“The Chair Company” takes viewers on a wild, ridiculously complex ride in the workplace. Along the way, Ron meets a number of odd characters inhabiting the deranged world created by Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin (the voices behind the similarly absurd and surreal sketch series “I Think You Should Leave”).
This presented veteran casting director Gayle Keller with a major challenge: finding largely unknown actors who could believably populate this off-kilter world.
“I kind of had a sense of the oddity of Tim, but you read these character descriptions like ‘Denthead’ and stuff like that and you’re just like, ‘OK, I have to find a guy with a dent in his head?’” Keller recalled. “For every role, we saw a lot of people because they didn’t really know it until they saw it.”
The role of Denthead (a bar patron with an indented head whom Ron repeatedly sees dunking his sleeve into a bowl of soup) eventually went to Douglas Bennett, one of many relatively obscure character actors who come together in a mosaic of peculiarity within “The Chair Company.”
There are a few familiar faces in the show besides Robinson’s, including Lou Diamond Phillips, Jim Downey and Sophia Lillis. Keller also tapped Lake Bell as Ron’s wife, Barb—a role she called particularly difficult to cast.
“Tim wanted somebody who had this feel that they weren’t necessarily from the coast,” Keller said. “They weren’t an L.A. person or a New York person; they were a Midwest person. Lake doesn’t necessarily fit that bill initially. It was purely her skill as an actor, her being so realistic, so grounded, not trying to do any acting acting.”
Keller learned years ago that realism can be an important asset for a comic actor. She has picked up three Emmy nominations, including two for the FX dark comedy “Louie.” There, the casting director (who frequently works in the genre) discovered that “you want these people to just be as real as possible. The comedy comes out of that reality.” For “The Chair Company,” she scouted improv troupes for performers capable of maintaining reality within Robinson and Kanin’s surreality.
“You’re not creating a joke and making it funny,” Keller said of improv. “You’re living in the moment of some situation that’s thrown at you and then making it funny.”
The audition process was a bit of an improv exercise in its own right, with Keller throwing a sea of unknown actors into some of the show’s many strange scenes to see how they handled it. It was a trial by fire, meant to help find people with a certain “it” factor Robinson and Kanin were looking for.
“Tim and Zach really do like the way people look,” she said. “I don’t want to say the acting’s secondary, because it is really important, but the look is really important to them. Zach and Tim are just so clued into this writing that if they saw an audition and they could do that scene that was written in the audition, they just took leaps of faith.”
One giant leap of faith came in the casting for Mike Santini, one of the show’s primary characters. Keller needed to thread the needle for Mike, a weirdo loner who leads Ron through the seedy underworld of furniture-related crime (when he’s not busy watching “A Christmas Carol” porn or listening to The Jerky Boys–influenced comedy tapes). She searched for someone able to portray a “really odd, aggressive and maybe dangerous guy” who also has “some sweetness to him that you’re trying to find through the porn and all the other craziness that he’s involved in.”
Thankfully, through her many casting sessions in New York over the decades, she became acquainted with one local performer who had yet to score his big break: 76-year-old Joseph Tudisco.
“What a great gift to get if you’re an actor of a certain age and you’ve never had such a leading role. Now he’s got all this attention,” Keller said. “HBO loved him, the boys obviously loved him, so it’s just a happy thing when you find an actor that just fits a part that everyone’s really thrilled about and is not that known. That’s an exciting thing about being a casting person. You want to make those discoveries. You want to give someone a career. You want to give someone a shot.”
This story first ran in the Comedy Series issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
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