Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
On ABC’s Speechless, the DiMeo family have been bad neighbors, good paintballers, and ingenious at Halloween costumes, and it all comes on top of the fact that oldest son J.J. has cerebral palsy, gets around in a wheelchair, and communicates using a word board. It’s a balance that has kept Speechless light and lively over its first handful of episodes, a combination of cock-eyed comedy and genuine heart that’s earned the show a full-season pickup from ABC. It helps to have an Oscar-nominee like Minnie Driver as the full-steam-ahead advocate mom at the center of the show, but among the many joys of Speechless was discovering what a true ensemble family comedy the show was going to be. Of particular value has been John Ross Bowie as DiMeo family patriarch Jimmy. Opposite Driver’s Maya as a hair-trigger ready to go off at any second in defense of her special-needs son, Jimmy’s unflappability would seem cartoonish were it not for Bowie’s reserves of humanity and warmth that he deploys like pellet-gun shots of kindness to the gut.
If Bowie looks familiar to you, he should. With more than a dozen movies and appearances on over 50 TV series, you’ve almost certainly noticed him before. Perhaps as the FBI agent who gets shown up by Sandra Bullock at the beginning of The Heat; or as Sheldon’s bete noir Kripke on The Big Bang Theory. He’s been the secret weapon of Speechless so far, and a big reason why that show is the best new TV series of the fall.
We spoke with Bowie over the phone last week, shortly after the Speechless Halloween episode aired.
Decider.com: How do you describe the show to people who are unfamiliar with it?
John Ross Bowie: Well, it’s funny. I am very careful about how I describe the show. The show is an extremely funny comedy about a family of limited means that moves to a terrible house in a really nice neighborhood just so they can get their kids into a good school. One of the kids has cerebral palsy, he’s in a wheelchair, and communicates through a word board attached to the chair. And I usually save that for the last part of the description because nobody working on this show wants it to just be the show with the kid in the wheelchair. We are making a comedy first and foremost. And we’re really proud of the kind of comedy we’re in, and it’s smart and it’s occasionally moving. But, I watched our Halloween episode last night and I laughed out loud at stuff I knew was coming. Which is honestly not vanity because I am completely capable of watching something I’m on and just holding my head in my hands with just deep regret and shame but Speechless is really funny!
How did the show come about for you? Was the project well along in it’s development by the time you heard about it or was Minnie Driver already attached?
It’s really interesting. Keep in mind that I’m an auditioning journeyman actor, so I don’t think go into pilot season with a stack of scripts in front of me thinking, “Huh, which one of these offers shall I accept?” It’s more like, “Oh, maybe I can get an audition for a couple of these then we’ll see what happens.” So what happened was, really early on I started to hear about the show before I’d actually read the script. And I was hearing about it from some of my actor friends [similar to] exactly what we were just talking about. That sort of sense of “Oh, here’s this weekly after-school special that ABC is trying to shove down our throat,” and I kept thinking there’s a way to do a show like that where it’s really smart and funny. And I was familiar with Scott [Silveri’s] work, and I had actually really enjoyed his show, Go On, that he’d done a few years ago. Which was Matthew Perry as a widower, do you remember that?
I remember it, yep.
And that was not, on paper, the strongest content for a comedy but I thought it worked really well and had a fun absurdist streak running through it. So, it was one of those scripts that, as we say in the business, is “execution dependent.” You do it wrong and it’s a treacly disaster. You do it properly, you’ve got something really interesting and novel. So I got an audition really early on for the project. And I went in, I felt good about it, and they very understandably said, “We love John, but we really need to figure out who the mom is,” and that took them two months or something. I mean they were really just scouring to find who could fit this role of this very aggressive child advocate, who is also incredibly likable. It was funny, initially the script was supposed to take place in Yonkers which which is where Scott Silveri grew up. And the emphasis was on the First Ward and the character then was working class, and those qualities don’t automatically lead you to Minnie Driver. But, they were fishing around and they were having trouble finding the actress, and it was getting to a point where the network was like, “We might actually have to postpone this,” and they reached out to Minnie, and she was just kind of a lock for the part. And by that time the location had moved to Southern California, so we wouldn’t have to pretend that Southern California was Yonkers. Minnie’s a mom in real life, and as all moms, she is a serious advocate for her kid, and she really responded to the material. Then I went in and read with her — I had known her anyway, I had played her boss on About a Boy — and we clicked together really well.
That’s very cool. I’m very impressed that they didn’t have her do an American accent for the show. That they just let her speak how she normally speaks and let the audience figure it out.
It’s interesting, there was a time before we even table read, I think, where she was doing her perfectly solid American accent, but there’s something about how comfortable she is with the comedy when she’s speaking in her native British dialect that just made the words pop off the page. And since then they started writing for her, so where Maya might have once said, “hey” she now says “oi,” little flourishes like that, that play to Minnie’s strengths. I have to say, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her get to let loose in a comedy as much as she’s getting to do on Speechless. She’s really in her zone, and she’s really having fun embracing this … I don’t want to say broadness, ’cause it’s not a particularly broad show, but there’s something aggressively funny about that character, and she’s really taken to it.
It’s really wonderful to watch. I feel like an underrated aspect of the show, and you mentioned it earlier, is that the DiMeos are not this particularly well-off family. And the show doesn’t shy away from that, but it doesn’t really roll around in it either.
It’s interesting, the show doesn’t dwell on the family’s economic woes because when you’ve got economic woes, you can’t dwell on them, you don’t really have that luxury. So, you know, the show deals with the family aggressively using coupons and hustling to make an early bird special and things like that without getting mired in self pity. That said, it’s really fun to see a sitcom that takes place at such an incredibly shitty house. I mean, the set is so dingy, it’s hilarious because I’ll make myself an iced coffee at the little catering table, and I’ll take it onto the set and I’ll just put it down on the coffee table and it doesn’t matter. It’s a hot set but I can use my coffee, and put it on the table, and leave a ring, and it doesn’t matter. If I did that on Big Bang Theory, I would be lectured off the lot by a Warner Brothers security guard, they’d take me to a river, and put two in the back of my head. Everything is so pristine on every set I go to, and the DiMeo house is such a lived-in shithole, I love it.
And the show has drawn attention to that, in the early episodes. That’s also the tone of the comedy within the family. There’s one point in the second episode where Jimmy sort of lays it out when he’s talking to Dylan [Kyla Kennedy as the youngest DiMeo daughter] about the Dimeo family philosophy of, “We’re not jerks, we’re idiots.” And I felt like that sort of summed it up really well. Did that kind of give you guys a guideline of where you were going to take the family?
Well, that kind of piggybacked onto a couple of other things in the way they’re promoting the show. We’ve done a couple photo shoots where it’s the family with leather jackets, leaning up against a wall looking like the Ramones. The idea was to pay homage to the Ramones, which I am 100 percent behind, but it was to play up the idea of the Dimeos as rock stars who play by their own rules. And they play by their own rules because they have their hands full. They are of modest means, they have a child living with a disability, and they don’t necessarily have time for the niceties that a lot of people take for granted. That streak of rebellion is something really fun to play, and that episode was a total blast. I love the very subtle nuance of making sure that Dylan doesn’t prank the neighbors. We’re not aggressively mean, we’re just setting expectations nice and low.
Working in the family-sitcom realm — which feels like it’s own thing, even apart from other types of sitcoms — for a while there it felt like sitcom dads were getting a really bad rap. Where the sitcom dad didn’t know how to do anything and was always getting put upon and would shrug his way through whatever plot. And it feels like as of late, shows are actively trying to go against that. And I think that Jimmy and Maya’s relationship in Speechless is a good example of countering that, where they’re both weird in their own way. And they both get to have an equal share of the comedy and the funny bits without the husband being a dummy and the wife having to put up with him.
Scott and I talked immediately, like the night I booked the gig, right before the table read, we got on the phone and we talked and did a crash course on “Who is this guy?” because I got the job and started work the very next day. I was the last part to be cast. And we talked about how we wanted to steer clear of the sitcom trope of the dad who is cowed by the wife, or the dad who is consistently hiding things from the wife, the dad who gets all the jokes while the wife is just the eye-rolling straight woman, those were a few things we wanted to avoid. The marriage feels like a real partnership, and I say that as somebody who’s married. There is just something very authentic about the way these people divide labor, and support each other, and are very much figuring out as they move along. It’s funny, I got a tweet last night that was a pretty standard issue obnoxious tweet, where somebody on Twitter said that they love the show but they felt that the husband and wife had more of a brother/sister than husband/wife chemistry. And I would have let the whole thing slide, except that he ended the tweet with “Fix!” which made it immediately necessary to publicly ridicule him. He was fine, he was going to get away with it until he closed with tweet with “Fix!” as if we’ve got nothing better do with our time than to structure our careers based on this guy’s notes, him and his 15 followers. I just posted the tweet on Instagram with the caption “Twitter!” and, you know, this is what you pay for. Everyone gets a voice — oh no! Everyone’s got a voice! What everybody articulated for me was the fact that this is a couple that has been married for minimum 15 years, they have 3 children, limited means, and one of their kids uses the wheelchair and needs assistance going to the bathroom. … I can curse on Decider, right? You’ll just bleep it out or whatever?
I’ll bold it and capitalize it, it’s fine.
A marriage like this, 15 years in, it’s probably not going to be a non-stop fuck-fest. Even if we weren’t on network TV, it would not be realistic for these people to be pawing at each other like prom king and queen. And what we heard – the guy obviously apologized on Twitter for it – but I heard from so many people who were like no this marriage feels completely accurate, it feels like a partnership, it feels like people who love each other but just do not have the energy or means to show it all the time, and it brought something up that I thought was really interesting about people’s expectations of what TV marriage should look like. And I feel like the TV marriages that I have looked at and admired over the years, I’m thinking of like, I can’t think of the character’s names but Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton on Friday Night Lights. I thought they just nailed marriage. I looked at that and I said, “Yeah, that makes sense.” And I think the marriage on black-ish works really well. I watch that chemistry and I watch the way they butt heads and what they butt heads about to be very authentic and thoughtful, and there’s not a whiff of Ralph Kramden in any of it. I’m not going to go so far, we’re only 10 episodes in, so I’m not going to put us in with the pantheon of great TV marriages but I like what we’re doing and I like what we’re saying.
So, our site, Decider, focuses on TV and movies that are on streaming, and you have a very impressive list of TV credits under your belt. Pre-Speechless, you’ve done episodes here and there of some really great sitcoms and other TV — Glee, Party Down, Veep, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Happy Endings, Children’s Hospital — could you pick one or two episodes that you really loved doing, or you’re really proud of, to say “Oh, go seek that out and find it on streaming and watch it”?
I’m on my phone, I can’t look up my own IMDB page. I did a Curb Your Enthusiasm where my wife [actress Jamie Denbo] and I auditioned together, and we booked it together, and we played Jamie and John, who were neighbors of Larry’s. It’s a very interesting episode, and it was really funny, and it happens to deal with people in wheelchairs and our perceptions around them and how able-bodied people tend to congratulate themselves by being friends with people who use wheelchairs. It’s ten years old at this point, but in the context of my current job, it’s a really interesting episode to look at.
[Stream Curb Your Enthusiasm’s “Denise Handicapped” on HBO GO.]
I’m completely and totally proud of my Big Bang Theory work; I’ve had a total blast doing that show over the years, coming in and out like — perhaps I flatter myself — like that show’s Newman. I’m in the very final episode of Party Down which is notable because the cast was just a murderer’s row, I mean what a cast! And on top of that, it’s the only time I’ve ever sort of thrown a punch on TV.
[Stream Party Down‘s “Constance Carmell Wedding” on Hulu.]
Oh, very nice. Congratulations!
I am usually neither a lover nor a fighter, just a guy. And, so, I punched Ken Marino on that show, and it was very hard to shoot. I love Ken, he’s an old friend, I didn’t want to offend him. Oh, and I did a House of Lies episode in their first season where I had two great moments. One where I dressed-down Don Cheadle in this incredible monologue that they wrote, and I also play a foot fetishist who sucked on Kristen Bell’s feet. She was an awfully good sport about it, too. Not every actor would have been as cool about that but she was super game, and whenever I’ve run into her since then she’d, in a very friendly fashion, waved her foot at me.
[Stream House of Lies‘ “Microphallus” on Showtime Anytime.]
So what can we expect from the DiMeos coming up on upcoming episodes? I see there’s a Thanksgiving episode in a few weeks.
The Thanksgiving episode we have coming up, it’s really fun because Rob Corddry, who I’ve known for about 20 years, plays my brother on the episode, and we had a total blast working together. And without giving too much away, in the Thanksgiving episode, everything goes so awry we never actually sit down for dinner.
