Growing pains
Michelle Byrne speaks to Jon Cryer, the hyperactive star of the hit US sitcom Two and a Half Men, about the brat pack, babies and being jobless.
‘I don’t feel like a repressed guy, which I think Alan definitely is,’ says Jon Cryer, talking about the uptight character he has played in the US sitcom Two and a Half Men for the past three years. It’s a point his behaviour betrays without any need for words. Swinging his arms around elaborately to emphasise his every point, shifting hyperactively in his seat, crossing and uncrossing his legs more times than we can count, before jumping up with almost childlike excitement at questions he clearly enjoys answering, he is every inch the performer.‘
I dress much better than Alan, that’s for sure, but he has more hair than me, so I guess he wins that battle,’ he continues. You know, he is a part of me, that sort of guy that has been thwarted all of his life. While I act like a clown, he responds by shutting down and closing up – there are much more similarities than differences. We also look very similar,’ he says pausing for the expected laughter – which usually arrives from Two and Half Men’s live audience – and the cue cards of course. Thousands of miles from the sitcom’s LA set in a cramped London hotel suite he demands the attention of the small, stuffy room – and despite being acutely aware that he could easily spill his steaming hot cup of coffee in our laps at any given second, we find ourselves submitting to his infectious enthusiasm.
For the uninitiated Two and Half Men is a comedy that sees two fully-grown brothers (Malibu bachelor Charlie Harper played by Charlie Sheen, and control freak Alan Harper played by Cryer) living together in a Malibu beach house with Cryer’s onscreen son (played by the adorably cute 12-year-old Angus T. Jones). ‘He’s a guy I know and I can do him very easily,’ Cryer admits before continuing slightly more seriously, ‘for me, the first season of the show was very autobiographical because I was going through a divorce just as the show was happening. So every day I would show up for work, having gone through an argument over whether I was going to see my son. I would go into the show and be having an argument about when I was going to see my son. While I was grateful to have something to go to every day, it was not doing a very good job of keeping my mind off my troubles’.
‘But,’ he continues, ‘they have an episode in the third season (currently showing on the Super Comedy channel) where my character has a nervous breakdown, so I thought: ok, things could be worse.’ Born of actor parents in New York City, Cryer found mainstream fame in ’80s brat pack movie Pretty in Pink, alongside Molly Ringwald, as well as starring with Charlie Sheen in ’90s spoof Hot Shots!. ‘The first time we worked together, Charlie was straight out of rehab,’ recalls Cryer. ‘My experience with him had always been different from the sort of classic Charlie Sheen experience. He and I went to Las Vegas (to promote Hot Shots!) and I was like, I’m going to Vegas with Charlie Sheen, it’s going to be awesome! And he slept. He slept. I was gambling, and he slept. We don’t have a whole heck of a lot in common, other than we had theatre parents and he and I both grew up loving sitcoms.’
His role in Superman IV also turned out quite differently than he imagined: ‘Blissfully that has sunk to obscurity now, but Superman IV was a blast to do, because that was back before CGI special effects,’ he says. ‘The first shot we did was Chris Reeve flying and picking Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) and I up in an open top car – so they actually hooked up a plane to a car and wired Chris Reeve underneath it, and flew the thing away. It was amazing, but the movie was a mess.’
In fact it was such a mess that it nearly killed Cryer’s career completely. ‘I went two and a half years without a job, before Two and a Half Men, ironically, happened,’ he says mournfully. ‘That was really shocking, because I hadgrown up as an actor in America, I started getting jobs when I was 18, straight out of acting school. It was just non-stop for 15 years, then all of a sudden, it dried up. I had three weeks of work total out of two and a half years. My son had just been born and I was petrified,’ he says. Which is perhaps why he is so enthusiastic about Two and a Half Men and proceeds to wax lyrical about how great it is to be working as Sheen’s sidekick in the sitcom, for the next ten minutes.
With a host of awards in the Two and a Half Men trophy cabinet (including the 2004 People’s Choice Award), are we likely to be seeing the sitcom on our screens for the next decade, a la Everybody Loves Raymond – and what happens when Angus isn’t half a man anymore? ‘The feeling was that the show would go until Jake left for college, which is eight years from now,’ says Cryer. ‘But his character has proven so lazy that he might not ever get there. People were worried about what happens when he’s not cute any more. And I think the writers are looking forward to that in many respects, because they want to deal with the changes he goes through as a teenager. And, you know, just let Angus be Angus and deal with that. Instead of people feeling like there’s a time limit we’ve got on it, that actually it’s just going to let the show grow more.’
So will the Harpers all live happily ever after? ‘Well, a lot of bad things happen to Alan in season three (he has a nervous breakdown and breaks his fingers being just two examples). And that’s what makes it fun. But good things too, actually something that’s a lot of fun happens in the season finale, but I won’t tell you what. The writers have really done a great job,’ he says almost brimming over with pride. ‘The reasons Two and a Half Men is doing well is that it’s an old school, no apologies sitcom’, Cryer says as if he’s speaking with the fast forward button on. ‘We’re not reinventing the wheel, we’re not doing anything gimmicky at all, we’re just doing it the way we always wanted to.’
Two and a Half Men, Super Comedy, 22:30 on Thursdays.