“I Like That Guy. That’s a Good Guy.”
As the menace turned best pal Mike Santini on ‘The Chair Company,’ Joseph Tudisco has emerged as yet another diamond in the rough from the extended Tim Robinson universe“I Like That Guy. That’s a Good Guy.”
As the menace turned best pal Mike Santini on ‘The Chair Company,’ Joseph Tudisco has emerged as yet another diamond in the rough from the extended Tim Robinson universe
Joseph Tudisco greets me like a Brooklyn pizza shop owner who’s just spotted his favorite customer. “There he is!” he shouts when my face pops up on his computer screen. This video interview is the first time we’ve talked, but he feels disarmingly familiar.
It’s precisely why Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin loved working with him on The Chair Company. “If me, him, and Zach met each other outside of acting and we were just striking up a conversation at an airport,” Robinson says, “I think it would still just be like, ‘I like that guy. That’s a good guy.’”
In the mysterious and bizarre hit HBO comedy, Tudisco plays Mike Santini, a likable 70-something guy who also happens to be a violent weirdo. In the pilot, he smashes Robinson’s character, Ron Trosper, in the head with a pipe and sheds his “well-loved” button-down shirt to evade Ron. But at the end of the second episode, they partner up and embark on a whacked-out detective mission. Soon and strangely enough, Mike becomes Ron’s older, angrier, porno-loving shadow.
Tudisco’s dead-serious performance makes Mike Santini even funnier than he is on the page. That’s what Robinson and Kanin, the show’s creators, were going for. “They don’t like jokes when people try to go for a laugh,” says executive producer and director Andrew DeYoung. “When you watch the show, it’s filled with laughs, but it’s never an overt joke. It’s behavior.”
The fact that most people watching have no idea who the hell Tudisco is only adds to his magic. He’s the kind of wild card Robinson and Kanin have built a reputation for pulling. “They’re looking for people that we haven’t seen, really,” DeYoung adds, “and who have a specialness that makes us all lean forward.”
For Tudisco, all of this is new. “Are you kidding me?” he says. “Who expected this, Alan? This is crazy.” He’s not used to juicy television and movie roles. Up to this point, many of his characters didn’t even have names. He was “Trucker” on The Sopranos, “Delivery Man” in The Post, “Handyman” in Mr. Robot, and “Super” on Blue Bloods. But if you’re familiar with the Tim Robinson universe—until recently, Tudisco was not—you know there’s always a place for scene-stealing unknowns. Tudisco is the latest in a line of older dudes who, when given a chance, have matched Robinson’s uniquely deranged comedic energy. “There are elements of it that are just so hilarious,” Tudisco says, “because they come out of nowhere.”
By now, Tudisco is an expert at coming out of nowhere. For the first time, he’s a huge part of a TV series. “It’s not something I’m used to,” he says. “But I can get very comfortable with it.”
It all started with a self-taped audition. “I didn’t have any scripts or anything like that,” Tudisco says. “I had scenes, which were not in any of the episodes.” After sending the recording to Gayle Keller, The Chair Company’s casting director, he tried not to think about it. “I let it go like anything else,” he says. “I don’t tend to carry any of that stuff around. Once I let it go, I let it go.”
Tudisco is used to the routine. He’s been a working actor since the 1980s. It’s not exactly what he had planned for himself. After growing up in Bath Beach, Brooklyn, near the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge—“People usually refer to it as Bensonhurst, but it’s not,” he says—Tudisco worked in construction. He was miserable. “I was going through relationship problems, financial problems,” he says. “And the business was just horrible. We all got laid off.”
There’s just an unexplainable ease when it feels like it’s working. It might not actually be working, but sometimes you feel that. And I felt that with [Tudisco], and I think we all did.Tim Robinson
Tudisco eventually decided to go back to school to learn bookkeeping. But after enrolling at the nearby Kingsborough Community College, he discovered the drama program. “Hmm, let me go see what that’s about,” he remembers thinking to himself. “That sounds fun.” He took theater history and stagecraft classes, and all of a sudden, he knew what he wanted to do with his life. “I became addicted,” Tudisco says. “I got my first role in the college play. I was the very first Buddhist monk from Brooklyn in the production of Rashomon. And I was scared to heck, but I did it. The adrenaline, that kind of pushed me forward. And I’ve never stopped trying to climb the ladder.”
To make a living, he worked for 20 years as a teamster on the overnight shift in a warehouse. “For a large food concern,” he says. And during the day? “I hit all the auditions.”
By the ’90s, he was getting background work. After Tudisco briefly popped up in Cop Land in 1997, the New York Post published a still from the movie. He was in the photo. His ball-busting coworkers cut out the picture, pinned it to a bulletin board, and circled his face. “Everybody used to go, ‘Hey, here comes Joe the actor!’” Tudisco says.
Within a few years, Tudisco had landed small parts on The Sopranos and Law & Order. Casting directors seemed to figure out that he looked and sounded like a real New Yorker because he was one. Case in point: He appeared in For Love of the Game as “Yankee fan.”
“The funny thing, at that stage, you go, ‘Oh, I’m here. I made it. Look at this. Somebody wants me,’” Tudisco says. “Then you don’t work for a year.”
There were dry spells, but Tudisco kept on working. And then Robinson and Kanin discovered him. “We had lots of tapes and auditions, and his was funny,” Kanin says. “He seemed really good and believable.”
By then they’d resolved to pick at least a relative unknown to play Mike Santini. The character is in a single scene in the first episode; they figured going with a known actor would’ve tipped off the audience to his importance. “We knew that that was going to become a much bigger part,” Robinson says. “If you saw someone [famous] with one line in the pilot, you would be like, ‘Well, that’s going to become something.’”
Tudisco says he first had a callback over Zoom. “When we were setting that up, Gayle Keller said to me, ‘Don’t you dare do anything different. This is not about the humor. You play it as straight as you can.’”
After that went off without a hitch, Tudisco was called in for a chemistry audition with Robinson. “When we met with him is when it was probably where we were like, ‘Oh, this is the guy,’” Robinson says.
Tudisco and Robinson read together in front of about 20 people in the room, including Kanin, DeYoung, and executive producer Todd Schulman. “And HBO people all, as they say, up the wazoo,” Tudisco says.
It went well.
“It was fun and you could feel that, to me at least, what we were doing together felt, like, effortless,” Robinson says. “There’s just an unexplainable ease when it feels like it’s working. It might not actually be working, but sometimes you feel that. And I felt that with him, and I think we all did.”
That week, Tudisco’s manager called to tell him that he’d booked the role. “My wife was there when my manager called. I think she was more excited than I was,” he says. “I don’t know if I was shocked. I was certainly excited, and certainly overwhelmed with the whole idea.
“How did we celebrate? We went out to dinner.”
More on ‘The Chair Company’
It quickly became clear to Robinson and Kanin that coming up with stuff for Mike Santini was fun. Tudisco’s Brooklyn accent and distinct delivery make everything he says interesting. “It’s a nice marriage of how we’re writing the character combined with the rhythm of how an actor talks,” Kanin says. “You kind of get some nice surprises there.”
In the third episode of the season, Ron and Mike go to a bar. Out of nowhere, Mike starts talking about how his ex-wife tried to kill him … by sneaking boner pills into his food. “She put a hundred of them in there,” he says. “Used to make me smell like a duck. She would say, ‘Mike, why do you smell like a fish? You smell like a duck.’”
Kanin and Robinson thought of the non sequitur on the spot. Understandably, Tudisco didn’t quite know what to make of it at first. “I do think, because it was so fresh, there was a little bit of: What am I saying?” Robinson says. But Tudisco was ultimately unfazed. “His performance is—he’s so serious,” DeYoung says. “We were crying behind the monitor because it’s such an insane thing to say. It’s probably one of my top five things on the show because it’s so insane. But you’re also like, ‘It’s believable.’ It’s one of those specific things that sometimes you catch yourself saying or your friend saying. You’re like, ‘Oh, that’s a sentence that’s never been said before.’”
Robinson still laughs thinking about the scene where Mike and Ron break into a man’s house and steal a bunch of papers. During filming, Tudisco got a plastic bag caught on his foot. “We both thought it was so funny,” Robinson says. “After the take, he couldn’t stop laughing because he and his wife have cats, and he was remembering a story about his cat getting stuck in a bag and freaking out and being so freaked out that no one could help the cat. I remember after the take just him loving that he had done the thing his cat had done.”
For his part, Tudisco has enjoyed playing such an intense character, the kind of guy he used to work with as a teamster. “They were all part of Mike Santini,” he says. “All of them.”
These are heady times for Tudisco, who’s been enjoying the reviews of The Chair Company that mention him. “Some people have called it a breakout role,” he says with a smile.
Tudisco never expected he’d ever have a breakout role. He’s just glad he stuck with acting long enough to earn one. “That’s one thing people should know,” Tudisco says. “You’ve got to have the stickability in this business. Because you just never know.”
Right now, Tudisco is hoping this gig leads to more work. “I don’t know where it takes me,” he says. “I got a ticket for the train, and let’s see where it drops me off.”
Tudisco hasn’t been recognized by a stranger in public yet, but he’ll be ready if it happens. At the show’s Hollywood premiere in October, he asked costar Lou Diamond Phillips how he deals with fame. “I said, ‘Lou, how do you handle all this if it’s all of a sudden?’” Tudisco says. “And he looked at me and he said, ‘Very careful, Joseph. Very careful, Joseph.’ I said, ‘OK, I’m going to take that.’”
