All I really cared about while talking to Larry David was not having a Larry David moment. For those unfamiliar with the term, it originated with the American comic's hit HBO television series, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and refers to some inappropriate verbal gaffe made by Larry David, the fictional version of himself whom David plays on the show.
But just how fictional? Curb Your Enthusiasm's Larry David is something of a misanthrope, short-tempered, socially inept and easily offended. And if the real Larry David was anything like that, I didn't want to give him a chance to snap back at me.
It turns out that Larry David the person is a little nicer than Larry David the character. But just a little. At first he could barely curb his own enthusiasm at talking to someone overseas in Israel.
"What time is it there?" he asked. When told we were 10 hours ahead of Los Angeles, where he makes his home, David gave a familiar laugh and said, "Aren't you jealous that I have the whole day ahead of me?"
After explaining to him that he should be the jealous one because I already knew the results of the day he was only beginning, we got around to talking about the business at hand, David's starring role in Woody Allen's new film, Whatever Works, which opened nationally on Thursday.
In the urban romantic comedy, the 62-year-old David takes on the "Woody Allen" role with his own skewed world view, which takes the bad traits of Curb Your Enthusiasm's Larry David and magnifies them. David plays the curmudgeon Boris Yellnikoff, a failed physicist who pretty much believes that he's the smartest man in the world, living amid tadpoles - his most endearing term to describe the people with whom he comes into contact in New York.
When a Southern teen runaway played expertly by Evan Rachel Wood enters his life and his cramped, low-rent apartment, it triggers a series of comic turns, and an unlikely romance develops. The introduction of Wood's Christian fundamentalist parents (Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley, Jr., in broad roles) raises the laugh level, but it's David's Yellnikoff - a world-class grouch who has survived a failed career, marriage and suicide attempt - who controls the film and ultimately makes the viewer care about what happens to him.
"I think Woody felt that I would be able to manage to play an unlikable character and still come out likable," said David, who, before starring in Enthusiasm, was best known for creating and writing the huge comedy series Seinfeld, along with Jerry Seinfeld. While he was flattered that Allen had contacted him about playing Yellnikoff, David had second thoughts due to the demands of the role and the fact that he was gearing up for Enthusiasm's seventh season, which began airing on HBO on September 20.
"I was contacted first by Woody's agent, who told me that Woody wanted to know my availability. Yeah, I'm available for Woody Allen. But I thought it was going to be two or three days, doing a short thing for him," recalled David.
"Then I got the script in the mail and opened the first page, and there's my part. Then I turned to page 50 and I'm still there. But you don't say no to Woody. I actually tried to, though - I called him and said I'm not sure I could do this. I wanted him to know that he could be making a big mistake with me."
It turned out not to be a mistake at all, as David carries the film and quickly makes you forget that he's playing an Allen surrogate, speaking lines that were originally meant for Allen when he wrote the script in the 1970s. While there are snippets of monologues that recall Allen and some of his scenes in classic films like Annie Hall and Manhattan, David almost imperceptibly takes Yellnikoff away from Allen's voice and turns him into… well, Larry David.
"It was a little intimidating taking on the role of Boris at first. People were telling me, 'You better not play the role like Woody,' but I had no intentions of imitating Woody. It's a trap some actors fall into when they play the Woody Allen part in one of his films," said David.
"I think I managed to make Boris my own," he added. "Boris seems to have changed somewhat by the end of the film [referring to a plot twist that we can't give away], but I'm not quite sure it's going to take. I don't know if people can change to that degree."
Despite some obvious similarities, Yellnikoff and the fictional Larry David are miles apart in their personalities, claimed David.
"Larry David means well, he just gets into a lot of conflicts along the way. Boris, on the other hand is looking for trouble. I grew up around people like that, I have relatives like that - sour Jewish intellectuals. I know what they're like."
GROWING UP in a Jewish family in Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, New York, helped to form David's sense of humor.
"I was raised very Reform. But when I was bar mitzva-ed, I brought the house down. Everybody thought I should have become a cantor," he laughed.
Instead, David chose to become a stand-up comedian. While struggling in New York City clubs in the 1970s, he worked as a store clerk and television repairman to pay his bills. In the 1980s, he became a writer for late-night ABC comedy show Fridays, which led to two years as a skit writer for Saturday Night Live. By the end of the decade, David had teamed up with Seinfeld to create the series that became one of the most successful shows in US TV history and made him a wealthy man - with almost totally frayed nerves. During the show's first seven years, David wrote almost 60 episodes and rewrote most of the others.
He also found time in 1993 to get married - a union that ended in 2007. Since we were speaking a couple of days after Rosh Hashana, I asked David how his holiday had been, and he replied, "Uneventful."
You don't go to services on Rosh Hashana? I asked, treading dangerously close to a Larry David moment.
"Nah. I used to go to when I was married, that was part of my marriage arrangement, but it isn't anymore," he laughed.
