John Astin on playing Gomez, reading for Gandalf, meeting Fellini, and more

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https://www.avclub.com/random-roles-...tma-1848715237

The Addams Family (1964-1966) / The New Scooby-Doo Movies (1972) / Halloween with the New Addams Family (1977) / The Addams Family (1992-1993)—“Gomez Addams”

AVC: How did you find your way into The Addams Family in the first place? Was it an audition, or did they come looking for you specifically?

JA: Yeah, they came to me. I never read for it or anything. I had been in a few things that had done well, and in those days, once you got over that hump, you didn’t have to read. They called me in because they got a bunch of preview cards that were very positive on a movie I had done with Jim Garner and Lee Remick called The Wheeler Dealers, and they wanted to make a deal with me. They sent Marty Ransohoff’s assistant, who was a young man named John Calley...and I don’t know if you know the name, but John became head of Warner Brothers and all kinds of stuff like that. But we had a really good dinner, and we became instant friends.

So there were three possibilities for me: there was The Loved One, The Americanization of Emily, and The Addams Family...and the first one to come up was The Addams Family. So Marty Ransohoff pitched The Addams Family to me. Well, he didn’t have to pitch it to me, because I was a Charles Addams fan before my college days. I mean, my roommate and I would put our pennies together and buy a book of Addams’ cartoons and razor out the ones we liked best and frame them and put them up in our room. That was our decor! But I was told that I would play the butler. I thought, “My God, how am I gonna do that?” And Marty said I would have a non-exclusive contract, which you can never get in television, and a bunch of other stuff. And I left the meeting thinking, “Well, this will never happen, and that’ll be a good thing.”

But then I got a phone call, and it was from David Levy, who had been present at the meeting but had been mostly quiet. He said, “I had another idea for you in this show.” He was a former vice-president of NBC, so he had a lot of credits. We met at the Polo Lounge and had martinis, and we discussed The Addams Family. He said, “This show is really Father Knows Best with different people...and I want you to be the father. And then we’ll cast the rest of it.” So we discussed it further, and I realized that I could make up a character, because there were really only a couple of clues from Charles [Addams’ cartoons]. So I thought, “This looks pretty good!” And that’s how it happened.

AVC: Gomez had always struck me as being a bit Groucho-esque at times, but it wasn’t until relatively recently that I realized that the show’s head writer was Nat Perrin, who’d actually written for the Marx Brothers.

JA: Oh, yeah! Although I actually never thought of Groucho when I was doing Gomez. But it was somewhere there, because I was such a fan of the Marx Brothers. It came from my childhood, actually. When I was a kid, I was in fourth grade, and for Halloween, I was made up as Groucho, my younger brother Sandy—or Alexander, who’s now a professor emeritus at UCLA—was Harpo, and a pal of ours named Dominic was Chico. And we went to school on Halloween as three Marx Brothers. We didn’t have a Zeppo, but...we didn’t really need a Zeppo! It was quite an event, actually. We surprised everybody.

One day shortly after the show premiered, I was talking to Nat, and I said, “You know, they’re saying Gomez reminds them of Groucho Marx, Ernie Kovacs, Peter Sellers...” And Nat said, “They’re all good, my boy.” [Laughs.] “Take it and enjoy it!” He was a terrific father figure, in a sense. Both he and David. David Levy was the guy who thought up the show, and Nat was brought in after we’d done the presentation film. The presentation film went over very strongly, and it was thought that we should finish the presentation film and make it the first show, because it was sort of introducing all the characters. So that’s when Nat was hired.

At one point, they replaced David and Nat, and they hired somebody else to direct and write, but Carolyn [Jones] and I got together and said, “You know, this isn’t what we signed up for,” and we went to Filmways, the producers, and said, “You’ve got to get David and Nat back.” And they did. It was a very compatible group. Nat might say, “Let me read something to you,” and he would read a phone call that he had written down...and it lasted about five minutes! He said, “We’re about five minutes short on an episode that has to go into Canada. Can you shoot this right away?” And I said, “I’ll give it a shot!” So what I could remember of it, I did, and what I couldn’t remember, I made it up! So we got the five minutes. And Nat congratulated me. [Laughs.] We had a very loose, friendly relationship, and I loved working with him. He would openly talk about stealing stuff from the Marx Brothers. He said, “Do you think we could do the stateroom scene in Cousin Itt’s room?” I said, “Well, we could give it a shot!”

It was fun to do the show. Most people ask me about The Addams Family, and it has dominated my professional life, really. But we just did two years...and, you know, it’s been on the air for more than 50 years following that! I regard it as good fortune, really. It’s interesting. I’ll get a class of freshmen—I’m retiring now, but I’ve been teaching for the last 20 years—and I’d get a bunch of 17- or 18-year-olds, and I’d mention ... oh, let’s say Marlon Brando or Charles Laughton or Cary Grant. And they would not know who I was talking about. But they would all know what I did! [Laughs.] Which is a strange twist.