Greg Kinnear: Golden Boy?

"Honey," I say, wiping that smile right off his face, "that's just the beginning. What's your feeling about asking your guests about their personal lives?"

"I think it's pretty much their own business," he says, with a shrug.

"I agree, but my editor has a different feeling on the subject."

"What does your editor say?" he asks, rolling his eyes again, looking like he's regretting this interview.

"My editor says, 'Find out if he lives alone, if he dates, what he does when he's not working.'"

"Well, tell your editor that you asked, and that I just try and keep my private life private."

"You don't know my editor..."

Kinnear bites the bullet. "OK, I've got a girlfriend. She's not in the business. She just went back to school, and we've been together for a while and we spend a lot of time out of town on the weekends. Will that appease him?"

"Close enough," I tell Kinnear. "So, let's see, you came out to L.A., got a gig as a host on the Movietime cable channel, which you lost when the channel was sold." Kinnear nods, but offers nothing more. "Then you did 'The HBO International Report,' of which I know next to nothing."

Kinnear nods again. The image that comes to mind is Dr. Sidney Zelton, who was my dentist when I was growing up. He seemed to be forever in a cloud, which later turned out to be true (he was snorting nitrous oxide while his patients waited), and he'd continually smile a slightly crooked grin and nod.

"You acted in a TV movie, Murder in Mississippi, and on a series called 'Life Goes On.' Anything you'd like to add?" I ask.

'They were small parts," he says finally. "Fun to do, but I can't say I learned a lot."

"You also had a TV show on Fox called "Best of the Worst.' What in the world was that?"

"We'd show the worst jobs, the worst movies, the worst of everything. The idea was good, but I'm not sure it translated well."

"Then on to 'Talk Soup,'" I say. "Either you're the luckiest guy who walks the earth, or you're very ambitious..."

"No," he says, "I mean, sure. I want to do good things and would like to perform in front of bigger audiences. But I just have never been good at outlining where it is I'm going. For me to look five years down the line... I have no idea where I'll be. I truly believe that I'd have missed some great opportunities along the way if I had plotted it all out. I don't really have a well-thought-out plan, but I do know that I enjoy doing 'Later' a great deal. This is the most challenging thing I've ever done in my life, bar none. A talk show is really tough."

"Who's the best interview you've ever had on the show?'' I ask.

Kinnear looks uncomfortable. "I'd rather not say, because then it makes everyone else feel less than great."

"OK. then, who was the worst?"

"'You know," says Kinnear, "when an interview doesn't go well, I always blame myself. It's because I didn't work hard enough, or I wasn't funny enough, or I wasn't well-enough prepared."

"I used to feel the same way," I tell him, 'until I interviewed Harrison Ford."

"Harrison's agreed to be on the show," Kinnear says with a smile. "At least, I think he did."

"Call me afterwards," I say. "We can commiserate. So, how did it feel to get a role originally intended for Tom Cruise in Sabrina?"

"I'm pretty sure my getting cast in Sabrina was some sort of paperwork misshoveling over at Paramount. I know that originally Sydney Pollack was saying. 'Who the hell is Greg Kinnear?' but some women said he should check me out, and he did. When they called me about meeting Sydney Pollack for Sabrina, I assumed it was a crank call. But he was great at putting me at ease. When he found out that I'm from Indiana, and he's also from Indiana, I guess I had it sewed up at that point. It's just the craziest piece of luck."

"What was it like working with Ford, who's the most successful star in the business?"

"It seems to me that the bigger they are, the more powerful they are," Kinnear says, "you get a sense that they can be any way they want. Sometimes that can be very dark and negative--I mean, you hear those stories and you read about them. But Harrison is the exact opposite. This is a guy who can be any way he wants, and what's remarkable is that he's unbelievably gracious, nice and down-to-earth. He didn't have to go out of his way to make this an easy experience for me, but he did, from the very first day. I was standing around and it seemed to me that everybody knew everybody else, except for me. I don't come from this world, you know, so I was the guy standing over in the corner eating a bran muffin. I fell very awkward. All of a sudden, up walked Harrison and he said. "So you're my brother, huh? God-damn good-looking, isn't he?' And everyone started laughing. I will be eternally grateful to him for that,"

"You sound like you'd been pretty intimidated about the prospect of working with him."

"What was the intimidation factor of working with Harrison Ford? We're looking at about 101 on a scale of 100."

"So you felt like an outsider the whole time?"

"Well, I never felt like an insider, definitely not. That might just be a product of my own being, though. I'm not sure I feel like an insider to the late night world either, and I've been doing this for a year and a half. I have always felt a little bit leery of show business in general."

"Did you worry about remaking what some people consider a classic?"

"I had never seen Sabrina, and I sort of half-assed watched it before I went in to meet Sydney, so I had nothing invested in it. But I'll tell you something: every night when we do 'Later,' I have 250 random Americans from across this great nation of ours silting there ..."

''People who couldn't gel into Jay Leno?"

"Exactly. I do a quick warm-up before the show and answer some questions, and invariably there's a person who goes, 'Hey, how's that movie going?' I explain to them that I'm in the remake of Sabrina, and say, 'How many of you have actually seen the film?1 And what I hear is the kind of eerie silence usually reserved for executions. Not one of them has ever seen it. So to me, that makes it a good film to rework. But I'm listening to the advice of my friends, who tell me. 'Don't quit your night job.'"

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Marsha Frankel interviewed Steve Guttenberg for the November Movieline.

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