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Talking with ‘Boy Who Loved Batman’ actor Dan Fogler
New York actor Dan Fogler is in Tampa this month, playing comic book obsessive – and eventual Hollywood film producer – Michael Uslan in The Boy Who Loved Batman. The new play is being workshopped at the Jaeb Theatre, part of the David A. Straz Center complex, in anticipation of a run on London’s West End and, hopefully, Broadway.
Read Michael Uslan’s story here.
The stage is familiar territory for Fogler, who originated the role of William “Magic Foot” Barfee in the musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, taking the Tony Award for Best Actor in 2005.
Since then, his career trajectory has taken him through a handful of successful but mostly forgettable comedies (Balls of Fury, Fanboys, Good Luck Chuck) and, recently, plum roles: Jacob Kowalski in Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts films, parts in The Walking Dead (Luke) and The Goldbergs (Marvin), and as Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola in the critically-acclaimed miniseries The Offer.
This Christmas, Fogler plays Bob Dylan’s legendary manager Albert Grossman in writer/director James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown.
For now, he’s at the Straz Center, playing Michael Uslan as a 7-year-old, a high schooler, a college student and a full adult. And having a great time.
St. Pete Catalyst: OK, so why are you in Tampa workshopping a play?
Dan Fogler: I had Michael on my podcast about a year ago, and he brought up that they were planning this, and I said ‘Give me a call. I’d love to have a shot.’ I didn’t know what it was going to be, I thought it just sounded really cool. And now here we are in Tampa, in hurricane season. I’m used to doing workshops like this. It’s how I got into the Broadway scene, I don’t know any other way, basically, because when we workshopped Spelling Bee into a musical we went to Great Barrington, in New York State. And so it was the opposite – it was freezing!
Did the whole comic book-nerd universe hold any particular interest for you?
I love comic books, that’s how I basically learned how to read. So I’m kindred spirits with Michael in that sense. And it’s fun to tell the story. Like Jack Nicholson is my favorite actor, and I get to tell the tale of how Michael opened up the newspaper and saw an ad for The Shining, and said “Holy shit – that’s my Joker!’ I get to tell that onstage, and if you’re a fanboy like I am it’s just super-cool.
And you wrote a graphic novel?
Yeah, I got a couple of graphic novels: Moon Lake, which is like my R-rated Twilight Zone; and then I have Brooklyn Gladiator, which is my dystopian sci-fi graphic novel – and I have the prequel to that, Fish Kill, which is like a modern noir with a little bit of sci-fi sprinkled in.
When I was a kid, I thought I could draw, but I never excelled past my talents from high school. I wish I could draw like these guys: I got to work with some of my favorite heroes from the pencil world.
“Spelling Bee,” 2004. Publicity photo.
Spelling Bee was the launching pad for you. That’s been 20 years now – how do you look back on it?
It’s crazy that was 20 years ago. They’re celebrating it next year at the Kennedy Center. It’s a wakeup call (laughing) – ‘Dan, you’ve been in this business for 20 years!’ I’m very proud of the journey, and it was an amazing start: Spelling Bee, I created that character when it was just an improv show. And we took it all the way from off-off-Broadway to Broadway. Then I won a Tony Award! And that’s what kicked open all the doors for Hollywood, TV and everything.
So to have a character that I created, who was basically an amalgamation of crazy times that I had growing up as a kid, is really fulfilling and surreal.
Here I am, 20 years later, and I’m right back doing the workshop, right back onstage. And doing kind of an homage to that original character, in Michael. Because he is also this eccentric kind of genius.
Like Coppola – same thing, man, he’s a shade of that original character. The original archetype when I stepped on Broadway. It’s that uber-thinker, the uber-nerd, whatever that is.
Are you getting typecast now? Is that what you’re saying?
(Laughing) I don’t mind! I don’t f-ing mind! These are great, great roles. And I will play that as long as I possibly can. If you said to me ‘Dan, you’re going to play a biographical character,’ I’d be like ‘Who is it? Is it Belushi? Is it Sam Kinison?’ Because these are the roles that have been tossed around.
But then to say ‘It’s going to be Coppola,’ I’m like ‘What? …. OK …’ I guess that’s my first lesson. And I realized that when you do these characters, you’re like ‘I see … I guess I do kind of look like him.’
But at the end of the day, you boil it down, it’s just like that original Mr. Barfee character, he’s got the glasses, and the hair’s to the side, Gene Wilder hair, basically.
As Francis Ford Coppola in “The Offer.” Photo: Nicole Wilder/Paramount+.
So how do you embody somebody who’s real, without doing an impersonation?
That’s a tricky thing – you don’t want to do an impersonation. So I try to do like: The clone is grown out of my initial DNA. My initial foundation. I don’t know what he (Coppola) was thinking during certain times, but I could recall from times in my own life when I was hungry and I was trying to make things for nothing, and had a lot of opposition.
But of course there’s so much to watch on him. So what I did was, I looked at all the things that were similar about me that were similar about him. The cadence in his voice is already kind of ingrained in me – it’s that New York, east coast.
And I watched (the documentary) Hearts of Darkness immediately after I watched Apocalypse Now, and when you watch him in that it’s just an amazing character study. And there’s footage of when he was making his first movie, and then of course there’s all the documentary footage that’s behind the scenes of The Godfather.
And one of the most amazing things that’s out there is notebook that he had for The Godfather. We had the replica on set. And just having that in my hands, where he cut out pages from the novel and made kind of a ‘look book’ out of it, and then in the margins are all of his thoughts – casting ideas and anxieties – I had all that for homework.
In “Fantastic Beasts.” Photo: Warner Bros.
So the ‘What happens in airports’ question: What do people recognize you most from? Fantastic Beasts? The Offer? The Walking Dead? Balls of Fury?
There’s a lot of Balls of Fury fans out there. There are people that see me, and they know they know me – and then they ask me to figure out how they know me. And then I play a game where I look at them and go ‘Is this a Balls of Fury person, or a Fanboys person, or is this a Fantastic Beasts person?’ It’s a fun game!
I go to these Comic Cons and I do these signings, and it’s cool – I got people coming up dressed like characters I’ve done! It’s surreal. Man, I signed up for this, so I gotta enjoy it, you know?
You’ve got several bay area actors in the cast with you, including Katherine Yacko, who plays Michael’s wife Nancy, plus Hugh Timony, Kelly Bashar and Nick Hoop. How’s it all going?
You never know what you’ve signed on for. My philosophy, you’ve got to make the person you’re acting with, your acting partner, look good. Just listen and project onto them whatever you need to make the scene feel right for you.
And thank God, everyone’s super professional. Katherine, I love her laugh, my God! The audiences are eating her up – she’s getting lots of laughs. And the chemistry there is good; that’s such an important throughline, their romance. So that’s working great.
Hugh is great – he plays many characters in the show, including my dad. Great chemistry there. And it’s like you really can’t go wrong. Nick is fun – he’s getting a lot of laughs, too. Kelly plays my mom, and she’s hysterical. She’s getting some of the biggest laughs.
It’s a funny show. And there are moments where it’s heartbreaking. He has a roller coaster of a journey.
And it’s what I’ve been wanting, for a long time, to get back onstage.
For The Boy Who Loved Batman information and tickets, click here.
