It’s not “Science Fiction.”
Barry Bostwick, who played Brad Majors in the cult classic “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” campaigned for Richard Nixon as a child.
“I grew up in a political family,” the actor, 76, told Page Six in a recent interview. “My father was Congressman J. Arthur Younger’s campaign manager — very Republican.
“I was doing parades for Nixon, all this kind of stuff,” he continued. “I stood in front of the train station and handed out flyers for every Republican running for something in San Francisco from 1955 to 1960.”
Bostwick said his father, Henry “Bud” Bostwick, was even going to run for office himself, but former child star Shirley Temple entered the race and “got all the money.”
Perhaps because of his background, the California-born actor is loath to discuss politics.
“I’m not against people having a point of view against all that I will have it privately, but I don’t think I would actually be able to change the world with who I thought was an a–hole, besides me,” he jokingly added.
Bostwick is proud to have starred in the 1975 musical, which also featured Tim Curry and Susan Sarandon, but feels that a lot of the show’s original darkness has been diluted in subsequent revivals.
“With each new production of the ‘Rocky Horror’ show that I see now, it just gets sillier and cartoony,” he explained. “There’s a really dark underbelly to that show that they don’t explore, I think, quite as much.”
Bostwick said the same thing has happened to “Grease,” in which he starred as the original Danny Zuko on Broadway.
“‘Grease’ was originally a very sort of dark musical done in a church basement in Chicago, and then it was brought to New York and really cleaned up,” he pointed out. “It got a little more cotton candy. The movie was even brighter and more silliness. It lost its edge that I think some of us brought to it in its early days. It was based on two real gangs that existed.”
Bostwick, who won a Tony for “The Robber Bridegroom,” is also known for his role as New York Mayor Randall Winston in “Spin City” opposite Charlie Sheen, whom he said exhibited none of his later “tiger blood” behavior.
“Oh no, he was normal!” Bostwick exclaimed. “He was getting his Zone Diet food delivered every day, and he was doing yoga, and he was totally focused and wanted to learn the sitcom genre.
“And [what] a great way to do it, to walk into an ensemble that had been doing it for four years and were incredibly talented as a whole. He had Mike [Michael J. Fox] to mentor him and all of us to ease him into it. I think that if he hadn’t done ‘Spin City,’ I don’t think ‘Two and a Half Men’ would have been successful.”
Bostwick is currently involved in a crowd-funding campaign for Viral Vignettes, a series of short comedies starring various celebs which began during the COVID-19 pandemic to raise money for The Actors Fund.
Producer David Levin is attempting to turn the series into a movie or TV show, and fans who pony up a decent contribution have the opportunity to act opposite Bostwick.
The genial actor is game for performing with amateur thespians.
“I’m a bit of a man whore 24 hours a day,” he cheekily noted. “It’s something different. I just think it’s interesting, and I’ve worked with a lot of good actors and a lot of bum actors, so how bad can this be?”
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