Welcome to Always Great, a new Awards Insider column in which we speak with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this entry, Stephen Root reflects on his journey from Broadway to Hollywood—and from silly sitcoms to gritty HBO hits, including Barry and the final season of Succession.
HBO has plenty of star power, but on one particular Sunday night this April, the network was ruled by a single character actor. We all expected to see Stephen Root as part of the final-season debut of Barry, in which he stars as the titular antihero’s mentor turned antagonist, Fuches. But an hour before that dark comedy’s season premiere got going, Root reprised another role in another beloved series on its way out, Succession. As political donor Ron Petkus, he returned to eulogize Logan Roy (Brian Cox) in exceedingly flattering terms at the late patriarch’s wake, to the great horror of his children. They’re wildly different roles, and Root, as ever, shines in both. “To be able to do all that in one night was pretty great,” he says with a smile over Zoom. “I think that’s the best it’ll ever get—don’t you?”
From our vantage point, it’s been pretty great for a while. This may not even be the first time Root has taken over a night of TV in such a manner. (One will have to check the TV Guide archives.) On HBO alone, of late he’s appeared in True Blood, Boardwalk Empire, The Newsroom, All the Way, Veep, and Perry Mason; within that 15-year timespan, he’s also done Fargo, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Big Bang Theory, The Good Wife, Raising Hope, Fringe, Justified, Californication, and many, many more. That’s to say nothing of the independent movie credits he’s racked up, or his beloved voice work on King of the Hill and other animated series. Root has acquired the reputation of a guy who can get just about any kind of job done; he’s proven equally adept and comfortable in the silliest of sitcoms and the gravest of dramas.
Still, with small roles come specific types on either end of those spectrums. In Barry, for the first time, Root has gotten a chance to use everything he’s got in one package—a layered, funny-scary performance that’s netted him his first (very overdue) Emmy nomination and the sort of character arc too rarely afforded to actors of his profile. “I feel like the luckiest guy ever, at this late in my career, to be able to have something that special,” Root says. Call it the happy result of 35 years of hustle.
After attending college in Florida, Root came to New York in the mid-’80s with stage training, specifically Shakespeare, and an offer to do a whole bunch of plays on the road. He was known for playing the Bard’s clowns and jesters, and wound up touring for nine months with the National Shakespeare Company. After returning to New York, he nabbed back-to-back starring roles on Broadway, in So Long on Lonely Street and All My Sons; he later joined the national tour of Driving Miss Daisy opposite Julie Harris.
He moved to LA at the beginning of the ’90s; his mentality had shifted to the screen, to booking as many jobs as possible, given that he had a new child to take care of. In 1991 alone, he amassed eight screen credits, establishing a particular sitcom niche in series like Home Improvement and Davis Rules. “The mash-up of a sitcom, which is audience and camera—I felt comfortable in front of an audience, having done theater forever,” Root says. “I was doing so many auditions for sitcoms that I think all the casting directors around town saw me as a quirky guy. It’s a strength of mine to do quirky guys, but when you get put into that little slot for a year or two, then it becomes sedentary.”
That familiar, complex industry bargain was highlighted most by Root’s breakout turn in NewsRadio, the critical darling that ran from 1995–1999. Root’s chummy, conspiratorial, micromanaging billionaire boss Jimmy James dominates just about every scene he’s in—despite the killer ensemble, including Phil Hartman and Maura Tierney—and cemented him as a comedy pro and a brilliant blowhard. He now cites his favorite episode as “Super Karate Monkey Death Car,” in which James boldly reads from the very poorly translated Japanese rerelease of his memoir at an author event; Root sells every note of the book’s ingenious stupidity, and many critics now regard it as one of one of the great sitcom episodes ever. But the show never had much of a chance to break out. “The NBC programmer hated us for reasons we don’t know,” Root says. “We had seven [schedule] moves in all, so it really didn’t have a chance to become a staple like a regular Thursday night NBC show would’ve been able to do.” Keep in mind, the show aired on the same network as Friends and Seinfeld, in the same years both were on the air.