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Paul Reiser will perform at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center on Sunday, July 21, at 8 p.m.
Comedian and multihyphenate Paul Reiser returns to the East End this weekend for his first love, stand-up comedy, as he takes the stage at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center on Sunday night.
Younger audiences may know Reiser as Dr. Sam Owens from the Netflix smash hit “Stranger Things,” though to most he is still best remembered as Paul Buchman from the 1990s sitcom “Mad About You,” which led to 10 Emmy nominations for Reiser as the show’s co-star and co-creator and was briefly rebooted in 2019. He’s also a screenwriter, author and recording artist, and he recently dipped his toes into writing for comic books. During a phone interview on Friday, Reiser shared updates on the various roles and creative projects that he works on between touring his stand-up act.
Reiser lives in Los Angeles and said that, having grown up in New York City, when he gets to go to Long Island, especially the Hamptons, it feels like a vacation. “But it’s also like going home,” he added. “Because anytime I can play in New York, it just feels 20 to 30 percent funnier. It feels like a home crowd.”
He said although stand-up is what he most loves doing, many people today don’t know stand-up came first for him.
“The guy from ‘Stranger Things’ is going to try to be funny now? Why?” he imagines people thinking. “No,” he says. “I was a comedian before I was a pretend doctor.”
To that point, in November he will put out his first stand-up special in more than 30 years.
Also this fall, in October, his film “The Problem With People” will have a theatrical release in the United States, the United Kingdom and the country where the film is set, Ireland.
He co-wrote “The Problem With People” with his friend Wally Marzano-Lesnevich and stars opposite Colm Meaney, an Irish actor who American audiences will recognize as the “Star Trek” character Miles O’Brien.
“Walking around Dublin with him, it’s like walking through the Bronx with De Niro,” Reiser said of Meaney. “It’s like everybody knows him and loves him, and he’s imminently approachable.”
Reiser and Meaney’s characters are cousins.
“I’m not playing Irish,” Reiser explained. “I’m playing a New Yorker. And the heart of the story is that there are two branches of a family tree that came from the same great-grandfathers, and one of them settled in Ireland, and one of them made it over to the States. … There’s been a feud between the original grandfathers, and that feud has been handed down to these guys who’ve never met.”
Reiser’s character is invited to Ireland to put the feud to rest and raise a glass in friendship — “and it goes bad.” He explained that the film wonders, when the world is nothing but divided, how do you possibly bridge it?
He said he was tickled when the reviewers who saw the premiere at the Austin Film Festival really got it. They wrote, in essence: “This is really the movie we need to see right now.”
“It didn’t start out that way, but as I was writing it, it became a little microcosm of, why can’t people get along? Why are there borders?” Reiser said.
“It’s the movie I’ve wanted to make for a long time, and it’s my kind of movie,” he added. “It’s small in scale, but hopefully big in heart and funny.”
“The Problem With People” is just one of many projects Reiser has coming out this year or next. He’s also rumored to be returning to the Amazon Prime Video series “The Boys” for the fifth and final season, which has yet to start filming. He appeared in season three for two episodes as The Legend, who was an informant for the title characters, a CIA-backed group formed to take down super-powered individuals and the corporation that controls them.
In the comic books that the series is based on, The Legend is a parody of Marvel Comics editor Stan Lee, though The Legend in the television adaptation is often compared to Hollywood producer Robert Evans.
The show, like the comic that inspired it, is known for being graphic, both violently and otherwise.
“I had not seen the show, and I never even heard of it, until I got the offer to join the cast,” Reiser said. “And I asked my son, who is my cultural canary in the coal mines. He knows everything.”
His son, Leon, told him, “It’s great, and you’ll hate it.”
“Why will I hate it?” Reiser asked.
“Watch it,” his son told him.
He did, and he discovered the show is deliberately “over the top” — and also good.
“It was great fun. It was great fun,” he said of the filming experience.
Coming into a show with an already established and bonded cast can feel like being the new kid in high school, he said. “Like, where am I going to sit at lunch?”
He noted that he had a similar experience when he joined the cast of “Stranger Things” in its second season, though he said in both cases, the cast was so welcoming.
“I don’t know why I naively thought ‘The Boys’ was going to be like a dark set. But it wasn’t. It was all very light hearted and great fun,” he said.
Because he hasn’t seen a script yet, Reiser is not taking his return to “The Boys” for granted. He said he’s learned in show business that just because he hears a part is being written for him, it doesn’t necessarily mean it will really happen.
He recently returned to another old role, one that he first played in 1984’s “Beverly Hills Cop,” starring Eddie Murphy.
Reiser reprises the character Jeffrey Friedman — a Detroit cop who is a colleague and friend of Murphy’s Detective Alex Foley — in the fourth film in the franchise, “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F,” released this month by Netflix.
Reiser recently attended the red carpet premiere and said Murphy is still as powerfully funny, confident and magical as he was as a teenage stand-up prodigy.
“He just pops right off the screen,” he said.
In another return to a role from the 1980s, Reiser and his son Leon both worked on writing a comic book for Marvel that is based on his character from the film “Aliens.” The five-issue limited series is based on the concept “What if Carter Burke had lived?” The final installment was published this week.
“I would get approval, and I would just make my little suggestions about the dialogue for my character,” Reiser explained.
He said comic books and graphic novels are a world that he’s not versed in. “Whatever skill set I have about scripts didn’t really apply, because it’s a whole other thing,” he said.
He said Leon was the perfect medium: “He was the comic book whisperer to me and the Paul whisperer to the others.”
He credits his son with making better suggestions and contributions than he did.
“It’s your character and everything, but your son’s were funnier,” Marvel would tell him.
“It’s music to any father’s ears — your son did better than you,” he said.
He said Marvel had the best comic book artists drawing and coloring him as Carter Burke, though sometimes he felt the drawings looked a little too much like him. “Could you knock off eight to 10 pounds, please? You don’t have to presume that Burke has been eating muffins for the last 30 years,” he quipped.
“There’s talk of maybe taking this ‘Aliens’ comic book and maybe making it into a series, which I thought is really fun,” he added. He said if that happens, he’ll be able to contribute a little more assertively because writing half-hour television scripts is more in his world than a comic book.
Though comic books and sci-fi are admittedly not what he gravitates too — “Helen Hunt still has a hard time accepting the fact that I’ve never seen a Star Wars movie” — he keeps finding himself in them.
“These are such cultural landmarks, and it’s such a privilege and a kick to be involved in them,” he said. “And it’s so not my world. It’s so not the kind of thing I would, on my own, watch or be drawn to. My taste goes almost 180 degrees the other way.”
As for whether he’ll appear in the fifth and final season of “Stranger Things” next year, he wouldn’t say either way.
“I could tell you, but then I’d have to have you killed,” he said. “They’re very closed lip about that.”
He had another project out this year that is no secret: He co-wrote the New York Times bestseller “What a Fool Believes,” the memoir of Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Michael McDonald of the Doobie Brothers, published this spring.
Paul Reiser performs at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center on Sunday, July 21, at 8 p.m. For tickets, call 631-288-1500, go to whbpac.org or visit the box office at 76 Main Street, Westhampton Beach.
