Paul Reiser: ‘Thanks to Stranger Things, kids don’t know that I’m funny’

Paul Reiser is wasted on the young. It was in 2022 that the actor and comedian noticed something was amiss, after returning to stand-up for the first time in two decades. “People would come up to me and say their kids were confused,” Reiser explains, from his Los Angeles home. “That they’d say, ‘wait a second – the doctor from Stranger Things is trying to be funny now?’”

Thanks to his role as a morally questionable (and decidedly non-comic) scientist on several seasons of the Netflix smash, we now live in a world where Paul Reiser isn’t automatically associated with homespun comic observations about life. Or even with his role as Axel Foley’s long-suffering detective buddy in the Beverly Hills Cop movies. And while there may very well be a 13-year-old out there who adores the gentle marriage-themed wit of his Nineties sitcom Mad About You, Reiser has yet to meet them. All of this is a bit of a bummer: no one is quite so good at the harmless, deadpan dad joke, spoken with the performative shrug of a Manhattan cab driver. “I’ve lived in LA far longer than I lived in New York,” he tells me. “I came out here when I was 27 or 28, and now I’m well into my thirties.” Badum-pshh!

The 68-year-old is quicker to gags at the start of our conversation than at its end, as if to wrest a modicum of early control from the journalist on the other end of his Zoom call. Take the room he’s in. There’s an exercise bike propped up behind him; further back, a painting of what appears to be two men drinking coffee. Am I making it out right? “I didn’t realise you could see that,” he says, as if I’ve glimpsed too much. “If this was a psychological evaluation and you saw a giraffe punching your mother, then I’d think, all right, you’ve got some issues.” He calms. “But no, there’s nothing important about it. It’s by a friend. It tickles me.” I sense that’s all I’m getting.

Reiser is not one for confessionals, or for celebrity dirt. “I’m not a fan of gossip,” he told a newspaper a few months ago. “I don’t like it about other people, and I certainly don’t want anything being said about me that I wouldn’t want shared.” His worldview, though, is all over his comedy, which is good-natured and slice-of-life, yet never saccharine. The Problem with People, his new film, is a culture-clash comedy about mismatched American/Irish cousins, and has baked in every cliche under the sun. But it also feels warmly aspirational – a testament to what can be achieved if we put down our weapons and try to find common ground.

“Everywhere on the news, it’s fighting,” Reiser says. “But I believe that if you put any warring party in a room and ask them what they want, you’re gonna find that they’re not that different.” In The Problem with People, an elderly Irish man on his deathbed asks his son Ciáran (Colm Meaney) to heal a family rift going back generations. Ciáran’s cousin Barry (Reiser) is a blustery New York real estate tycoon, and flies over to Dublin to help mend fences. But the two men quickly squabble, lobbing comic grenades back and forth. They can’t quite help themselves. “That’s why the movie’s called The Problem with People,” Reiser adds. “There must be something inside us that leans towards a fight or a suspicion, but if we can somehow tame that and aim a little higher, maybe we’ll live better.”

Reiser first visited Ireland in 1990, but fell in love with it far earlier – drawn to the idea of “being a fish out of water in a beautiful, idyllic little seaside town”. This was the Eighties, though, where the closest Reiser was getting to water was the dank of New York’s East River. He was studying music at the city’s Binghamton University by day, performing stand-up in dive bars and clubs on Long Island by night. Friends on the circuit included Jerry Seinfeld, the future Princess Diaries actor Larry Miller and the soon-to-be cult comic Mark Schiff. The four of them would have a tradition that continued well into the Noughties: every New Year’s Day, they’d meet for brunch in Brooklyn, before heading into Manhattan.

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“We were a brotherhood,” Reiser remembers. “This little community of comedians sharing stories: the biggest paycheque that year, the best one-night hook-up you’d had in Cleveland that year. The heart of it was just celebrating the fact that we didn’t have real jobs. We were getting to wake up late, meet girls, then go to clubs and perform, and we were getting paid. It was like, ‘what kind of scam are we running here?’”

As their individual successes increased, the brunches got fancier, the walk into the city traded for a limousine ride. “The tradition kind of fell away after a few decades, not by my choosing,” Reiser says. “But when you get married and have kids [Reiser has been married since 1988 and has two sons aged 29 and 24], it’s harder to sell that you’re wanting to spend New Year’s Day with your idiot friends.”

He moved to Los Angeles after the success of 1982’s Diner – a smart, funny coming-of-age dramedy that also made stars of Kevin Bacon and Mickey Rourke. That film led to Beverly Hills Cop and James Cameron’s Aliens, where he played a corporate stooge so unctuously despicable that only death by acid-spewing ET would suffice. His casting was intended as a plot twist. “My understanding was that James Cameron wanted somebody you couldn’t possibly think would be a bad guy,” he says. “Though I don’t know how well that works. Throw me into a drama and I think people instantly think ‘wrong, wrong, wrong – something bad is here!’”

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He starred in the sitcom My Two Dads in 1987, then Mad About You, which he co-created, in 1992. It became a phenomenon, but feels slightly undervalued in the cultural landscape today. Back then, the show – in which Reiser and Helen Hunt played neurotic, middle-class marrieds in New York – held a fixed position in what was a real golden age of the form. It was broadcast by the US network NBC as a part of its “Must-See TV” lineup, alongside shows including Friends, Seinfeld, Frasier and ER, and it had won 12 Emmys and four Golden Globes by the end of its eight-season run in 1999. Reiser admits to only appreciating its success once it was over.

“I didn’t have the luxury of seeing the bigger picture,” he says. “You’re so immersed in your little world, chasing your tail and trying to cross the finish line every week. But I knew that everything had changed. You go from being a guy writing jokes in your apartment to being in 10 or 15 million homes every week.” And there was a sense, too, of being a part of a shared universe of massive sitcoms – sometimes literally.

“When Mad About You came out, it was viewed as a companion piece to Seinfeld – it was the New York comedian thing,” he recalls. “Then [Michael Richards’s Seinfeld character] Kramer came on for an episode, we had Jerry Seinfeld on for an episode…” There were a handful of Mad About You/Friends crossovers, too, notably in the shared presence of Lisa Kudrow. Two years before Friends, she was cast on Mad About You as a mean waitress named Ursula. “I remember Lisa saying one day that she was auditioning for a new show,” Reiser says. “I asked her what it was about and she said, ‘it’s six friends who live in the same building and hang out in the same coffee shop.’ I go, ‘well, that doesn’t sound like anything, but good luck with it!’ Shows how much I know…” Kudrow asked to keep recurring on Mad About You, so both series ended up “sharing” Ursula, who became the estranged twin sister of Kudrow’s Friends character Phoebe.

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Despite its success, Mad About You didn’t come to define Reiser. If anything, it’s Aliens that served as an unexpected blueprint for his second act in showbusiness – in recent years he’s played a cocaine-addled executive in Prime Video’s ribald superhero series The Boys, and a cranky country club bruiser in the cult comedy Red Oaks. Then there’s Stranger Things, which returns for a fifth season next year that he may or may not be in (“Netflix have my home address, it would go badly if I say anything”). He’s grateful for how his career has shaken out.

“The actors that registered for me as a kid were the ones who could do it all – be funny, and be heartbreaking, and be scary,” he says. “Alan Arkin – nobody funnier, nobody more frightening… Peter Falk… Jack Lemmon… Tom Hanks. And I think Aliens opened the door for me to do that sort of thing, too. I don’t need to be funny all the time, you know?”

As long as the kids know that he can, I suppose.

‘The Problem with People’ is in cinemas from 8 November