September 04, 2006 |
Numbers Star Says, "Here, Kitty!"
by Matt Webb Mitovich
As Charlie on CBS' Numbers, David Krumholtz looks for mathematical solutions to puzzling crimes. In the latest film from Edward Burns (now playing in New York City), he's Looking for Kitty as Abe Fiannico, a sad sack whose honey has run out on him and off to the Big Apple. TVGuide.com asked Krumholtz about his latest indie excursion, and did some looking of our own — for Numbers scoop.
TVGuide.com: First off, I want to say job well done, in that you're almost unrecognizable in Looking for Kitty.David Krumholtz: Facial hair is fun to play with. I've always wanted to play an Italian guy, so I really jumped at the chance, and I kind of gave myself the ol' Don Mattingly '80s baseball haircut. I cut my sideburns off and cut the back of my hair real high. It was cool to sink my teeth into a real character. I went so far as to use mascara on my mustache. My own mustache is very blond. I don’t know what that means, maybe that I'm still going through puberty at this late age!
TVGuide.com: How important was developing a "look" for Abe?Krumholtz: I think it was everything because you want to believe that Ed [Burns, as a private eye hired by Abe] and I are closer in age than we actually are in real life, that we're contemporaries, but from two very opposite ends of the universe. If there's some assumption that I'm a lot younger than he is, I don’t think the story would work, it would take on a different meaning. I just kind of had a sense of who this guy was and what he looked like as soon as I read the script.
TVGuide.com: Being this sad sack, he can't exactly be handsome....Krumholtz: Right, he's a sight gag to some extent. The whole point is, he's got the will to [find Kitty], and he's probably never had as strong a will to do anything like this before in his life. He stepped outside of who he was for a moment, to get this girl. But at the same time, there's got to be this constant reminder that he's pathetic. It's a really cool movie. I'm proud that it's finally come out.
TVGuide.com: Did I sense a bit of Robert De Niro's King of Comedy in your performance? Krumholtz: A little Rupert Pupkin? No, not really. I didn’t think of it that way, but you're right, I can see that parallel. They both believe their own crap, don’t they? [Laughs] For the most part, Abe's intentions are much more genuine and sweet. Eddie's a great writer, and the two characters I have played for him have been really well-written, in-depth characters. I think they are two of his best, so I just drew from what was on the page, like I did when we made Sidewalks of New York. Working with Ed is really easy, not just because the writing is in my voice but because he allows me to experiment. There's a trust there.
TVGuide.com: Kitty also gives Ed something interesting to do, which is not always the case in his films.Krumholtz: Right, he's doing something very different. Talk about hair, he's got this comb-over going! [Chuckles] I think he wanted to pull a Charlize Theron, to debunk the whole "handsome" image and play a guy who was more down on his luck. It's a more emotional character than he's ever played. He's brilliant in the film.
TVGuide.com: Let's talk about Numbers. How would you compare last season to Season 1?Krumholtz: All [first seasons] are experiments, and mostly it's an experiment behind the scenes. Not only are you experimenting with story lines, but there's a group of people thrown together under a lot of pressure. Sometimes certain people don’t gel, and the show suffers for it. Or the opposite; we discover friendships, and before you know it, they become alliances that only make the show greater. So in the first season, there was a lot of back-and-forth with that. I love the first season, I'll always have a place for it in my heart, but I think our second season got closer to what the ultimate goal is with the show, which is to be the first procedural to really tackle problem-solving and emotional story lines. In the first season, the weight of the crimes sort of outweighed whatever character story lines we were trying to do, so the show was uneven. Toward the end of last season, we got to a place where we established that we could do both. I get as many people saying they love the way the math is involved in the crimes as [who say that they] love the three of us — Judd [Hirsch], Rob [Morrow] and me — together as a family.
TVGuide.com: And for Season 3...?Krumholtz: In this season [premiering Sept. 22], you'll probably see more of that, hopefully to the point where people are not just tuning in for the crime, but to see what happens next with the characters.
TVGuide.com: I see that Lou Diamond Phillips' sniper expert is back for the premiere?Krumholtz: That’s right, for the first two episodes, actually. He plays a pretty slick character, so he must have fun doing it. We have fun working together, he's a great guy.
TVGuide.com: When I spoke to him, he said he likes the interplay between his character and Charlie, how they address problems from different points of view.Krumholtz: That’s what's cool about our show. People who haven’t watched it scoff at it and say we never point out how unorthodox it is for a mathematician to work at the FBI — and to some extent we can't, because we [have Charlie] do it every week — but Charlie is consistently under scrutiny. That’s a theme we've iterated time and time again. [People also say that] "Charlie knows everything and never makes a mistake," but really, a lot of our show is about Charlie making mistakes — and then fixing them, which is a part of the mathematical process of trial and error. We're not trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes.
TVGuide.com: How will Numbers work around Peter MacNicol's upcoming stint on 24?Krumholtz: We're actually going to handle it in an incredibly unique way, a way I don't think anybody expects. It will be a terrific surprise for our fans. He is going away, but [Laughs] he will stay in contact somehow.
TVGuide.com: He's going deep undercover as a large black woman, isn’t he?Krumholtz: That’s right. That's Peter's dream role, incidentally!
TVGuide.com: And the buzz is that Diane Farr is pregnant?Krumholtz: Uh, I have no comment. [Chuckles] Sorry!
TVGuide.com: What other films do you have in the can?Krumholtz: A month or two after Looking for Kitty premieres, I have another lead role, in a movie called My Suicidal Sweetheart. That's another reunion for me, this time with Natasha Lyonne, who I did Slums of Beverly Hills with. She and I play two suicidal kids who meet each other in an insane asylum, and fall in love and become each other's reasons for living. It's one of my favorite things that I've ever done.
TVGuide.com: When did you shoot that? I know she just went through this "rough patch"....Krumholtz: Yeah, it was before that. Three and a half years ago, actually. And I also did some work on Bobby, which was pretty cool. And I hope I'm still in [Jack Black's Tenacious D in "The Pick of Destiny"]. I'm not exactly sure. I had a really small little thing, but it's a great script. And this summer I did another independent, opposite Eva Mendes, called Live, which is a fake documentary about a network executive [Mendes] who is desperate to pitch a game show based on Russian roulette.
TVGuide.com: I think you just gave Fox an idea.Krumholtz: There you go.
TVGuide.com: Do you feel that's where reality TV is ultimately heading? Krumholtz: [Laughs] I hope not. I'm really encouraged by how TV writers have reacted to the wave of reality TV. It's really a lot better, and they're thinking outside the box, which is something they needed to do. Before reality television, in the early '90s, let's say, TV really wasn't very good. The '80s was a golden era, '90s TV was kind of a failure, and now I think there's a shift. Reality TV has brought on much better, more irreverent story lines.
Send your comments on this Q&A to online_insider@tvguide.com.
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