Curb actor Richard Kind joins The Producers

“By the way, I’ll be eating a banana while we’re talking,” says Richard Kind at the start of our conversation in that comforting nasal tone that has been familiar since the heady days of Spin City and Mad About You in the 1990s. You might know the name, you probably know the face but you definitely know the voice of the Pixar mainstay.

Kind is filling in for seven weeks as Max Bialystock in The Producers at the Garrick Theatre, 20 years after last playing the role at the centre of Mel Brooks’ masterpiece. He found the prospect of joining the cast with the show already up and running “daunting”, especially since he would be replacing Andy Nyman, “a great actor who’s great in the role”.

Zero Mostel’s performance in the original film of The Producers affected the young Kind greatly and he estimates he’s seen it around 80 times. That formative influence is essential to the way he works in the relatively intimate space of the Garrick Theatre in 2026: “I’m doing The Producers the movie as opposed to the big Broadway extravaganza.”

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Oddly enough, Curb Your Enthusiasm built its fourth season around Larry David being cast in The Producers on Broadway and Kind’s performance as Cousin Andy ensured he became a fan favourite despite appearing in just eight episodes of the iconic sitcom. The first of those appearances, in season three, comes when Larry realises his mother had died and his father has chosen not to tell him until after the funeral. It is a truly transcendent scene, amongst the funniest in television history, and just when it seems as though it cannot possibly sustain the laughs generated by David and Shelley Berman, enter Kind.

Having started out doing improv at Second City in Chicago, he seemed an ideal fit for the unscripted approach on Curb. Jeff Garlin recommended Kind for the role but David felt he was too famous to play a character that wasn’t Richard Kind, a rule that was considered essential to aid verisimilitude in the show’s early seasons. The actor wore them down by insisting: “I am not too famous, trust me.” When he read the outline for his first scene, he did not sense comedy history was in the offing:

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“My stupid, bull-headed way was that when I read what I had to do, I thought – of course they tell their son, this is so stupid. I’ll play it but this isn’t right… I’m stupid. I like it when artists are smarter than me.”

Kind needs reassurance and would conclude every improvised scene in Curb by turning to the star and asking: “Larry, is that what you want?” When I tell him the creator of Seinfeld and Curb is my favourite artist ever to have lived, he gently rebukes me with an incredulous: “Not Stanley Kubrick?” While Kind might not have worked with the latter, he has been employed by an astonishing number of the most significant creatives of the last few decades, including Clint Eastwood, Stephen Sondheim, David Milch, John Mulaney and the Coen brothers.

Working with the Coens on A Serious Man was almost the opposite of Curb since the brothers do not like any deviation from the script as written. “Like Alfred Hitchcock, they know what the movie looks like even before they’ve started shooting,” says Kind. He is open to either approach, so long as he is always working and the material is strong. His ultimate ambition is to play Roy Cohn in Angels in America although a viral monologue written by Jesse Eisenberg during lockdown suggested Kind’s goal in life was to one day be cast as a gentile. When I mention this particular deep cut, he channels Cousin Andy: “I have not seen Jesse since. He’s had plenty of opportunity to cast me in things but he hasn’t.”

Perhaps not but, in reality, he has played Jews and gentiles on stage and screen in roles both dramatic and comic. He is man who simply loves to work: “I love doing radio like I love doing stage like I love doing TV like I love doing opera like I love doing musicals like I love doing whatever. I like acting.”

Kind grew up “very reform” and describes himself as “Jewish by heritage and observant twice a year”. In terms of faith, he gives the most Kindly analysis: “Every day of my life I believe in God. Is he Jewish? I dunno. But he’s not Christian. I tell ya that, he ain’t Christian.” He grew up at a Jewish country club not dissimilar to the one depicted in Red Oaks in which he played the father of the central character: “Everybody was Jewish. It’s enough to make you antisemitic”.

Which brings us back to The Producers. He feels, 20 years on, we have to “observe it in a different light” and that there is a “percentage of Americans and probably Brits who like what Hitler preached”. He elaborates on his despair at the state of the world: “I hate Netanyahu and I love Israel… I don’t know how to reckon with it.” When he sees somebody has died these days, he takes comfort in knowing they will no longer have to witness what is happening in America. Clearly, as is evident in the work, Kind contains multitudes.

It is probably one of the reasons such a high proportion of geniuses have employed the actor over the last 40 years. Kind has his own theory:

“They need somebody who’s like me. Anybody who looks like me was wise enough not to get in this business. They can go a different way. They can go with Stephen Root, which they do often. They can go with Paul Giamatti. Or you get me, who’s much cheaper.”