Good People: The Clark Brandon Interview (part 2)

Last month, I was able to sit down via Skype with Clark Brandon, the actor who played Eddie, Jo’s boyfriend, in four Facts episodes in seasons two, three, and five. My biggest takeaway is that Clark Brandon is good people. Since he was nice enough to speak to me for a long time, there’s a lot of content! Therefore I’m posting it in three parts. Part 1, discussing his early career and how he came to be on Facts, is published here. What follows is Part 2: Jo and Eddie would have been a great show!

VO: Your next episode was an episode called “Sweet Sorrow,” where Eddie comes back and Jo is involved in a simulated marriage project with a Bates boy. I don’t know if you remember this about the “Sweet Sorrow” episode, but one of the recurring jokes in the episode was about Blair’s simulated husband, who was named Waldo Wilbur, and they made fun of him for having two first names. Did that bother you at all?

Why, ‘cause I have two first names?

VO: Exactly.

I actually have two last names! Clark is my mother’s maiden name. Jokes aside, nothing like that ever affected me. I was pretty human. I don’t have perfect teeth, I’ve never really liked my whole…thing. I didn’t like my face.

VO: You should read my blog more often. You’ll learn to appreciate your appearance from my perspective.

I will! I’ll go back whenever I need to build my confidence! But yeah I was laid back, and part of it was that I had low self-esteem, so it was hard being in the spotlight all the time. Not horrible, but I think a quality of being an actor, and certainly a successful one, is liking a lot of attention, in a good and healthy way. Why I’m in a school, or why I loved directing when I switched careers, is that I like the energy going out from me. Acting is a place where energy comes a lot at you. And I just wasn’t that type. I would much rather give than receive in life. So I tried to be super-normal, even though I was in my twenties, and they used to say I swaggered a lot, and my shirt was always unbuttoned. I admit it, I probably would hate myself if I met myself now. But I was healthy. I had no ego, really. People thought I did, but I was just confident. I was just having fun. I was an actor.

VO: At the end of the “Sweet Sorrow” episode, Eddie and Jo decide to see other people after realizing that they’ve grown apart. What was Eddie thinking or feeling at that time?

Eddie was weird, because you didn’t know if Eddie was really sincere. He had a lot of layers of schtick. I thought people were very sympathetic to Eddie, even though he was sort of a dog, right? If you remember, I was already dating, or married or something?

VO: Oh, we’ll get there.

OK. But he always had a little of that in him. And so it was a fine balance as an actor, to take that sort of doggish personality and also make that likable. And to make that an innocent kind of scamming and not pervy stuff. That was a challenge for me, and it was even magnified somewhat because my age difference made it sort of pervy anyway! So I really worked hard to make Eddie likable even though at times he was scamming her or two-timing or being less than sincere. A lot of it was, though, that Nancy and I genuinely liked each other, so a lot of that crept into the sob-story, the unhappy ending. There was something genuine about it. I think that helped me with that role, and not to be just this smarmy guy.

VO: In a lot of my recaps, I refer to Eddie as “dumb.” Do you think that’s accurate?

Oh yeah! But in a charming way. He’s a bluffer, but he doesn’t have stuff to bluff, so like when he’s with the Bates boys, he’s always trying to show off. I remember that, saying at one point, a word that I didn’t understand or something. Oh  I remember – it was a menu item.

VO: Yes! “Biftek au champignion” becomes “breakfast o’ champions” for Eddie.

Yeah, Wheaties! So stuff like that is part of his likability, and part of what made him accessible and not just an arrogant prick. I used that as a positive to soften my edges. So I wasn’t all that, I was sort of a knucklehead.

VO: Knucklehead is a good word for him. I might like that better than just dumb.

And maybe just charmingly over his head intellectually.

VO: For sure. So then we get to the “Seems Like Old Times” episode, where Eddie comes back, wearing something besides a sailor suit! Did you appreciate that?

Yes, although if I had to cry it might have been a problem for my emotional performance! [Author’s note: as we learned in part 1, it was indeed in this episode that Clark did the sweat-cry. So I guess he didn’t need the sailor suit, just the peacoat!]

And I got to wear my hair a little longer too. I’d always had to get my hair cut for Eddie, which was sometimes a problem because I was on other shows, so there was a potential continuity issue. What was that episode again?

VO: That was the episode where Eddie comes back, not having seen Jo in two years, and they have an amazing time and are totally still in love and then the bombshell drops that he’s married.

OK, with the Coca-Cola girl.

VO: So how did you feel when you read the script and found out that Eddie was such a shit in this episode?

I don’t know. I don’t think it was a bad thing. I don’t remember having any negative feelings about it. I always knew, and I think it was always set that Jo and Eddie were never going to get together. That was part of the draw, and the drama, when she finds out.

I liked that scene because it was an emotional scene, and I knew that if we were going to continue working together, we would have worked that out, that part of it. And I think Nancy’s character, Jo, wasn’t really resentful or angry about it. She was hurt.

VO: She was mostly hurt about the lying.

Yeah. And she also realized that it wasn’t going to work. So I wasn’t like, “damn.”

VO: After that episode, did anyone react negatively to you, about lying to Jo? I mean, were people on the street pissed off at Clark because Eddie lied to Jo?

No, I think everyone still liked Eddie! I still get great comments about Eddie, and people always gloss that over.

VO: In my recap I referred to Jo’s eventual husband, Rick, as a poor substitute for Eddie, but then I had to remind myself that Eddie lied about the marriage.

Yeah, and that was part of Eddie being over his head, and making bad judgment calls, and sort of being human. And the writing on that show was good. And they handled it well. They didn’t handle it in a Potsie Williams sort of way. And again, credit to Nancy and her acting for those scenes. It may even be that one where I sweat-cried.

VO: What do you think happened to Eddie? Did he work things out with his wife?

Oh, he clearly got divorced immediately. A guy from Brooklyn or whatever Eddie was from –

VO: The Bronx.

Yeah, a guy from the Bronx cannot marry a Coca-Cola heiress. That’s just wrong. In reality. They’re just two different worlds. In fact that’s probably why they had me marry an “heiress” and not a regular normal person. They were probably trying to leave the door open like, “What, are you a fool? You think you’re going to live with a millionaire and you’re Eddie, who fixes motorcycles?” I think that was part of the escape route if they were going to have Jo and Eddie continue. We all talked about that. A Coca-Cola heiress. They did that very deliberately to make it like, “What, are you a moron?”

VO: In the episode he just says she works for Coca-Cola. The way you’re talking about it, though, it’s very clear that at least in your head, she was a millionaire heiress and I think that’s another important piece of background that’s nice to have.

They may have said her pop works for Coca-Cola or something. I just remember that it was not like, “I met this really neat Italian farm girl who cooks and we just have a house and we just manja.” That would have been more realistic than an executive’s kid. I just remember it not being a match that I would assume would continue.

VO: Would you have done a Jo and Eddie spinoff if one had been offered?

Oh, in a heartbeat.I thought Jo and Eddie would have been a great show! Both Nancy and I definitely would have done it. It was talked about, not on a huge level, but they came to me several times and asked about it, and I was always extremely positive. I knew Nancy’s popularity was just insane, and it was fun working with her. I thought it would have been a good young twenties marriage show, which has enormous plot potential. I would have been excited.

Just imagine: a Jo and Eddie spinoff. On the one hand I swoon. On the other hand, it might have been a disaster in the vein of Joanie Loves Chachi, so maybe it’s for the best.

I want to react badly to Clark’s suggestion that a poor boy from the Bronx could never be with a rich corporate girl. That’s exactly the sort of class segregation I work so hard to battle every day. But it’s also sort of true; I know I still feel weird around the lawyers who come from generations of education and money. At most events, I’d rather hang out with the service staff than with the guests. When I found myself at an event with five Article III judges, including two judges from Federal Courts of Appeal, well, it’s a wonder I kept myself together. Oddly enough, I disturbed and offended one Federal District Court judge by what followed when I mentioned this very blog. But I also had one of the Appellate Court judges think I was just the most delightful thing ever, in part because of the blog. Not for nothing, the judge who thought I was weird was a dude and the judge who liked me was a woman.

Tune in tomorrow for the conclusion of Good People: The Clark Brandon Interview, where Clark discusses his life after Facts. We talk about his directing career, his transition to academia, and how in a parallel universe he might have been a star on Friends.