One thing stands out from Christopher Lloyd’s vast and diverse body of work: All of his characters become larger than life when he pulls them off the page and inhabits them. His latest role, as Larry, the grandson of silent film legend Fatty Arbuckle, on “Hacks,” continues that trend and earned him his first Emmy nomination (for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series) in 32 years.
In the nominated episode “Hacks,” Lloyd plays an eccentric who lives in a house surrounded by memorabilia and memories — and a pet falcon. Filmed on location at Andrew McNally’s historic 1887 Queen Anne-style home in Altadena, the nine-bedroom mansion features a three-story rotunda and a birdhouse.
“I don't look for strangers,” Lloyd says of Larry. “I don't want people knocking on the door to sell magazines or anything like that. I maintain my own little island and I do it very happily. He's not a social creature. He gets upset, and if he's in a situation where he can't control things, he starts to stutter. Maybe he grew up in this house and feels safe there.”
Lloyd in “Hacks” (Jake Giles Netter/Max)
The witty, funny, and witty character he delivered in “Hacks” is familiar territory for Lloyd, who made his mark on “Taxi” in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In “Taxi,” Reverend Jim Ignatowski was an eccentric cab driver with a giant heart, an uncomplicated mind, and a greater love of drugs than usual. Although he won two Emmys for the role, sitcoms in general were not the path he originally intended to take.
“There was a kind of stupid prejudice in New York in the early ’60s or mid-’60s that going to Hollywood and doing a sitcom was like selling your soul,” Lloyd tells Variety. “Certainly, if you were a serious actor and a real actor, you wouldn’t seek out sitcoms.” He was a theater guy but ventured to Los Angeles anyway—“but with a little bit of that attitude.” Once in LA, he let his agent know about his sitcom stance, who scheduled him to audition for sitcoms every now and then, just to meet casting directors. “You never know when it might be important,” Lloyd recalls his agent saying. One of those times led to him appearing in Taxi.
“I loved the role as soon as I read it,” he recalls. Before he was offered the role in season two, he went to the set to watch the actors work together. “I thought, ‘These guys are amazing. In New York, you always hear about the perfect theater. [which] “My goal was to start a band. And I thought, ‘This is right there in front of me. It’s perfect.’ And I never changed my feelings about it. I thought it was a great band. I was happy to be a part of it. I thought, ‘This isn’t going to go sideways. This is a good thing.’ So I got over my reservations about sitcoms pretty quickly,” he adds with a smile. “I mean, I don’t have much to complain about.”
Lloyd as Reverend Jim Ignatowski in Taxi
CBS via Getty Images
Pastor Jim was certainly a unique character. He was always disheveled, drunk, and clueless. And as soon as he opened his mouth and said something—anything—you couldn’t help but laugh. (Have a spare moment? You can find clips of Jim’s scenes on YouTube with his Taxi co-stars Danny DeVito, Judd Hirsch, Mary Lou Heiner, Tony Danza, Andy Kaufman, and Jeff Conway. You won’t regret it.)
“I felt like I knew this guy so well,” Lloyd says. “I understood what was going on in his mind. At the time, there were people like him on the street. So I watched them and I noticed my feelings for them, and it worked. A lot of this performance came from the freedom I felt working with this amazing cast and writing team. They made it easy.”
Jim was just the beginning of a series of characters played by Lloyd that all share something very unique: to this day, they still make great Halloween costumes. Think: Pastor Jim in Taxi, Dr. Brown in the Back to the Future trilogy, Judge Doom in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Uncle Fester in the Addams Family movies, and Klingon Commander Krug in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.
Michael J. Fox and Lloyd in “Back to the Future” (Universal)
Lloyd is humbled by the longevity of his love for Dr. Brown, the brilliant, benevolent, and eccentric inventor of the flux capacitor (great Scott!). “I’ve done my share of work, and there’s nothing like the way Back to the Future has stuck with people. It’s a phenomenon. Almost every day—I definitely go to comic book conventions—people come up and say, ‘You made my childhood.’ And there’s another similar note, where Back to the Future bridges the gap in the lives of so many young people, who go on to become doctors and scientists and so on. So I’m very grateful and very happy about that. I feel very fortunate to be a part of that.”
Uncle Fester in the Addams Family films was another character of special importance to him. He recounts how his family subscribed to The New Yorker when he was a child. He didn't read the articles at the time; he just watched cartoons. Often there were cartoons about Charles Addams and others featuring Uncle Fester with the rest of the family.
“I loved it,” Lloyd says. “It was about Uncle Fester being mischievous, not evil. He could just play a little bit. Then that period of my life came around and decades later, I got a phone call saying, ‘Would you like to be Uncle Fester in a movie? What are the odds?’ It was so exciting to be able to play the character I loved as a kid.”
Lloyd played the Klingon leader Krug in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.
Courtesy of CBS
At the time, that kid probably never would have believed he would one day become an animated character, but Lloyd is an animated character, too. Star Trek fans know what I’m talking about—the foot-tall Klingon leader Krug is a carbon copy of Lloyd. From the moment “Finding Spock” director Leonard Nimoy asked him to don the character’s prosthetic forehead, eyebrows, and sinister chin, a supervillain was instantly born.
“I would come to Paramount Studios at 4 a.m. to get my makeup done—the way my forehead was built—and then the costume. How can you not feel like you’re the character when you’re doing all of that?” he asks. “I loved that. I tried to find what it was about this guy that I could relate to with the audience so that they would feel something about themselves in this guy—even if he’s someone you wouldn’t want at your dinner table, you know? It doesn’t change his undesirable traits, but I want the audience to feel like they’re not engaging with someone from another planet. They’re engaging with someone they can talk to.”
