Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 20, 1993 TAG: 9303200405
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-17 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By JERRY BUCK AP TELEVISION WRITER
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Medium
AMONG THE BEST AT BEING A SCHNOOK
Jason Alexander is a walking, talking tropical depression who brings dark clouds, rain and gales of laughter to NBC's "Seinfeld."Alexander plays George Costanza, Jerry Seinfeld's angst-ridden best friend on the comedy series. Rarely have hard luck and knuckle-headed stubbornness produced so much fun. In its Thursday night spot behind "Cheers," where the show made its debut in May 1990, "Seinfeld" has shot up in the ratings.
Stand-up comedian Seinfeld plays himself in this series, a throwback to days when Jack Benny, George Burns, Ozzie Nelson and others built shows around fictional versions of their home life. Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Michael Richards also star as Seinfeld's pals.
The series was originally built around Seinfeld's stand-up comedy, and the characters were merely to illustrate the stories he told. But very quickly the characters took on a life of their own, and Seinfeld's stand-up appearances are there only to remind people he is a comedian.
"I thought in the beginning George would be just kind of Woody Allenish," says Alexander, who won a Tony as best actor in a musical for "Jerome Robbins' Broadway" in 1989.
"That was the handle I was used to get a grasp on the character. George was seen as Jerry's best friend, based on a couple of people. He was just a voice. I think George was less neurotic in the beginning. But as you go along you see paths you can take a character. I've looked at some of the early episodes and see that George was much sweeter. He's become more mercurial and neurotic. I myself don't know how he'll react. We look for the funniest possibilities."
George began changing when Louis-Dreyfus joined the cast as Elaine Benes after the pilot.
"Elaine became one of the guys," Alexander says. "She was more straightforward in her eccentricity. George then became the alter ego of Larry David, who created the show with Jerry. Larry poured himself into George and that's how the neuroses developed."
Alexander has spent much of his career playing schnooks. He was Richard Gere's sleazy lawyer in "Pretty Woman" and in a long-running Western Union commercial he's the hapless kid wiring home for money after he's ticketed by the Southern cop in the mirror sunglasses.
"America discovered me as a real jerk when I attempted to rape Julia Roberts in `Pretty Woman,"' he says. "Women across America decided I wasn't fit to live."
Currently, during time he can get away from "Seinfeld," Alexander's playing the next-door neighbor in a feature film version of "The Coneheads" from "Saturday Night Live." The movie, which stars Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin in their original roles as the space aliens, hopes to catch some of the magic that struck "Wayne's World."
In his Tony-winning role, Alexander sang and danced his way through numbers from such favorites by choreographer Jerome Robbins as "West Side Story," "Peter Pan," "On the Town," "The King and I" and "Fiddler on the Roof."
"I didn't leave the show for `Seinfeld,"' he says. "I couldn't do it any more. More than a year of my life had been devoted to that show, between rehearsals and performances. After I left it went on for another year, but I was shocked when it closed. I thought it should run forever."
Alexander is married to actress Daena Title and they have a 9-month-old son, Gabriel. The actor grew up in Livingston, N.J. and attended Boston University.
"As a little boy I knew I wanted to be an actor," he says. "I did a lot of community and children's theater. I started working professionally when I was 16. I got $400 for three days' work. I never finished college. I worked every summer doing commercials and bit parts in movies.
"The summer before my senior year I got a good part in a horror film called `The Burning.' When I finished it was too late to enroll in school. I moved to New York, got a job in a casting office, then I got a part in a Broadway show and I never went back to school."