-Our next guest is a very talented actor
and comedian you know from shows such as
"The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" and "Search Party."
His podcast, "Dead Eyes," is available
wherever you listen to podcasts.
Please welcome to the show Connor Ratliff, everybody!
[ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪
Hello, Connor! How are you? -I'm great.
How are you doing? -I'm doing good.
We have been in the same room often.
You've actually been in sketches on this show
that we filmed outside of the studio.
But this is the first time we're meeting,
and I'm very excited about that.
-I'm very excited, too. It's very nice to meet you.
-But I have also -- You have a talk show of your own.
-I do. I do a show called "The George Lucas Talk Show."
-Yep. -I pretend to be retired
filmmaker George Lucas and interview real people
as themselves, yeah.
-And this has been something
that's been shared with me a lot.
You have a pillow, a "Late Night with Seth Meyers"
pillow on the set of the --
-Yeah. -There you are as George Lucas.
-Yeah. -Why do you have my pillow?
-You were doing South by Southwest, and I was also there.
And we were -- I was starting off the show
around the same time.
And I had lots of -- The set was decorated
with talk-show paraphernalia from other talk shows
to establish that "George Lucas"
was among the pantheon of talk-show hosts.
And so we stole one of your pillows.
-Yeah. -You had this display that had
all these pillows at South by Southwest, and you had so many
that we thought, "They won't miss one."
And I actually thought, you know,
probably these other pillows will end up in a landfill,
and we will actually protect this Seth by Southwest pillow.
-I think that's probably the most likely outcome.
In the end, I don't know where any of those pillows are,
but it's a huge part of your show.
-Yeah, and the deal has always been
anytime we've had writers from your show as guests
on "The George Lucas Talk Show," we always say, "Tell Seth
if he wants his pillow..." -- Or George says it.
George says, "Tell Seth if he wants his pillow,
he has to come on the show."
-Yeah. -And the offer stands.
-I'm very excited to get the pillow back.
-Yeah. -I will be doing that.
You -- This is, I think, very common in podcasts now.
It tries to solve a mystery. -Yeah.
-But unlike other podcast mysteries,
this is a very small, tiny mystery.
-Yeah. -And this is "Dead Eyes,"
and this is a story that I had heard
before I knew much about you.
And tell people what the mystery is.
-Okay. So, in the year 2000,
I was a young actor fresh out of drama school.
I was cast in a very small speaking role
in the HBO miniseries "Band of Brothers."
-A fantastic show. -Great show. Great show.
-A fantastic show. -I was so excited
to be part of it, and then I found out,
"Great news. Tom Hanks is directing your episode."
And then the day before I was supposed to film my episode,
I got a call, frantic, from my agent's office saying,
"You have to get there right away.
Tom Hanks has looked at your audition tape
and he's having second thoughts.
He thinks you have dead eyes."
And so I had to go and re-audition
in person for Tom Hanks.
And minutes later,
I was told they were deciding to go another way.
-So this is -- Yes. -[ Audience awws ]
-A very sad story. -Very sad story.
-Yeah. -Not only -- I think any actor
would dread being told they have dead eyes,
but to get it from the person
who is considered the nicest man in show business.
-Yes. Like, if I had been cast
in a very small role in "Eyes Wide Shut"
and then Stanley Kubrick had said it,
I would have thought, "Of course."
-Yeah. -You know?
But this was the nicest man in show business,
so I thought, "Oh, I'm so broken as a person.
My eyes are so awful that the nicest man in show business
couldn't even bear to have me be the tiniest part
of 'Band of Brothers.'"
"With all the horrible things that happened in World War II,
we can't show this to the audience."
-[ Laughter ] -Now, had you ever even thought
about your eyes as being a detriment?
-No, I had plenty of bad things I thought about myself,
but the eyes, I thought, were,
like, just fine, normal human eyes.
-The eyes were great. -Yeah, yeah.
And since, I've heard nothing.
It was the only time I got that note.
-And so you decided to do this podcast
to drill down because --
This was a very -- I mean, all jokes aside,
this was a very real thing that affected you
and affected your relationship with acting.
-Yeah, I mean, if it hadn't been this,
it probably would've been 10 other things
that would've added up to me deciding,
"I don't want to be an actor. This feels terrible."
But I got it in one concentrated dose of like -- Choonk!
You know, "You are broken and cannot do this."
But I decided, you know -- I had never --
He didn't say it to me. It was a message I got through...
-And, by the way, I would say a better agent
would not have passed it along to you like that.
-It was a complete breakdown along every part
of the chain of communication. -Yeah.
-I never should've been told, "Here's what's going on."
They should've just said, "You have to go in
and read the scene again. He wants to meet you."
I would have been thrilled, you know?
-You have a guest coming up on the show that I would love
for you to announce now. -Yes.
So, on March 10th, for our 31st episode,
our season-3 finale will feature my conversation with Tom Hanks.
-Now, this is thrilling. -Yeah.
-This is thrilling. -It's -- It's beyond thrilling.
It's -- It is, you know -- I didn't expect it to happen.
The podcast was designed -- The podcast is about disappointment,
so I would be foolish -- It was baked into the DNA
of the podcast that maybe we'll never get to him.
-Right. -But we did. And it's great.
It's a -- We have a fully -- we hash out everything,
and it's everything that I wanted from the conversation.
I would not have gotten this conversation
if I had played the role. -Right.
-There would never be a world in which
I played this small role and then 22 years later
I got to talk to Tom Hanks for over an hour.
-Right. -You know? So it's --
-Yeah, the guy who got that part right now is like,
"What the [bleep]?"
"Here I am over there. I got this light in my eyes."
-He's doing great. He actually does --
He has a great career. He does a lot of audio books.
He's doing fine. -Alright.
I like that you've kept up with him, as well.
-I have. He's a very --
I talked to him on the podcast. A very nice guy.
He had no idea it had happened.
I actually found out when I talked to him that the same day
that I was re-auditioning,
there was a second car filled with alternate actors
who were ready to take my place if and when I got fired.
-[ Laughs ] Oh, my God. -Yeah.
-And now, obviously, now you're doing the podcast,
so it comes up all the time
that you think about this moment.
-Yeah. -World events right now
might also make you think about the part.
-Yeah, the character's name was Private Zielinski.
And if you follow the news, you might have heard that name
almost every minute of every day now,
one of the most famous names in the world right now.
-Right now.
The other thing that is amazing to me,
even more amazing than the fact that you got
Tom Hanks to do your podcast, we --
Our research did some digging, and you as a young man were --
You went to sort of a C-SPAN -- What was it?
-I was on, like, a high school --
It was the senior year of high school, went on a trip,
and I guess that's how C-SPAN
gets a lot of their studio audiences.
It's just, like, gangs of students.
They just go in here and watch a C-SPAN taping.
And it was a debate about Russia and Ukraine.
-So, here you are.
There you are on C-SPAN in 1992, I guess, maybe?
-Yeah. Yeah, end of '92, I think.
And I was determined to get on camera,
so I asked a question about the differences
culturally between Russia and Ukraine.
And the Russian person, she said,
"Oh, there's really no differences."
We're all the same. We're all one thing."
And the Ukrainian representative was like,
"No, we are different."
And, I mean, you can see.
It's just, like, such a call forward to, like,
"Well, this is not gonna end well."
-[ Laughter ] -Yeah.
-This was also -- It should be noted --
You're doing this podcast now, but was this a story
that you told people before you did the podcast?
-Yeah, I mean, for a while, it was an embarrassing story
that I had to tell people because I told everybody
that I was going to be on "Band of Brothers."
So it was kind of like -- I would tell it reluctantly.
Like, "Why aren't you on 'Band of Brothers'?"
"Well, here's why."
Then when I started doing, like, comedy at UCB
and I started doing improv and stuff,
people would be like, "So, what's your story?"
And I was like, "Well, I used to be an actor,
and now I'm doing this." And they're like, "Why?"
You know, I would tell people within the first
10 minutes of meeting them, you know?
Like, I'm finding out as I do the podcast --
I would ask friends, "When did I tell you this story?"
And they'd be like, "Five minutes after we met."
-[ Laughter ] -Because it just explained,
like, well, here's why I'm doing improv in a basement for free,
because this is fun and I don't like show business.
-And, also, I will say, it's -- if it wasn't real,
it would be the greatest
beginning of an improv scene of all time.
-Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, "Tom Hanks thinks you have dead eyes"
is a great initiation to the -- The scene writes itself.
-The scene writes itself. -Yeah.
-And I know the podcast hasn't written itself,
and it's been a lot of hard work.
But, man, oh, man, has it been a fantastic journey
to listen to you talk about it, and I cannot wait to hear
the Tom Hanks episode. -It's gonna be great.
Thank you so much. -Alright. That's Connor Ratliff.
Subscribe to "Dead Eyes" wherever you listen to podcasts.