Jeffrey Tambor is sitting in the window of a diner in the suburbs north of New York City, telling a story about losing his hair at the age of 16, when a young man approaches tentatively on the sidewalk outside and holds a handwritten note up to the glass: "Would you mind if I came in and got your autograph?" Tambor reads the note aloud, squints behind a pair of owlish glasses, makes a face we've all seen him make a million times—indignation flavored with the slightest pinch of mischief—and then bellows his answer: "Yes!"
Too late: The guy is already bouncing through the door.
When Tambor was a boy, growing up in San Francisco as "the only Jew within miles," he fell in love with the theater and used to practice giving autographs in his family's basement. "I would daydream about what it would be like to be an actor. I would even do talk shows where I interviewed myself," he tells me, shifting his lanky six-foot-two frame in the booth. "Oh, Lord. They were so worried about me." No wonder he can tell you exactly where he was the first time anyone ever asked him for his autograph: outside the Broadhurst Theatre on West 44th Street after his Broadway debut, when he was 33.
Now, at 71, Tambor has had such a long and varied career that when people recognize him, it's impossible to guess which role they're thinking of. Lately it's been for Transparent, the hit Amazon show on which Tambor plays Mort/Maura Pfefferman, a professor and father of three adult kids who is transitioning into a woman. Transparent represents a long-overdue first for Tambor—a series built entirely around his character—and a crowning moment for one of the most respected dramedic actors in Hollywood. (The role won him a Golden Globe earlier this year and is widely predicted to garner his seventh Emmy nomination before this article comes out.) At the same time, it's the third in a trio of equally beloved characters—the others are Hank "Hey Now!" Kingsley, from The Larry Sanders Show, and George Bluth Sr., the incarcerated patriarch on Arrested Development—_that Tambor calls "the hooks" on which his career hangs. And what a career. His résumé includes more than fifty feature films and dozens of TV shows across every conceivable genre, from Hill Street Blues and _M_A_SH* to L.A. Law and The Twilight Zone. In the '80s, he even appeared in a Phil Collins music video ("I Wish It Would Rain Down").
Transparent has been "a thrill ride—all I've ever wanted as an actor," Tambor says, taking a bite of his egg-white sandwich. Too often on TV, comedic roles are one-note: greedy, angry, dumb. Maura, by contrast, is a symphony, contradictory and complex. In one of Tambor's favorite early scenes, Mort and his kids devour barbecue out of Styrofoam boxes, food flying everywhere. After a debate about whether you should wipe your chin clean as you eat or "hose off" afterward, Mort tries for the first time to broach the subject of the "big change going on" within him. But he can't do it, hiding his sauce-stained face in his hands. In more than one way, Tambor tells me, the scene highlights the messiness—and unconscious repetition—of familial relationships: "I like that [eating take-out barbecue] is a family ritual, and they do it over and over, no matter what's going on."
This is the essential thing about Tambor's brand of comedy: It hinges on his characters' obliviousness to how funny they are. Jill Soloway, who was inspired to create Transparent by her own trans parent, describes Tambor as the "perfect mixture of funny and sad." When approaching a scene, he never sets out to be comic or tragic. He aims to be real, and in real life, people often don't realize their own ridiculousness.
"He's just so convincingly, hilariously serious about these absurd things that he says and these absurd characters he plays," says Jason Bateman, who co-starred on Arrested Development and is one of many, many people who consider Tambor a mentor. "There's a very healthy indifference with what he does. He's not begging for laughs." Even in a sitcom, Bateman continues, "whatever character he's playing is in the most serious drama you could ever hope to film, you know? It is not a comedy to him."
Now, at the diner, the autograph seeker, looking vaguely nautical in a red windbreaker, is tableside and grinning. Tambor suggests a selfie, but the guy insists on also getting a signature for "a friend who's a huge fan of The Larry Sanders Show."
"So what's your friend's name?" Tambor asks, starting to scribble. "It's Andrew," the guy says, then implores: "Maybe say, ‘Hey, now!’?" At the mention of Hank's signature line, Tambor looks up, scowling in an exaggerated, mean-muggy way. He obliges, then sends the guy on his way with this: "Now are you going to ask me for money?"
I laugh. The guy laughs. Jeffrey Tambor does not.
The Role of a Lifetime, Part I: The Larry Sanders Show
It's possible that you're too young to remember this HBO series from the '90s, but you've definitely watched a lot of shows that owe it a massive debt. Larry Sanders starred co-creator Garry Shandling as a narcissistic talk-show host and Tambor as his unctuous sidekick, Hank. The groundbreaking series, shot in a faux-documentary style, satirized not just late-night TV but our entire celebrity-obsessed and voyeuristic culture, paving the way for the likes of The Office, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and 30 Rock. Tambor has said the role transformed his career. He also likes to say that Hank was a professional at work but an amateur at life. Though you never saw Hank's home on the show, Tambor says he imagined it as empty: no art on the walls, no books on the shelves. Hank lived for Larry Sanders.
During casting, Shandling searched for months for the perfect Hank. Several actors read for the part, and a few even captured Hank's sycophantic core. But Shandling felt Larry's sidekick needed emotional range. More than a buffoon, he could be loyal, loving, and even wise. That's when a producer friend, Alan Zweibel, sent over Tambor's eight-by-ten.
Shandling wasn't familiar with Tambor's work, so he sought the opinion of his protégé, Judd Apatow, who was already known as a kind of comedy savant. Apatow emphatically endorsed Tambor, urging Shandling to check out his performance in …And Justice for All. In the 1979 film, Tambor's feature debut, he plays the partner of an embattled defense attorney (Al Pacino, who got an Oscar nomination for the lead role). In certain comedy circles, though, it's Tambor's performance that borders on legend—which is especially legendary given that …And Justice for All, which revolves around the trial of a rapist, is a drama. But about ten minutes in, there's a scene in a courthouse restroom where Tambor takes his big line—"You don't threaten a judge"—and dials it way the hell up by repeating it at scream volume—"*YOU DON'T THREATEN A JUDGE!"—*when Pacino turns his back on him. It's a made-for-Tambor moment, a line that wasn't even supposed to be funny but somehow transforms into serio-absurdist comedy when he delivers it.
Shandling watched the movie, then asked Tambor to come in and read. They did a scene in which Hank tells Larry, "You worry about your half of the show, I'll worry about mine," and an angry Larry storms out of the room. But when Shandling got up and headed for the door, Tambor moved a couch to block his way. "It struck me like a lightning bolt," Shandling told me. Still, Shandling was undecided until Tambor called him later.
"He was very genuine," Shandling says. "He said, ‘I've been thinking about this—I know this guy. I know this guy.’ " Tambor remembers the call, too. "I told him, ‘Garry, I really want that role’—because that's something I teach: If you want something, you have to ask for it." (Tambor has taught acting off and on for decades.) "So I did. I said, ‘I am Hank.’ And then I said, ‘I have never made a call like this.’ And Garry said, ‘No, but Hank has.’ Isn't that good?"
We've left the diner and climbed into Tambor's brand-new Toyota Sequoia, a huge vehicle he loves, he says, because it reminds him of his childhood. Tambor's dad, a professional boxer turned flooring contractor, owned a big truck sort of like this one, and the two of them would ride around in it, delivering rugs. Barney Tambor was Jeffrey's hero—a gentle giant of a man whose attitude toward success was "Don't celebrate too much. Because they might take it away." As we drive through the lush, rolling landscape of Westchester County on our way to the five-bedroom brick home Tambor shares with his third wife, Kasia, and their four children, all under the age of 11, he admits that admonition—Don't celebrate!—was something he has worked hard to overcome. Once, he says, when his mother visited the set of Sanders, Shandling told her, "You must be very proud of your son." Her response: "I would be more proud if he had his own show."
Sanders, he says, taught him essential lessons about his craft. "Garry took me to school. He liked mistakes. I remember him saying, ‘Look, you can't button this down. You've got to let it happen to you.’ " In its best moments, he says, doing the show felt "like free fall."
Suddenly he has a request. "Please don't let me forget as we're talking that my dog is being groomed and not to leave him over the weekend," he implores, explaining that Gus, the family's Bouvier des Flandres—"like a Buick with hair, he's so big"—is getting his "summer cut."
Obediently I write "DOG" on a scrap of paper and tuck it into the cup holder. Tambor smiles with that mouth that so often seems settled into a frown: "I love the idea of you typing up your notes later and going, ‘Oh, right, the dog!’ "
__The Role of a Lifetime, Part II: __ Arrested Development
Until Tambor brought George Bluth Sr. to life, the crooked, overbearing character was imagined as a one-off, to appear in the pilot only. Instead, his performance—as the disgraced founder of a company that builds mini-mansions—was such a bombastic delight that executives at Fox, the network producing the show back in 2003, insisted he be in every episode.
Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz, who had written George with Tambor in mind, was happy to comply. From the get-go, he says, Tambor had upped the quality of the production by inspiring everyone around him. For example, in the pilot, Bluth Sr. is arrested on a boat in the midst of his floating retirement party. While shooting that scene, Hurwitz suggested at the last minute that George get on the phone with his secretary just before he is apprehended and tell her to dump incriminating documents.
"He did two brilliant things," Hurwitz recalls. "First, as he said, ‘Shred it. Shred it. Save it. Shred it,’ into the phone, he seemed to hear her on the other end. Like you could just tell she was going through a litany of things"—when, of course, Tambor was talking to dead air, conjuring a character that hadn't existed ten seconds before. "Second, after he says all this—‘Shred, save, shred, shred’—he pauses and says to the secretary, ‘Why are you crying?’ It was the most inspired ad-lib. He just invented that this character we've never met would be crying. I can't even explain the serious mind behind that."
Bateman, who was the show's moral center and straight man, says he had trouble not bursting into hysterics in the scenes he and Tambor shared. After blowing more than one take, he resolved to find "some kind of strategy to keep from laughing. What I came up with was: Just don't look him in the eyes. So I would look just below his eyeballs, or just above his eyeballs, or at the tip of his nose, or at his temples. I was going cross-eyed. And after a while, he discovered it, and he'd break the take and complain to me that it was like working with Helen Keller."
Not only did Tambor play George, he also played his pot-smoking, freeloading twin brother, Oscar. When I ask Tambor what it was like to play the twins, he brightens as if thinking of old friends. "I loved George," he says, "but Oscar—Oscar was the one I went, ‘Oh, I love Oscar.’ Oscar has a little Hank in him." We are in his study now, a sunny room at the front of his house. Sitting under a framed poster for the 1925 silent film Ben-Hur (a gift from playwright David Mamet), he asks if he can put his feet up on his desk, then does so elegantly, in one long-limbed swoop.
Tambor says the secret to Hank's and Oscar's power was "just past the laugh." This is the sweet spot he strives to occupy as an actor—the place where comedy becomes not just about levity but about revealing a character's humanity. "Lying and art are very allied," he says. "But after you lie, you get to the truth."
Here's something I want the truth about: Is there going to be a fifth season of Arrested Development? When I ask Tambor and Bateman, both demur, claiming ignorance. Hurwitz says that while he's loath to "abuse the fans' interest in it," he can confirm that he is actively working "every day" to make a fifth season happen (and that if that doesn't work out, he'll turn his attention to a film). Netflix is on board, as is Fox (which owns the show), Hurwitz says, "and my hope is to start the writers' room on it this summer, while they're making deals with the cast."
If that should come to pass, I ask Tambor, would it be difficult to play Maura Pfefferman at the same time he is breathing new life into George Bluth Sr.? "No," he says flatly, reminding me he spent about twelve years doing repertory theater in towns like Louisville, Milwaukee, and Seattle. "You had a different role every night. Can you imagine that?"
Those days came to an end in 1976, when he was offered a job as Hector Elizondo's understudy in the Broadway production of Sly Fox, opposite George C. Scott. People advised him not to take it: He'd fathered his first child, Molly (she's 41 now), and this gig could mean he'd be an understudy the rest of his life. But after eighteen months, he got his chance to go toe-to-toe with Scott, a lion of the theater. He "fumfered" (muffed) his first line, he recalls, but then gained confidence and nailed the rest. At the curtain call, Scott hushed the audience and made a point to single out Tambor's performance. "He told the crowd, ‘This is his first time. You're going to hear something from this guy.’ I went to Sardi's afterward and had the famous cannelloni. Then I don't think I slept for two days."
Things changed quickly after that. His first TV guest spot was on Kojak, then Starsky & Hutch. In 1979, he got a co-starring role in The Ropers, a short-lived spin-off of Three's Company. Things were good. Except they also weren't: Around this time, Tambor lost the brother he adored to alcoholism—a tragedy his family never acknowledged publicly (saying he died of pneumonia) for years.
For a while, he says, "I lost my moorings. But you know the great thing about acting? It's all part of the gig. You get to put it in your work." Alcoholism, with which Tambor himself would later struggle (he's been sober for fifteen years), "was our family secret," which is part of why Transparent resonates so deeply with him. "The Pfeffermans have their secret," he says. "That's something I relate to."
The Role of a Lifetime, Part III: Transparent
The highest praise Tambor can give a performance is to say, "It doesn't look acted. It looks found." When he watched Jill Soloway's first feature film, an indie called Afternoon Delight, that's how he felt. Similarly, when he read her script for the Transparent pilot, he responded immediately. "It had that snap," he says, snapping his fingers. "That verve. I said, ‘I'm in. I'm in. I'm in.’ I all but threw myself at Jill."
He has said that he was "throw-up nervous" about depicting Maura, whose look—all muumuus and scarves and oversize sunglasses—Soloway likens to a "Jewish therapist on vacation in Sag Harbor." But it wasn't dressing in drag that scared Tambor, he clarifies: "I was worried about doing it right, whatever that means. Because it's important."
Indeed, of Tambor's three best-known roles—all set in California, all revolving around dysfunctional families of one kind or another—this is indisputably the one that is about something that matters. Shortly before shooting the first season, as a sort of trial run, Tambor took Maura out to The Oxwood Inn, a club that hosts a weekly trans night. He remembers his knees trembling as he first stepped into public and, then, "my realization: Nobody's looking at you. Once I threw myself into it, there was something very easy about it."
Judith Light, who plays Mort's ex-wife, Shelly, on the show, was at The Oxwood Inn for Maura's unveiling. She and Tambor have been close since 1971, when they did theater together in Milwaukee, and she says collaborating again has been a joy. It shows. In one indelible scene from season one, Maura comes over to help Shelly with her ailing second husband, and Shelly lectures their kids about how Mort remains her soul mate. "I say, ‘He's the only one who comes over for me.’ And Maura says, ‘She,’ " Light recalls, mimicking Tambor's soft intonation perfectly. "And I say, ‘He's the only one that is really here for me. None of you kids ever come over.’ And she says, ‘She.’ And then, the third time I say, ‘He's the great one, and you guys are terrible.’ She says, ‘She.’ And I say, ‘She.’ There is a progression of letting in who this person is. We eat from each other's plates and we take from each other's mouths and we're a family, and you feel it, and it moves you."
Amazon began streaming Transparent sixteen months before Caitlyn Jenner introduced herself to the world, and in that way, seeing Tambor in a caftan feels finger-on-the-pulse prescient. (Soloway says that Jenner has been invited to visit the set as the cast works through season two, which is expected to begin streaming this winter.) Tambor has said he's inspired by Jenner, but he is also proud that Maura is not striving for perfection. "I just love that she's of an age and that gravity has started to exert its force," he says. Hurwitz recalls Tambor once telling him: "Character is inconsistency." To Tambor, Maura's flaws are her beauty.
After several months off from the show, he tells me, he misses her. More than once as we talk, he catches himself using Maura's mannerisms—holding a hand around his throat, as if to prop up his jaw, or using both thumbs and pointer fingers to grasp the fabric of his shirt right above the breastbone. He admits a few of these gestures remind him of his late mom, a housewife he compares to Auntie Mame. "There's a lot I don't know about Maura until Maura does it," he says.
Soloway, who calls Tambor "Moppa"—a melding of "Mom" and "Poppa" that is his nickname on the show—says season two has great things in store for Maura. "Because the central conceit of the show was that the trans person is the most normal person in this family, and because in season one we were sort of introducing America to the idea of trans-ness, we didn't give Maura as many unlikable moments as we could have," Soloway says. Thanks in part to Jenner, "America is kind of caught up now. So we can allow Maura to be more vulnerable, to not be a saint, to fall in love, screw up, make enemies."
I tell all this to Tambor as he prepares to deliver me back to the Katonah train station, and he looks pleased. "Remember Willy Loman? I'm liked but not well-liked," he recites, paraphrasing Death of a Salesman. His 10-year-old son, Gabriel, has joined us, as there's a Cub Scout meeting they need to get to. Gabe is talking about a biography of Albert Einstein he's reading, and Tambor sounds like very much the proud father. "Isn't he great?" he says. "I could weep."
He putters around the kitchen, and at one point asks me sweetly, "Shall I make you a sandwich?" When I decline, we pile back into the massive four-by-four. "Are we all buckled? Is everybody buckled?" Tambor booms, Moppa-like. Then, to Gabe, after a glance at the cup holder: "Let's go get our dog!"