Full interview transcribed below! It is very long! John talks about playing Dan Fielding and what he thinks Dan's appeal is, growing up in New Orleans and the start of his career, his addictions and sobriety, and a lot about his then-burgeoning literary collection <3
DAN FIELDING MAY BE THE SLEAZIEST MAN ON TV, BUT OFFSCREEN, IT'S A DIFFERENT CASE ENTIRELY.
Out of character in the real world, John Larroquette has the appeal of an enormous teddy bear— his height (6'4"), his easy, comfortable posture, and his very human, lived-in looking face make him seem friendly, even adorable. Even the modish, baggy clothes he wears, his sweater and pleated trousers, add to this effect. This could not be more diametrically opposed to the effect his character on the hit TV show Night Court, prosecuting attorney Dan Fielding, has on all those around him. Dan Fielding is the archetypal man you love to hate, a formidably obnoxious and arrogant sleaze, a man who is incapable of treating women as anything other than sex objects in Frederick's of Hollywood lingerie.
All of this points to Larroquette's immense talent, for which he has been awarded Emmys for best supporting actor two years in a row. Fielding, in his pressed-conservative, three-piece suit, with his wheedling courtroom whine and even more wheedling, needy and less-than-slick approach to anything wearing a skirt, is a great comic creation, and could not resemble the actor who portrays him less. Larroquette, seated and relaxed at a Malibu restaurant, is serious and thoughtful, even quiet, and very, very smart in both a street sense and an intellectual sense. He has all the charm Fielding aspires to have, and he doesn't abuse it.
When asked to talk about Fielding, Larroquette explores his many ideas about his character thoughtfully but humorously. "We're very different psychologically, and spiritually, we're vastly different. The audience expects my character to get sleazy sex all the time, but not anything meaningful. He goes to bed with lots of women, but never more than once. They don't want to have anything to do with him after that."
He goes on: "One of the things I dislike about television is, if you do a character well, the world begins treating you as if you were that character. When you're playing somebody like Fielding, people have a tendency to think you're an asshole. And, although I am, I'm not the same kind of asshole as Fielding. I'm a different kind of asshole.
"But, it's interesting—women are very attracted to Fielding. The kind of mail I get from women—I don't want to get into that... You know, I think one of the things that women find appealing about Fielding is that he will say things that most of us think, but are too socially well-trained to utter. That's one thing we do have in common, he and I. Most of my life I've been rather outspoken about what I might feel about a certain person—it's a bit of a defense mechanism. I've always been of the mind that if I can walk into a room and pinpoint the faults of each individual in the room, then they're going to be less inclined to scrutinize me if I can put them on the defensive about their own frailties. Fielding does that too. To an almost criminal extent. With him, it's a huge defense mechanism.
"You can't get too psychological about a sitcom character—the basic reason he exists is to make people laugh. The jokes are what count. But that has something to do with his appeal—he's very outspoken. And he's very sensual—he loves sex. Now, he treats most women like bimbos—he definitely treats women like sex objects. There may be some slight appeal in that—I don't know. But women can also wrap him around their fingers very easily. He is, I think, ultimately pussy-whipped. He can serve as a lover and then be shuffled off, much as men have treated women—maybe that's the appeal. He can be used totally for his sexuality, then it's 'go catch a cab, honey.'"
John Larroquette, at 39, has all the accoutrements of Hollywood success—the black super-fast Porsche, the ranch in Malibu, the hit series, the two Emmys on the mantel. At the same time, he seems remarkably well-grounded. He has been married for 12 years to Elizabeth, and their two children, a 15-year-old daughter and a nine-year-old son, were scheduled to be joined by another male sibling in March. He has none of the slick and narcissistic mannerisms you might associate with the kind of stardom he has achieved in his four years on Night Court. Instead, he is remarkably lowkey, more like a friend with whom you can have a real talk, or an attractive real person you'd meet at a party. But, to get to this very grounded, happy point in his life, Larroquette has done some deep and heavy searching, and has dealt with some enormous private demons.
Soon after he was born in Louisiana, his parents' marriage dissolved, and Larroquette was raised by his grandparents in New Orleans' notorious French Quarter. "Growing up there had something to do with my not taking life very seriously at times," he says. "It also had something to do with my not attributing much intelligence to being an adult. I saw grown men doing very stupid things in the name of fun there."
Larroquette enjoyed his early life in the French Quarter (which he describes as "like Disneyland on acid"), where he first developed his love of watching people, and where he always felt safe and secure. "I was not a wild kid," he says. "I went to Catholic schools. I was never a delinquent, or in trouble with the police in any way. I was an only child, so I spent a lot of time alone, with my imagination. I lived with my grandmother and grandfather. My grandfather was a longshoreman, so I spent a lot of time on the river with him. They had a summer home in Mississippi, so I spent my summers there. It was a very nice childhood." But as an adolescent, Larroquette's ideas about life and about the world began to change, because of the fertility of his own imagination and the cultural revolution that was going on around him—the culture of youth, of growing your hair long, taking drugs, looking for greater meaning in the universe, of rock 'n' roll and the Beatles.
"I wanted to be either an actor or a priest," he says of himself as an adolescent, aware of the rather heretical content of that statement. "They're basically very much the same. They consist in selling a fantasy. You get to wear a costume. People ask me if I'm still a practicing Catholic and I say no, I'm not. I don't practice anymore because I've perfected it. Really, it just doesn't appeal to me anymore—Catholicism. I dislike dogmatic people."
As a teenager, Larroquette wrote short stories and radio plays and began to perform these plays on local radio stations. With his natural-for-radio voice, he also became a disc jockey and began to fulfill his need for travel and discovery. He did not go to college. Instead, right out of high school, he hit the road, in requisite Jack Kerouac fashion, to find out about himself and others. He puts his quest in a slightly different fashion: "If I could have stayed 18, that means it would always be 1965," he begins, "and '65 was a great year. The only thing that could have been better is if I could have been 18 and living in London in 1965. I never really had any true Peter Pan complex, I guess. I seem to have matured rather late in life, emotionally. Most boys mature slowly. I don't know if I used the '60s as an excuse, or whether the '60s had anything to do with my not wanting any kind of roots. I traveled a lot in the '60s, doing what most guys I knew in the '60s were trying to do—get high and laid. My two main ambitions. Not really having any direction, any real direction —except experience."
Larroquette worked as a disc jockey when he could, but he also worked as a bartender and at various other odd jobs during his gypsy period. He worked hardest at being a free spirit. "I was not the most reliable fellow," he says. "I'd say, 'See you at noon,' and then not show up until Tuesday. I'd leave cities without telling people, and sort of upset their dinner plans. Now I try to keep promises, show up where and when I said I would. Especially now that I have children—I try to set an example for them."
In the early '70s, Larroquette made a firm commitment to acting, and moved to Los Angeles where, after ten months of acting lessons, he got his first part in a production of Arthur Miller's The Crucible. He soon got roles in the TV series Doctor's Hospital, then on Baa Baa Black Sheep, where he was a regular, appearing with star Robert Conrad. Later he appeared in such films as Stripes, Choose Me, Summer Rental, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Altered States, Cat People and Twilight Zone: The Movie. He also continued to perform in theater in Los Angeles, and won a Drama League Award for his performance in Samuel Beckett's Endgame, which began for Larroquette, an intellectual love affair with Beckett's work, which he now collects. He also met his wife during his early days in Hollywood.
During this time, as well, he became a self-destructive drinker and drug-taker. "I always drank," he has said, "but at some point in those years it became my goal in life to drink. It took precedence over everything else. Without drinking, I thought I couldn't act, that I wasn't funny unless I was loaded. Actually I became a raging bore... There were nights when I forgot how many Quaaludes I took, so I took a few more just to make sure I was stoned, and I'd drink a little more bourbon just to wash them down." His behavior caused a brief separation from his wife and, while he gave almost all of his income to her to support his family, he frequently found himself selling his blood plasma to buy booze. Larroquette seemed to be a man on a non-stop downward spiral, on the road to washed-up-ness, until, in 1981, he had a revelation about his own self-destructive behavior which made it possible for him to go one whole day without taking a drink. Then another whole day, and another. Since 1981, Larroquette has not taken a drink, nor abused any drug. The same kind of amazing self-discipline emerged when he quit smoking on the day of Night Court regular Selma Diamond's funeral. Diamond died of lung cancer; Larroquette has not smoked since.
In 1983, Larroquette got the role of Dan Fielding on Night Court. The unverifiable myth associated with his test for the series is that he tried out for what became Harry Anderson's role, the judge. But the creator of the series, Reinhold Weege, supposedly saw the special something in Larroquette's test he needed for his smug, supercilious, male-chauvinist prosecutor, and Larroquette was hired. Since taking the role of Fielding, Larroquette has certainly become the comic villain of the '80s, a man with no conscience, out only for himself. "Dan Fielding is actually patterned after a real person," Larroquette says. "His basic Virgo attitude is patterned after a guy I used to live with. I'm in the business of imitating you guys. I can't just use me—I have to find other people to use. Fielding is very conscious of his physique, and his suit is never quite right"—here he goes into his Fielding routine, transforming himself, at the table, into the puffed-up, rigid-spined, chin-jutting prosecutor straightening his imaginary suit to perfection. "This guy I lived with used to check himself out constantly, even before he'd go to sleep, in his pajamas."
When asked if this roommate wasn't the most irritating person on the face of the earth to live with, Larroquette gets a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. "Не was," he says, "very much so. It was for a very short time. What complicated it was, I'm not sure if this is absolutely true, but it seemed like he worked for the CIA. So there were kind of strange guys hanging around a lot. I was a pretty bizarre fellow at the time anyway, working in underground radio and trying to be an anarchist." And living with a CIA agent? "Seemed appropriate," Larroquette says.
Well past his days of living with CIA types, Larroquette seems the epitome of the good family man. "I don't see why success should be a reason for a marriage not continuing," he says, firmly believing that the change in his fortunes never really altered him personally. "These days I live a rather sedate life. Elizabeth and I have been married for about 12 years. I guess we just sort of made an agreement that, no matter what, neither of us is leaving. It's a question of priorities, I suppose. Outside of staying sober, my family is my first priority. I find them essential to my sanity. We spend a lot of time together. My son is at the age where his father is a living god—it's a lot of responsibility."
Has success changed him? He answers: "I don't think people are altered by success. They might allow an aspect of their personalities to come out that they wouldn't before, because they didn't think they could get away with it. I think that someone who is a complete raging asshole because of his wealth was probably a complete raging asshole before, but had to keep his mouth shut because he had no power to enforce his will."
So what kind of an asshole, exactly, is John Larroquette? The question seems to please him—he flexes his hands, straightens up in his seat. "I'm the kind of asshole who, when somebody really pisses me off on the freeway, I will follow them to their exit. Occasionally my ego gets out and it's really silly when it does. It makes a fool of itself. It kind of puffs up its chest and prances around and says, 'Don't you know who I am?' And he's a slippery son of a bitch to get back in once he's out. So what I try to do most of the time is never allow a situation where my guard is down enough to where he'll get out. The best way to do that is to expect nothing. To not want anything from anybody."
But Larroquette does still want more from his life—for example, he wants to write a novel. Along these same lines, he also wants to improve his already terrific collection of rare and first edition books. Always on guard about appearing pretentious, Larroquette plays down his love of literature and the extent of his collection, but his enthusiasm rises when he speaks of it at the same time that his irony struggles for control. "I have the beginnings of a nice library," he says of his extensive collection. "It's rather small in scope. About a dozen authors, I guess. Mostly modern books. All post-World War II. I collect the three Bs: Beckett Bukowski, and Burroughs. Henry Miller. Thomas Pynchon. Anthony Burgess—I've got a couple of first editions of A Clockwork Orange." He then describes an elaborate fantasy involving the reclusive, if not invisible, author Pynchon, whom no one has seen for years—"I'll be walking down the street, and I'll see this man crossing the street. It looks inevitable that a truck is going to hit him, and I will save this man's life. It will be Pynchon, and he'll give me all the signed copies of his books that I want." At this, Larroquette smiles a smile that is almost Fielding-esque in its smugness.
Still, it is unusual for a successful Hollywood actor to be collecting rare books as a hobby. Larroquette explains, "After I stopped drinking, I needed some obsession. I realized there were so many writers I had read over the years that were available only in older copies. It was difficult to find them in paperback. Right at the end of my drinking, I discovered Charles Bukowski." Bukowski is a hard-living poet and novelist famous for writing about a life of drunken debauchery in a very rough and very beautiful style. "He reached a fist into my heart and grabbed onto it," Larroquette says of Bukowski. "I identified with him so heavily. So I started reading him, buying the paperbacks. Then when I started making a little money, I bought some trade edition firsts. Then Night Court came along, and I found that, without drinking and doing a half-ounce of cocaine a night, I had a great deal of money hanging around. So I started buying some expensive titles, and became rather obsessive about it. I spend most of my hours scanning catalogues, talking to book dealers around the world—and loving it. I have some very rare titles, of Bukowski in particular."
Larroquette then quotes one of his favorite lines from Bukowski, and the pleasure it gives him lights up his whole teddy bear's face—"'Let's fuck. Shit, let's have a beer,'" he recites, and laughs. "That's a poem." He thinks for a moment, and describes a literary theme that moves him—"the ability to continue on," he says, "that's what I love about Beckett. 'I can't go on. I'll go on.'"
He looks serious, pensive for a time, until a young woman walking by the table recognizes him as Dan Fielding, and she can hardly contain her pleasure. She smiles, and calls out, "You're great!" And Larroquette responds by turning on her a 100-watt Dan Fielding smile, crinkling up his little eyes until they're mere slits. The irony, the thoughtfulness vanish in this moment, and he is transformed into a simulacrum of his character, acting the role of an actor appreciating a fan's appreciation. Quite a performance, thrilling the woman immensely. This is the stuff that Emmys and fascinating, many-layered human personalities are made of.
