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, David Alan Grier reflects on his decades on stage and screen—and how after a long Hollywood career in comedy, he is finally getting a chance to showcase his dramatic bona fides. Read the previous entry here.
David Alan Grier never saw himself as just one thing. Coming of age as a performer, the actor admired the careers of legends like Jackie Gleason, stars known for one persona who could pull off brilliant surprises in another. “When [Gleason] did The Hustler, he was so deadly, man,” Grier says, almost in awe. “He was so bone-chilling and righteous that I always think about that—those kinds of choices. That’s what I’m about.”
Such fluidity, Grier has learned over the course of more than 40 years as a professional actor, requires patience. This is an actor who graduated from the Yale School of Drama, attending with the likes of Angela Bassett and Tony Shalhoub and rooming with the late Reg E. Cathey. He broke into movies with the celebrated stage adaptation A Soldier’s Story and Robert Altman’s Vietnam War drama Streamers, and has won a Tony Award out of four nominations for his extensive work on Broadway. Yet for the bulk of his time in Hollywood, Grier has operated as a kind of comic utility player, stealing scenes between sketch shows, blockbuster movies, and popular sitcoms—oftentimes with a handful of lines. “This business is very much about saying, Well, you can’t do that,” he says. Fortunately, Grier didn’t take the message.
That things have started changing is a credit to both Grier’s persistence and his talent. Taking on a rare dramatic screen role, the actor gave a quietly riveting, empathetic performance last fall in FX’s The Patient (streaming on Hulu) as the therapist to Steve Carell’s therapist, who’s been kidnapped by a serial killer (Domhnall Gleeson) seeking…some kind of treatment. In other words, Grier plays an imagined version of his character, appearing in fantasized sessions devised by his imperiled patient as a way of working through the terror, tedium, and trauma of his predicament. The part is anything but thin, though—Grier emerges as a nifty narrative conscience, guiding the limited series through to its affecting end. Immediately when he got the script, Grier was all in. “I really wanted to email my team after reading 10 pages,” he says with a laugh. “I had to wait a couple of hours so that they didn’t think I hadn’t read it.”
And then he was off, working on the sort of project he’d long been hoping for. “I didn’t know what people were going to say, I didn’t know how they would take it, I didn’t know how they would view it,” he says. “I just took it and ran.”
Everything Grier learned at Yale continues to guide him today. “We were trained to have careers,” he says. He wasn’t taught anything specific about screen acting, or movies and TV at all for that matter. He graduated in 1981. That same year, he made his Broadway debut in the musical The First, playing baseball icon Jackie Robinson, and eventually received a Tony nod. In 1982, he joined the company of A Soldier’s Play, as well as the Oscar-nominated film adaptation that soon followed. In 1983, he starred in Altman’s Streamers, which premiered in Venice; Grier won the festival’s best-actor award jointly with his ensemble. “I got off a really good start, but then I always felt pressure—What am I going to do next?” he says. “And no one thought I was funny. I hadn’t really done comedy, and I got the same thing at that point—they were like, ‘These casting directors have not seen you [that way],’ so I had to establish myself there.”
He felt the grind of proving himself, particularly in that new arena, as the buzzy projects started drying up. “I was very unhappy. I mean, I was doing a guest part on a TV show, struggling, or doing a play or two,” Grier says. He came out to Los Angeles, feeling “done” with New York, and filmed the pilot for a sketch comedy called In Living Color. Months went by with no news. Grier felt prepared to quit the business altogether. “I got these books on law school, and very early on, I was like, I can’t do this, this is not who I am, and this is not what I’m going to do,” he says. “And then In Living Color broke out. From then on, it was game on.”
The irreverent and groundbreaking ’90s series, created by Keenen Ivory Wayans, reintroduced Grier as he shined alongside the likes of Jim Carrey and Jamie Foxx, his appearances ranging from goofy to cutting to wildly unpredictable. He felt comfortable, unusually so given the new terrain, because here he found a company, not unlike what he’d experienced every day at Yale or in the stage work where he honed his craft. “We had a fucking ball,” Grier says of his five seasons on the show. He started receiving offers to do stand-up at dozens of colleges and universities. “I never really entertained the thought of doing stand-up and making that a part of my professional career,” he says. “I didn’t even have an act!” He developed one, in any case, and in all that gained financial freedom, the ability to separate what he needed to do with what he wanted to do.
Grier’s comedy profile soared. You could look to 1995 as the apex of that particular rise, after In Living Color had just wrapped; he took on a standout recurring character on Martin, as the preacher who could do plenty of wrong, and buddied up with Robin Williams for Jumanji. On that megahit film, Grier bonded tightly with Bonnie Hunt, grabbing dinner together every night during the rainy six-month Vancouver shoot and, later, costarring in the latter’s sitcom vehicle, Life with Bonnie. Jumanji also led to a hosting gig on Saturday Night Live that went over so well, Grier was offered a permanent cast spot by Lorne Michaels. (He turned it down: “You can’t host SNL, and then a month later be at the back of the line.”) Clips of his brilliant Maya Angelou impersonation circulate pretty regularly on social media to this day. “When you see others’ reaction to you, it reminds you, Okay, I’m doing stuff, I’m building a career,” he says. “Those guys were so fucking excited to have me on the show.” (As was Will Ferrell’s dad, who apparently said to Grier in a grocery store some time after the episode aired, “I just want to thank you for being so nice to my son.”)
But even at this height, Grier stayed close to the theater, returning to New York often for new productions. “It gave me a sense of control over my professional artistic life,” he says. “Like, I don’t have to just sit in my house in the Hills, waiting for that wacky, nutty new comedy that they’re sending me. It’s something that I was trained to do and that I love doing.” Still, during annual check-ins with his team, Grier found himself pushing back against his new industry standard. “I always urged them, ‘Put me up for everything. Don’t just put me up for these sitcoms.’”
Grier did a lot of sitcoms anyway: guest roles on Dream On, Cosby, My Wife and Kids, Happy Endings; his own short-lived titular vehicle, DAG; and voice contributions on everything from The Proud Family to The Cleveland Show. He toured the world with his comedy, hosting events and headlining others. The work was lucrative, often enjoyable. “But I remember doing this, like, corporate date in Florida, and I was just really beating myself up,” Grier says. “‘You’re not doing enough. Your career is stalled.’” The feeling was not exactly unfamiliar. Grier says that, generally, he’s struggled with being hard on himself, feeling like he’s “not doing anything.”
Never was that less true than the last decade. In the 2010s, Grier reignited his connection to Broadway, nabbing two additional Tony nominations for the play Race and the musical Porgy and Bess. He received wide critical acclaim for his tour de force as the Cowardly Lion in The Wiz Live!, broadcast on NBC, and started appearing in pedigreed indies more regularly, like the Tyler Perry–backed Peeples and the Oscar-nominated The Big Sick. His screen time in some of these titles is small; watch him, though, and you see him alive in every moment, elevating any material given. “When I go into a new role, I try and throw everything else away. I don’t want to come in with, Well, I have this bag of tricks, David-isms or whatever, and pull them out,” he says. “I try to strip myself there as an actor and build whatever the script and project call for.”
Look at The Carmichael Show as prime evidence—a sneaky sitcom created by and starring Jerrod Carmichael that could often play like live theater, situating its fictional family in a room for 20-odd minutes and forcing them to navigate thorny social issues and even stickier family dynamics. As the ostensibly blundering patriarch, Grier’s performance—as well as that of his on-screen wife, Loretta Devine—is magnificently complex, veering between slapstick and heartbreak in the same line reading. “That was the best comedy role I had ever gotten to that point because I was able to show the whole emotional life of the character, with an ease,” Grier says. “It was in the writing. It literally went from laughter to tears in the same scene.”
While it may have been another sitcom on its face, Carmichael changed things for Grier. It also marked the first time he played a father on screen. “People saw me in a more mature light,” Grier says. “I told my agents, ‘Give me every old Black man role out there. I’m ready. Let’s go!’” Out of that, perhaps, he’s finally approaching his goal of doing it all. He’s back in the drama game, drawing from his childhood for The Patient—his father was a psychiatrist, and he modeled his character’s cool, collected demeanor on the way his dad would try to calm him down as a kid—and is set to play Shug Avery’s kindhearted father in the upcoming The Color Purple musical film.
A few years back, Grier returned to A Soldier’s Play for its first-ever Broadway production, this time in a different, more mature part. His searing portrayal of Sergeant Waters won him his first Tony; upon accepting, he got emotional, noting how long he’d been acting and what it felt like to finally reach that stage. “It felt so good to win it when I did, because it is more resonant—it means more,” he says now. “I’m so thankful I didn’t win it when I was 25. This is when I was supposed to win it.” With a smile on his face, he then explains why: “I really thought in the beginning, Oh, okay, well by the time I get to 66, I’ll be retired. No one’s going to want to work with me. I’ll be too old. That’s what I thought! I’m 66 now, so this is all candy, man. This is all just candy.”
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