TV INTERVIEW: RICHARD ELFMAN & FRANKLYN AJAYE
Straight From The Basement of Dorsey High... and on to 'Deadwood'
Though their paths quickly diverged, for a time, director (and Buzzine CEO/Publisher) Richard Elfman and actor/comic Franklyn Ajaye could have been found in the same classroom in south Los Angeles as schoolmates. The pair of Dorsey High School alumni recently reunited at The Vanguard in Hollywood, California on the set of The Green Room with Paul Provenza for a chat about car washes, deadwoods, good times past and present, and Australian women…
Richard Elfman: I’m 13 years old in Crenshaw at Audubon Junior High School, and there’s a brilliant class cut-up named Franklyn Ajaye…
Franklyn Ajaye: That’s right... I don’t think I was brilliant, though.
RE: …who kept me laughing through junior high school and high school, and here he is tonight.
FA: Rick, it was really a surprise to see you because you were brilliant yourself, actually. You were a good student, and your mother was a teacher at the school. So I don’t know if I was brilliant, but I had to get good grades, we were in the same classes, so you must have been brilliant yourself. [Laughs] Because my dad always made me study.
RE: [Laughs] Are you still living in Australia right now?
FA: Not for the last few years. I still have a place there, which I rent out right now. I plan to go back at the end of the year. I lived there for seven years. I’m a permanent resident. I emigrated over there in 1997. I worked there, did comedy over there, taught television writing over there. I loved it, actually. I live in Melbourne, and I came back and did Deadwood, and I’m going to go back. I do prefer it.
RE: By the way, you were terrific in Deadwood. Tarred and feathered! [Laughs]
FA: Thank you. Yes I was. The first episode, which was not fun. But it’s funny – the racist guy, Steve – the irony is, of course, the guy who played him is so not like him. We would sit up, in between takes, of course, just chatting away, having fun, and then he’d have to turn into the racist. [Laughs]
RE: That was some heavy sh*t, Franklyn. I thought you really did a beautiful emotional performance…
FA: I’ve been acting now a long time, but the interesting thing was, by the time I did Deadwood, I hadn’t acted in a long time.
RE: Car Wash, I remember: Was that your very first?
FA: No, I did a movie right before Car Wash which ended up leading to Car Wash. It was a movie called Dandy, The All American Girl with Stockard Channing and Sam Waterson that was really a very small independent film, but the same casting director cast Car Wash and liked what I did, so he brought me in for Car Wash because he felt he’d taken a risk on me and I had done well. But then I had a series of just average films… we thought Car Wash was going to be an average film when we were doing it, of course.
RE: Your hair had more life in it in those days…
FA: That was a wig. My hair would never grow that long. Ironically, now with dreadlocks, it’s probably longer than that. But in an Afro, it wouldn’t grow that long. But that’s what everybody remembers me for. I had to have a wig to have that big Afro. But the thing I learned with Deadwood was you might not have acted in a long time and you’re nervous on the first day, because I was very, very nervous when I came to that first day of Deadwood because I recognized the quality of the show, and not just a big production but a quality production.
You can have a big production that’s not necessarily really intellectually challenging or stimulating, and Deadwood really was. It was pure art. So you say: “Wow, I’m on something really, really good, which I’ve always wanted to be in, where the art is really the goal.” I don’t want to find I’m not up to that, because that would be crushing, so I was very nervous. But what you find is, though you haven’t acted in all that time, you have lived, and because you know the technique in your sleep now…
Also, the fact that you’ve lived in those eight years, it comes into your performance in a way that I didn’t anticipate – a little more depth, a little more sorrow, a feeling of melancholy maybe… And I realized that when I was a young actor, I couldn’t have done this. Also, they filmed Deadwood in a very challenging way – you would get the lines sometimes just the night before. They were very Shakespearian, very difficult speeches that had no rhythm that you were familiar with. And I said, “Thank God I’m old enough now and experienced enough now to do this, because as a young actor, I could not have handled this”.
And I also realized he was paying me a compliment by putting me in there, because David Milch is a taskmaster. So if you really can’t perform, you’re not gonna stay, no matter how much he likes you. So you have to come up. So when he says I’m gonna do this, he’s paying me a compliment that he feels I can do this. So it kind of motivates you even more.
RE: Bringing you up to present time, you smoked dope tonight, my friend, [laughs] on television!
FA: [Laughs] Not me! It was the other people. It was peer pressure.
RE: How long have you known Paul [Provenza]?
FA: I’ve known Paul off and on for years, but it’s only in the last couple years I’ve gotten to know him better. Our paths have crossed in the past, but we really hadn’t chatted. Then I ran into him about a year ago, and he told me he had been looking for me to do the first season of The Green Room, but he couldn’t find me.
RE: You were in Australia with those pretty Aussie fans you were telling us about tonight.
FA: Aussie women are really special women, mainly because they’re sane. They’re very low-maintenance.
RE: Speaking of which, what do you have on the agenda right now, Franklyn? What’s coming up?
FA: This show starts things off. I hadn’t been on TV in a long time. When I came back from Australia, it was very difficult to get back into the comedy world. I had been gone for seven years. My age was against me, even though, certainly among comedians, I was…
RE: Wait a minute – we’re the same age. I don’t know about that…
FA: Exactly. It was against me with the gatekeepers, and that was a surprise. The interesting thing was we’re in a celebrity-oriented environment, and in contrast to when I started, where the predominant driving thing was quality and you got exposed because of the quality of what you did on TV – it is now really are you a celebrity or not? And I’m not a celebrity.
RE: But I think you will be before we’re finished…
FA: Maybe because of this classic ‘smoking weed on TV’ thing – that might go viral, huh?
The second season of ‘The Green Room with Paul Provenza’ premieres new episodes on Showtime every Thursday night at 11:00 p.m. ET/PT beginning July 14, 2011.
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