Brooks’s bad-taste musical satirizing the Nazis, The Producers. Kind takes over temporarily from Andy Nyman as Broadway salesman Max Bialystock, who plans to swindle his supporters by staging a foul-smelling play called Springtime for Hitler and seize their investments when it closes prematurely.

Today, the actor gives an impeccable impression of a Goldilocks. Unhappy with the dimly lit room in which we begin our conversation, he decides we need to move. “If it’s really dirty, I’ll fall asleep, and then it’ll just be you doing the talking,” he says in his New Jersey whine. He leads us into a deserted hallway, where we sit on the stairs for a few minutes, then are drowned out by the noise of rehearsals. “Very loud,” he says, turning again. Finally, he settles in the alley outside the fire escape, where benches and potted plants make the dreary space a hospitable one.

Kind played Max on Broadway in 2004 and again at the 17,500-capacity Hollywood Bowl eight years later. “This role is an exercise,” he says. “When I first did it, I lost 30 pounds. I call it the Producer’s Diet. It’s better than those potions.” He reacquainted himself with the show’s stunning musical numbers like “King of Broadway,” in which the lyrics come thick, fast, and corny: “I always got the biggest songs/The biggest bathrooms at the Ritz/The showgirls had the biggest tits/I never had the pits anyhow.” Kind achieves the image of an exorcist: “Once you learn it all, the words flow out of your mouth like Linda Blair’s pea soup.”

His interpretation of Max is closer to the bulldozer energy of Zero Mostel, who created the role in the 1967 Oscar-winning film, than to the more elegant Nathan Lane, who was the first to play him on Broadway. “Nathan slips,” he says. “I’m a big bear. I’m a wood.”

A friend once told him that only two things on Earth can be seen from space: the Great Wall of China and every acting choice Kind ever made. “I’ve become a better actor in the last 20 years,” he says. “But this is a huge show, so my choices are huge. Max is fun to play because he has an insatiable appetite. The more he has, the more he wants.”

This is very uncool behavior. In cinema and television, the actor is content with small but distinctive roles. “I’m parsley on a plate of meat and potatoes. Really good parsley. Green and fresh as parsley can get.” Theater is different. “I’m at a point where I can say no to a theater role unless it’s a challenge.” Doesn’t he long to be the main course on screen too? “Sure. I have an ego. But look. People might say, ‘Oh, I love this guy.’ Everything he does is good.’ No one says: ‘I’ll spend £20 to go see Richard Kind in a film.’ If you accept that, you can be happy and satisfied.

He cut his teeth with Second City, a Chicago improv troupe. Later came television work with comedy giant Carol Burnett and roles in sitcoms including Spin City alongside Michael J. Fox. One of the failed comedy pilots co-starred George Clooney, who briefly became Kind’s roommate and remains a close friend. I’m not asking him about this — Kind is a natural band member but the light fades in his eyes whenever an interviewer mentions his famous best friend — although I wonder how it feels when a dear friend is publicly insulted by the President of the United States, as Clooney was.

“Awful,” he sighs. “I’m always protective of George. I don’t even like it when critics talk bad about him. I don’t want to take Trump seriously.” He launched a diatribe against the president, full of unrepeated insults and accusations. “Listen to how ugly I am talking,” he says, wincing at himself. Although this outburst at least suggests he has what it takes to handle the role he hopes to one day play: Roy Cohn, Trump’s sordid mentor, in “Angels in America.” Is there anything Kind can’t do? “I will make a terrible Blanche DuBois.”

• Richard Kind is in The Producers at the Garrick Theatre, London, from 23 March to 9 May. Andy Nyman returns as of May 11th