Michael Douglas knows that comedy is harder than drama. He believed it before signing onto The Kominsky Method, his first episodic TV role in over 40 years, and he certainly thinks it now that it’s finished. It’s why he signed onto the Chuck Lorre show in the first place: to really wrestle with the form.
As acting coach Sandy Kominsky, the now 76-year-old actor starred opposite funnymen like Alan Arkin, as his agent and right-hand man, and Paul Reiser, as his daughter’s love interest. (In season three, his The War of the Roses and Romancing the Stone screen partner Kathleen Turner joined the proceedings as his ex-wife, Roz, with Arkin having departed.) He watched how they worked and learned from it. The appeal of the show, Douglas says, was doing something different and challenging.
You could say that’s his current M.O. In a comfy gray sweatshirt, Douglas Zooms in from his temporary home in the U.K., where he’s shooting the third Ant-Man movie—a franchise he signed onto out of a similar kind of curiosity: He’d never done sci-fi or green screen, and “wanted to understand how that worked,” he tells Vanity Fair. He marvels at how long it’s been since he first made the decision: “God, it’s almost been eight years now.”
With this new terrain, even for a multi-Oscar winner like Douglas (for producing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and acting in Wall Street), comes new discoveries about the craft he’s made a life of, and a passion he inherited from his late parents, Kirk and Diana Douglas. This goes particularly for Kominsky: Coming from Lorre, the Netflix dramedy delivered its fair share of punch lines, but over three seasons it reckoned honestly and frankly with the realities of aging too. Season two introduced a cancer diagnosis for Sandy, a nuanced story line that echoed Douglas’s own health struggles from a decade ago; season three jumps years into the future, a bittersweet acknowledgment of the passage of time.
The show marks a bit of a full-circle moment for Douglas, nominated for the third straight year for a lead-acting Emmy (and also for outstanding comedy series, as an executive producer). His big breakout came in the ’70s television procedural The Streets of San Francisco, where he first really learned the show business ropes; with Kominsky, he confronted one of his greatest, most enduring fears as an actor—being himself before the camera. “It’s taken me a long, long time,” he says. But as he reveals over the course of our conversation about his career in TV, he’s finally overcome it.
Vanity Fair: The Kominsky Method brought you back to television. How are you reflecting on it now that it’s finished?
Michael Douglas: Wonderfully. The first time my agents brought the first episode for me to take a look at, I was offered it and didn’t know much about streaming. I certainly knew about Chuck. But after struggling to get out of television early in my career and into feature films, there was a certain element of, “Well, am I going back into television?” Then I read the script, and God bless Chuck Lorre, man. He’s just a great writer. I read this thing and it just really, really touched me and appealed to me in a lot of ways. I had a wonderful experience with Alan Arkin. It’s what you dream about.
I loved this whole format. One of the reasons I wanted to do it was for comedy, just because I had never done a lot of comedy. It never gets the proper respect it’s due. It’s much more difficult to do than drama.
In season three, you lost Alan, your right-hand man.
It was a two-year kind of contract with Netflix, and then it was over. I said, “Well, I’d like to finish this up. I’d like to put a bow around this.” And Alan was—I don’t know the exact full story, but it’s tough, you know, a tough job working. I think maybe just age, everything. [Editor’s note: Arkin could not be immediately reached for comment on the nature of his exit.]
Did the comedy come a little easier for you over time? You spent a few years watching comedy guys like Alan and Paul Reiser.
Yes. I savored the time with Alan Arkin, but he used to piss me off. [Laughs] He made it look so easy. That Second City thing. I would say, “How do you do it? That was funny as hell,” and this and that. Then we brought Paul in [for season two]. I wanted to try to learn a little more about comedy, but ultimately you have to have timing, you’ve got to have a sense of rhythm. That was not necessarily my strength, but I learned a little bit more about it.
This third season was much more about trusting being yourself. We’ve been doing this for so long—actors create a persona, whether it’s really them or some variation of them. That’s what they do. I like characters, I hide behind characters. This was more of an effort to be truthful to yourself and to trust it. And it’s scary, it was really scary. I was really elated at how it turned out because I had doubts. I thought I was doing nothing. I mean, I’ve worked with Jack Nicholson earlier and other people—they do nothing. It’s internalized and they just react. They listen and they react.
It’s something you were afraid of your whole career? That letting go?
I had stage fright when I first started this business, when I was on stage and everything moved. Early on with cameras, it looked like they were extra machines in doctors’ offices or something. So it’s taken me a long, long time to be comfortable in the moment, in front of a camera. And to take your time rather than feeling guilty, like I was wasting somebody’s time. On set, I’m notoriously picking up the pace.
With Kominsky, it’s often talked about—just given Chuck Lorre’s involvement, maybe—as a kind of a throwback, but I think of it almost as the opposite. It’s a show about getting older, that’s both finding the humor in it and taking it quite seriously. That’s pretty rare.
Chuck found humor out of all the normal issues we have about getting older. It’s helped me a lot, just for the future and for doing stuff. And this whole streaming phenomenon—as somebody who started first in television 50 years ago, I can’t believe it. I produced Cuckoo’s Nest and was an Academy Award-winning producer, but couldn’t get hired as an actor, because I still was a television actor who was trying to transition; I was producing movies that I could not be approved as the actor for. This whole streaming thing [has] brought together film, TV, great screenwriters who’ve found they go into the streaming area and can produce. I’m really happy I’m around to share this benefit.
You were in a project that I associate with the lines between film and television beginning to blur, which was Behind the Candelabra. That felt like a real moment when cinema was kind of brought to TV. And your first Emmy win!
Oh, yeah. They couldn’t get a studio interested in it. They tried to do it as a film and then HBO stepped up to do it. I just remember Rob Lowe, we saw Rob Lowe the first day [of filming], the lips. He came in with his lips and his makeup. [Laughs] We were sick, we were laughing so hard. Yeah. It was really good. A nice memory, a good time.
And you say you like playing characters, you can’t get much more of a character than Liberace.
And [director Steven Soderbergh] was really fighting for me. I had cancer. I was coming off a stage-four cancer bout. I thought I’d never work again. The cancer I had, I had surgery where they had to have part of my jaw taken out. I got through it all. Steven said, “I’ve got another project that I really have to do,” and [costar Matt Damon] said, “Me too, I’ve got something else.” And I thought, “Oh, God, it’s going away.” But the reality was that I didn’t realize how bad I looked. I had lost so much weight and everything else. Liberace was a little bit on the chubby side.
They were so sweet, they just made excuses and gave me a year to get my act together, and then we were able to do it. But right before production, I had a little lunch out in California with everybody just coming together. We were fitting everybody out. My son, Dylan, had been watching me for so long, practicing. In front of Matt and Steven, he did this imitation of me. Steven always said, “I knew we were in great shape when I saw your son do the imitation, because of how many times you’ve probably been rehearsing.”
You were uniquely prepared for a role there after so much time.
Yeah, I was. [Laughs]
You’ve been in this business for a long time. Looking at stuff like Candelabra, how has your perspective on it changed in the last 10-odd years? I’ve enjoyed learning about your “no dickheads” policy.
[Laughs] Look, this is an extraordinary industry that compensates you very well and entertains people. I just don’t have any patience for people who are so self-centered, either in front of the camera or behind the camera, they make it difficult for other people. I picked this up from Paul Newman. I remember, he always cast high. He was never worried or afraid of being upstaged. He wanted the best actors possible in whatever roles. And I’ve always adhered to that philosophy, only adding to the fact that you can be good, but you don’t have to be a dickhead. And as you get older, you have to make more choices. When you’re younger, you sort of let life kind of flow and let it happen to you and enjoy it. But as you get older, you’ve got to make how you want to choose to spend your time.
In avoiding that, do you think more about your own behavior, and fostering a good environment on set?
That hasn’t really been an issue for me. This is one of the benefits of being second-generation. I’m sure my dad was called dickhead on more than one occasion because he was a tough guy. But I was around them enough, and then I was so fortunate to be mentored by Karl Malden, an Academy Award-winning actor, to recognize and realize that early on. And because I produced probably more than most actors, I really have a sense of how important it is to create that environment, that confidence for everybody if you do the best work possible. I think in that area, my reputation is pretty clear. I feel like a better citizen for it.
You mentioned Streets of San Francisco and Karl Malden, so I’d love to go back to that for a moment. Your father said early in your career that you weren’t a good actor, and you’ve said you agree with that assessment. Given that, I’m curious how you look back on Streets—your breakout acting job, and amazingly, the last TV show you did regularly before Kominsky.
Streets of San Francisco is the greatest thing that ever happened to me. It’s hard for me to think about it now, but we did 26 hours a year, a season, on location. We worked six days a week, and ended up doing 104 [episodes]. Whatever stage fright I had, whatever fear of the camera I had, I was able to learn just simply by being able to stand up there day after day after day. I kept my eyes and ears open and learned to make a [weekly] 52-minute movie. You couldn’t have a tougher schedule than that.
When I left the show after the fourth year, everybody thought I was crazy. It was a big hit show. And I finally got Cuckoo’s Nest, which I’d been trying to get made. I was shocked at how much information I knew as a producer, just from being connected to that show.
So fast-forward almost 50 years: You’ve said that Sandy Kominsky is the character you feel is closest to you, of everyone you’ve played—which is quite a statement for someone with your career.
Yeah, it is. It is.
This idea of playing yourself more, in the third season—coming off that, do you feel like a braver actor now?
I do. I struggled in that third season, off-camera. And I thank a lot of people who I worked closely with, who supported me, because I wasn’t really sure. I felt very naked. So I hope to try to be brave enough to do that more often, more than just the character stuff.
I imagine it feels like a new approach to acting—does it feel like a new way forward for you?
Well, it’s basically, You really think you’re that interesting? [Laughs] You can’t do it all the time. I could do it because I had great writing. But you can’t fool yourself thinking, “Oh, yeah. Okay. I’m just going to wing this one, man. Just be myself and talk and everything else.” No, that’s not going to work. I hope I’ll remember that, and that my shit detector will be able to differentiate between what’s crap and what’s good.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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