Friday, May 21, 2004
The actor hopes his new series will stay afloat.
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
NEW YORK -- One sidekick stint, several movie roles and a canceled sitcom later, Andy Richter still wants to be on TV.
"I fully understand the reality of the business of television," says Richter.
His last show, "Andy Richter Controls the Universe," was canned last year.
But June 16, the former couch-cohort of late-night's Conan O'Brien returns to Fox as a TV dad on "Quintuplets."
From the restaurant at the Ritz hotel, the cherubic-faced 37-year-old dips his toast in egg yolks, pinky raised -- and talks about being a TV star.
"You are not making gourmet food. You're making cheeseburgers," he says.
"I'm fine with that, I just want to make good cheeseburgers. I don't want to make a lousy cardboard, lukewarm imitation."
New material
For fans hungry for a taste of Richter's funny fare before the June series is served, he opened in two movies recently.
In Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen's "New York Minute," Richter plays the adopted son of a Chinese crime family. Attempting a broad Chinese accent, Richter uses martial arts and street smarts to capture the twins, who possess a coveted microchip of pirated music.
"The first day they filmed, the studio freaked out, worried that it was some sort of racist portrayal," says Richter.
Sarcastically, he says his inspiration came from the now-maligned 1930s character Charlie Chan, who was played in yellow-face most famously by Swedish-born actor Warner Oland.
"People can be offended, but if the character was of Scandinavian descent and the adopted son of the Irish mafia and spoke with a brogue, nobody would complain.
"What's the difference?"
In "Seeing Other People," a romantic comedy staring Jay Mohr, Richter plays the sensitive milk-drinking foil to his oversexed buddies played by Mohr and Josh Charles.
"I don't have the shelf-like abs to get those Ashton Kutcher, younger single roles," says Richter. "If I'm single in something now, it's as the loser single."
The real Richter
Richter is not a loser single in real life. The actor from Yorkville, Ill., lives in Los Angeles with wife, Sarah, and their 3-year-old son, Willy.
Richter has worked steadily since ditching his seven-year stint on "Late Night With Conan O'Brien" in 2000, but he still has to deal with the belief that he plays second fiddle better than any other type of role.
"They're slowly getting the idea, 'Oh, you're not an idiot,'" he says. "Initially, it was a bit patronizing, like, 'Oh, you have something to say? How cute that you weigh in like that.'"
Richter attributes some of this attitude to the failure of "Universe," which got great reviews.
"I felt the show was completely hamstrung by some people in charge who didn't either understand it or didn't like it and didn't give it a chance," says Richter.
In his mind, the show never overcame poor advertising by Fox, inconsistent scheduling and a mid-season start.
"They put you on an ice floe, then push you into the Arctic Ocean and they say, 'Hope you survive! See you later!'"
Richter has his fingers crossed for "Quintuplets," which will air after the second edition of the Paris Hilton reality show "The Simple Life."
"It's like all of these trains are leaving the station," he says. "First, you're lucky to get on one. But you have no idea where it's going.
"Either it ends in the middle of nowhere, or it keeps going and going and it's great."