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Full Interview. (11:13)
 

Tavis: I'm pleased to welcome John Larroquette to this program. The five-time Emmy-winning actor, of course, starred on the long-running sitcom that we all loved so much, "Night Court." The New Orleans native is back in prime time now as part of the cast of "Boston Legal." The show airs Tuesday nights at ten on ABC. Here now a scene from "Boston Legal."

[Clip]

Tavis: John Larroquette, now that's what I call making an entrance (laugh).

John Larroquette: Yeah, it's wonderful to be on that show and that's a great introduction to the character.

Tavis: It was a great introduction. It really does set up the relationship or lack thereof that you have with -

Larroquette: - well, the thing about Mr. Kelley, as well, is that you find out things. For instance, the first day I arrived on the set, I was told, "Oh, by the way, you're here because you're having an affair with Candace Bergen's character." I never knew that. It doesn't say it in the script, so you're always surprised with Mr. Kelley, but you show up and try not to bump into the furniture and you do okay.

Tavis: Did I read somewhere that years ago, you in real life had like a crush on Candace Bergen? Many of us did.

Larroquette: You know, I have a friend who I've known since I was ten years old. We were in school together in New Orleans. I told him what I was doing and he said, "Do you remember how many times you dragged me to the movie theater to see 'Carnal Knowledge' in the '60s so you could fantasize about Candace Bergen?"

I remember the first time I took her face into my hands and brought her in and I went, "What am I doing? I'm gonna make out with Candace Bergen." It was great. It was something. Really amazing.

Tavis: What do you make of the fact that, in your career, you've been given now these opportunities on more than one occasion in network television to be on these award-winning, very well written shows? I mean, it doesn't happen for everybody.

Larroquette: No, it doesn't and, particularly as one gets older as I have gotten, it seems, I've just been phenomenally lucky. I mean, my whole story is just, you know, I showed up, I decided to be an actor, I'd never acted before, I got into a play, got an agent, got a television series, met my wife in that play, we're still together. I mean, it was just Kismet.

I don't have a lot of ambition, I don't think, in life. It's just that I knew that the only thing I could do was be an actor. I've euphemistically said, "Had I been better educated, I'd have become something important, but as it is, I'm an actor," and luckily I found that. But I started in radio in New Orleans in the '60s, so I've always been sort of using my voice to entertain.

Tavis: You still got that radio voice too. It still works.

Larroquette: You know, I think that's one of the reasons why I've played more lawyers than I've had to hire in my life.

Tavis: (Laughter) That's a good thing.

Larroquette: It's worked out well for that, that's for sure.

Tavis: Well, when I saw you walk on the set for "Boston Legal," that is, I saw you appear on the show, just watching that very first episode, it occurred to me that here was a role that was allowing you to use your smarts and your humor. I mean, you get a chance to mix these two. On "Night Court," same thing. You were smart and funny. But here's another role where you get a chance to weave those two things together.

Larroquette: It's also more real here. You know, I've always described "Night Court" as sort of a vaudeville act because there were great comics. But it had its own reality and it didn't really pay attention to what real reality was, but it was a great, funny show.

David Kelley is sort of the same way, except that I think he touches reality more. As we talked earlier, you know, he uses comedy to make points and people listen because you make them laugh, as you mentioned. I don't know why. I mean, I've just been lucky. I've been very fortunate.

Tavis: Take me back to the comment you made earlier about the fact that, had you been better educated, you might have chosen something else. When did you know that the acting thing was for you?

Larroquette: There really is a moment in time. I moved to California in 1971 to work for a record company. I had been working for Decca Records in New Orleans as a teenager. Someone was starting a new record company and they asked me to come to California to help set up distribution around the country because I knew all the guys at the one-stops, I knew a lot of DJs around the country, so I could push their product.

One night I was walking around Old Town and there's a little theater there. I looked in the theater and there were actors just sitting around a table reading a play, so I just sort of snuck in and just sat. Something moved in me and just absolutely serendipitously, the woman saw me who was running the theater and said, "You know what? Next week, we're doing a play and we're missing one man." It was a Tennessee Williams play. Being from New Orleans, it seemed perfect.

So I went back the next week, sat around the table and just read small craft warnings and something went on and said, "This is what I'm supposed to do," so I quit the job at the record company and came to Los Angeles in my Karmann Ghia and said, "I think I'm supposed to be an actor." I had no idea how to do this and it just started.

You know, I got into a little acting class on Sunset Boulevard and got into a play and I just started working. I was very fortunate. Don't know why because I wasn't educated in that at all. You know, I barely made it through high school. I was a pretty lousy student in New Orleans.

But New Orleans is sort of theater on the streets anyway. I mean, there's a lot of pageantry, there's a lot of drama, there's a lot of music. Being a port city, I had met guys from Greece, Portugal, Rumania, all the sailors that came through.

I was a French Quarter rat from the moment I could get on a bus by myself and go to the French Quarter. I played music most of my early life and it just seemed that to entertain people was a really good thing to do.

Tavis: You've been away from New Orleans for some years now and yet I wonder whether or not your heartstrings get pulled when you see what happened there a couple of years ago now.

Larroquette: Yeah, very much so, very much so. I describe New Orleans now as the first time I went back, which was about a month after the storm, that New Orleans was flat on its back and now it's sort of on its knees. You know, at least it's coming sort of to a vertical position. But I have relatives who just got out of their FEMA trailers. Most of my close relatives now live on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, Waveland. I notice in your bio that you're actually born in Gulfport.

Tavis: Absolutely, yeah.

Larroquette: I used to play Goofy Golf in Gulfport in the '60s (laughter). They live in Waveland, which was decimated. My cousin actually swam with his mother on his back to get away from the storm surge. But in New Orleans itself, my closest people didn't get hurt because they lived in the Lower Garden District. But my old neighborhood, which is the Ninth Ward where I grew up -

Tavis: - you grew up in the Ninth Ward.

Larroquette: I grew up in the Middle. It's not the Lower. I went to high school in the Lower Ninth at Holy Cross right on the other side of the industrial canal. But my old house, you know, I broke into it so I could stand in it. You know, the coffee line, they call it, where the brown line is around where the water sat, was up to the ceiling.

In '65 when I lived there, the water was up to my chest on the street during Hurricane Betsy. My best friend's house had actually floated down the street and parked about a block from where he actually lived. You know, I grew up there. My first twenty-two years were in New Orleans. I would drive around at night when I first got there and I didn't know where I was.

I mean, Tavis, there wasn't a bird, there wasn't a sound of life, there wasn't a street light, there was nothing. Like twenty-eight days later, you know, it was a horrible, horrible feeling, a sickening feeling. And watching the debacle of all of the machinations that contributed to that desertion of that town really made me sad and sick.

Tavis: I was in New Orleans just a few weeks ago. Going back, I just signed on to give the commencement at Xavier, for graduates this year, so I'll be down there in a few weeks.

Larroquette: Fantastic.

Tavis: I'll be down there for their commencement. That said, I was in a conversation while I was there a few weeks ago with some people who, prior to the storm - these are New Orleanians - who prior to the storm had not been especially political. But the way the city was maltreated and continues to be maltreated these years later now, two-plus years later, has made them more political and they are anxious now.

They're ready for this presidential election because of what happened to them. I raise that to ask whether or not you have been political, whether or not you are political, whether or not something like this makes one more political particularly if it is one's home as it was or is for you?

Larroquette: Yeah, I would say that it has made me - I've been fairly apolitical most of my life. You know, in the '60s, I was just a mouthpiece for left wing agendas just because it seemed like a provocative thing to do. It wasn't even right necessarily.

It was just sort of provocative because New Orleans was sort of conservative in its way, although I've always described New Orleans as sort of just being south geographically. It's a whole different thing. But, yes, as a matter of fact, I helped start an organization called The Friends of New Orleans, people like James Carvel, people like Walter Isaacson, people like Donna Brazil.

It's mostly just to keep the pressure on Congress and particularly the Corps of Engineers to deal with the wetlands. You know, not to build houses. People are doing that and that's great. That should be done. But just to keep the consensus and the consciousness going that there's so much going on down there.

I mean, my best friend doesn't turn his stove on because the natural gas costs so much. Well, thirty percent of it comes out of the Gulf of Mexico. Why should New Orleanians not have access to cheap stuff like that? I've never contributed to a political campaign in my life. I just haven't done it. This time I have, and I've become more active certainly than I have ever been in my life.

I've never said it publicly, but it seems an appropriate time. I think that the paradigm shift of having someone like Mr. Obama in the White House is a fundamental, essential catharsis that we could have in this country. You know, Carl Jung talked about - I'm an alcoholic. When I got sober, I studied a lot about it. Carl Jung once said that the only sober people he'd ever seen that stayed sober and had successful lives were those who had a fundamental shift in perception.

That's how I got sober. I had a fundamental shift in perception. Didn't know it at the time. I think having somebody like Mr. Obama in the White House, this country will have a fundamental shift in perception and the rest of the world certainly will, I think, looking at us as well.

Tavis: I'm certain in about two seconds, if not already, that comment will be YouTubed by the Obama people (laughter). You can bank on that.

Larroquette: You know, I thought, if I was ever gonna do this, it would be here to do it because I'm not a stumper. As I said, I'm not educated enough in the history of the world to have opinions. I think actors, most of the time, should keep their mouth shut and be on camera and just be funny or entertain people. But I think this is a moment we have and I don't think it should be passed up.

Tavis: I'm juxtaposing the courage I just heard come out of your mouth with this notion that you raise now that actors ought to keep their mouths shut. If you're going to keep your mouth shut about something, it ought not to necessarily be who you're supporting for president, but about the fact that you boldly say, courageously say, that I am an alcoholic.

Larroquette: You know, that's just part of my life. I speak about it a lot. I don't take any credit for it. An old man once told me that, you know -

Tavis: - but you ain't got to admit it on national television either, though.

Larroquette: Well, I have, though, because I've done "Larry King," I've done stuff about how at least I'm an example of the ability to crawl out of the bottle. You know, I was gone. I mean, I was pretty much gone in the '70s particularly. I thank my wife for that. But ultimately it's a selfish decision to stop that behavior.

An old man once told me, "Congratulating a drunk for not drinking is like giving a cowboy with hemorrhoids a trophy for not riding his horse." (Laughter) It's not something that I stand up and say, "Hey, you know what I did?" It's stupid. If, by example, one can give somebody else out there a little hope and say, "Well, maybe," why can't that be a good thing?

Tavis: Well, John Larroquette tonight gives us hope and, on "Boston Legal," gives you smarts and funny. We are all the better that "Boston Legal" has now brought John Larroquette on the show, as you know, on ABC. John, nice to have you on the program.

Larroquette: Thank you very much.

Tavis: Come back any time you want, man. Good to see you.

Larroquette: Appreciate it.