E-mail a friendCraig T. Nelson
airdate November 23, 2004
Actor Craig T. Nelson began his career as a writer and performer on radio and a stand-up comic. In the '80s, he became a popular character player. He's starred in such features as Devil's Advocate, Ghosts of Mississippi and Poltergeist. Nelson's TV credits include HBO's The Josephine Baker Story, ABC's Movie of the Week Ride with the Wind, which he wrote and exec-produced, and Coach, for which he won an Emmy. His voice can also be heard in the animated hit, The Incredibles. Nelson's latest film is The Family Stone.
Craig T. Nelson
Tavis: Craig T. Nelson has been a popular, long-running fixture on prime-time television with hit shows like 'Coach'--I loved that show--and 'The District.' This fall, the Emmy-winning actor is lending his voice to perhaps the biggest movie of 2004--in fact, it is at the moment...'The Incredibles.' The film is the latest from the hit-making gang at Pixar. Here's a scene from 'The Incredibles.'
Dash: Ow.
Helen: Dash, you have something you want to tell your father about school?
Dash: Uh, well, well, we dissected a frog.
Helen: Dash got sent to the office again.
Bob: Good. Good.
Helen: No, Bob. That's bad.
Bob: What?
Helen: Dash got sent to the office again.
Bob: What? What for?
Dash: Nothing.
Helen: He put a tack on the teacher's chair. During class.
Dash: Nobody saw me. You could barely see it on the tape.
Bob: They caught you on tape, and you still got away with it? Whoa. You must have been booking. How fast do you think you were going?
Helen: Bob, we are not encouraging this.
Bob: I'm not encouraging. I'm just asking how fast--
Helen: Honey!
Tavis: Craig T. Nelson, nice to see you.
Nelson: You, too.
Tavis: I have great respect for actors who--and certainly curiosity for actors who insist on using that middle initial. Craig T. Nelson. Where did this start?
Nelson: Well, I had gone to the mountains in 1973. I had done standup and I was looking to change my life, and when I got up there, I built a log cabin and stayed up there for 8 years and did odd jobs. I was a surveyor, janitor. I logged, and I raised our own food up there and had a couple of kids and when I got on food stamps and welfare because I couldn't support the family anymore I decided to come back and when I made that decision-- This is really a long answer! There was another actor here that had Craig Richard Nelson, so the S.A.G. made you take a new middle initial.
Tavis: Oh, I got it. Craig T. Nelson.
Nelson: So that's why.
Tavis: You started out with something I was going to get to, and I'm going to get to 'The Incredibles,' I promise. It's a great film. But let me just stay where we've arrived at this point, with this story of you living up north. You went through that nice and quickly. You built a log cabin, you had odd jobs, you found yourself on food stamps, etc., you couldn't support your family. You did that after having starred in Hollywood. You were in Hollywood and decided to leave the business.
Nelson: Yeah, Barry Levinson and I met at the Oxford Theater here in Los Angeles, and Barry was just fresh from Baltimore and living in his car. We both had scholarships to the Oxford Theater. The Eddie Cantor Foundation had provided this medium where actors and writers could come in and almost freelance. And so we did that. We met and decided to start a comedy team together. So we did that, and then we went out and performed, did standup four years together. And then got a writing job on 'Lohman & Barkley' as writers for a 90-minute show and eventually made it to network with 'The Tim Conway Show.' And Rudy De Luca joined us then, so we became a threesome partners. And Rudy opened The Comedy Store with Sammy Shore in 1973 and that's where Barry and I were performing, and Rudy and a lot of others. Richard Pryor. I mean, everybody would come in, and it was real free-form back then, and I got rather discouraged. Plus I was personally involved in some areas of life that can be addictive.
Tavis: That's a nice way of putting that.
Nelson: Yeah. So...
Tavis: Nice way of putting that, 'coach'!
Nelson: Yeah, I was in real trouble.
Tavis: Is that primarily what led to this hiatus, if you will?
Nelson: That was one of the main reasons.
Tavis: Yeah.
Nelson: And the other reason was, uh... I just wanted to perform. And I'd been an actor prior to that, and it was really hard for me to get a job. So I decided to try something else.
Tavis: Let me ask you, and I know this is a difficult question. Let me ask you if you can give me a short answer here, to what you learned during that--how many years were you away? 8?
Nelson: 8 years.
Tavis: What did you learn most during the hiatus?
Nelson: How to survive.
Tavis: Yeah. OK, now what did you learn about this business while you were away.
Nelson: How to survive. When you're in the mountains and literally you have no running water or electricity, so everything had to be manufactured. And I was hunting to provide food for my family. It was really rudimentary. Plus building a house for them to live in. But at the same time, you start to learn about nature-- You really learn about yourself because there in the mountains it was like nature would come in and could devastate anything had you planned. In other words, uh... 6-foot snowdrifts, and you had to hike out. You're working with horses, and you're raising your own food. You have to go hunting. The basic thing that I learned was that if I can survive this and help my family, that coming back here--
Tavis: Hollywood was a piece of cake?
Nelson: I had the tools. There wasn't an agent that was going to tell me--
Tavis: There you go.
Nelson: It was in the long run. It cost a marriage.
Tavis: Yeah.
Nelson: And it literally cost for quite a while my relationship with my family, my children. But I had some decisions to make, and God came into my life, and I'm literally a miracle.
Tavis: Speaking of miracles, I think the fact that-- I think that birth in and of itself is a miracle. And I raise that only because there's a wonderful story about how you got here. I mean I'm told were it not for, since we're in the holiday season, were it not for Bing Crosby, you wouldn't be there.
Nelson: Yeah.
Tavis: Explain what I mean by that.
Nelson: Well, my dad was a drummer, and he went to Stanford, pre-med. He wanted to be a doctor, and the Depression hit. He came out of the Depression, and prior to that he had been in high school in Spokane. He was a musician, and he had gotten in with Bing Crosby and his band. So my dad played drums for Bing, and Bing introduced my dad to my mom on a blind date. How the heck he knew my mother I don't know. I always wanted to ask her about that relationship.
Tavis: You don't want to know the answer to that question, do you?
Nelson: I always thought it was like, there, there...they were in the backseat of an old Ford, you know, in the rumble seat with raccoon coats, just getting loaded at Couer d'Alene Lake.
Tavis: Yeah. Well, throughout the holiday season, every time I hear 'White Christmas' now, I'll think of Craig T. Nelson, and thank Bing Crosby that he came this way. Tell me what--pardon the phrase--how incredible was it to be part of this Pixar project.
Nelson: It was unbelievable. Those guys are... Forget, you know, unique. I mean all those words. You know what they are? They're so enthusiastic. They're like kids. And they see through the eyes of a kid. And when they approached me to do this project, and I thought, you know, it really was with reservations, because it was the first one that they were going to use human beings as characters. They had a new computer animation process they were going to do in this movie, and it was going to be the first PG-rated animated film that they had done. So they said, 'Really, we're not sure this is gonna work.' And I thought, 'Well, I wonder if I want to be associated with the first flop that Pixar--"
Tavis: I'm not sure I understand all that went into the decision to give this movie a PG rating, but one of the things I am certain of is that more than any of these animated films, this movie raises some real serious social questions about how we're raising our kids. Care to comment on that?
Nelson: Oh, boy. Yeah.
Tavis: It's a loaded question, but you can handle it.
Nelson: No, I mean... See, I've got this thing, having-- When I was doing 'The District', and we were talking earlier, you being familiar with Washington, D.C., and I got familiar with the area. And the nature of what's happening to our children and that for me as a grandfather and as a father and having to rekindle and reaffirm those relationships with my children, and I know how hard that is to do--to see how our future is being used and abused is alarming to me. You know, the buying and selling of children is perhaps something that isn't talked about enough. And it's--it's almost in a way beyond my capacity to understand why we allow that to happen. I mean that should be something that should be stopped immediately. So to participate in this movie, one of the considerations was: Does it affirm, reaffirm, or negate any kind of principles that I believe in terms of raising children, what I've come to believe over a period of time? And so that's another reason that I wanted to do it was because I felt that as a family unit it promotes the integration of different individual talents, and it says to kids you may not be the most acceptable, but you still have something that's worthwhile. You still have something that the family needs, that the family can use because as a family unit we're disintegrating. I just am speaking from my own experience. And so that was one of the pleasures of doing this, was seeing each of those characters have individual traits that are utilized in the family.
Tavis: Now, if that doesn't make you want to run out and see 'The Incredibles,' I don't know what will. I started with a deep philosophical question, I thought, and we end up with a good reason to go see the 'The Incredibles.' That's pretty incredible, and so are you, Craig T. Nelson. Nice to have you on the program. Come back and see us sometime.
Nelson: Thank you.
Tavis: That's our show for tonight. As always you can catch me on the radio on NPR. I'll see you back here next time on PBS. Until then, thanks for watching. Good night from Los Angeles, and as always, keep the faith.
Back to November 23, 2004