On Sunday, the third installment of “Crossword Mysteries” premieres on Hallmark Movies & Mysteries with Lacey Chabert as a newspaper crossword puzzle editor and Brennan Elliott as a police detective who team up to solve crimes.
John Kapelos also co-stars. “I’m the police chief and Brennan plays my son, who is the lead investigator on all these murders, and I sort of help him figure them out. And Lacey’s the enfant terrible who comes in and reveals her skills to everybody.” The franchise, which was co-created by Will Shortz of the New York Times, is “on the edgier end of Hallmark-land,” Kapelos said.
“We are set to shoot several more in the new year. They’re not exactly episodes, they’re movies-of-the-week. I’m actually writing one for them now where I’m exploring the idea of using sudoku. I’m also trying to write one of their Christmas movies.”
A Second City alum, first with the touring company in the late ’70s and later on the mainstage in the early ’80s, his career on screen kicked into gear with small but memorable roles in key movies from John Hughes: As Molly Ringwald’s future brother-in-law in 1984’s “Sixteen Candles” and a year later as the all-knowing janitor in “The Breakfast Club.”
In the years since, Kapelos has been a regular presence on TV with guest starring or recurring roles on shows that include “Suits,” “The Expanse,” “Justified,” and “Psych.” When you ask him about his varied jobs as an actor, he reveals himself to be a terrific storyteller as well.
I was curious about his “Seinfeld” experience in the Season 5 episode “The Sniffing Accountant.” Jerry is convinced his accountant (Kapelos) is a cocaine addict and Kramer hatches a plan to find out by following the guy into a bar and asking him a series of leading questions. The scene includes a hilarious moment wherein Kramer downs an entire beer while a lit cigarette remains balanced between his lips.
If you watch the scene closely, the reaction shot from Kapelos just barely hints at a smile, but he never breaks character. Does he remember shooting that episode?
“Oh God, do I remember shooting that. What Larry David said to me before that scene was, ‘Listen, we don’t know what Michael (Richards) is going to do, he does these things spontaneously. So whatever you do, do not mess up a take by laughing.’ At Second City, usually I was the funnier guy, the looser guy making the jokes, not the straight guy. So it was a very unusual situation for me to be next to a guy who was almost like the Tasmanian devil of comedy.
“And I’m really glad Larry David warned me because I wasn’t prepared for what was going to happen and I probably would have broken up. So what I did during the take — and this is probably what you’re seeing — I am biting into the inside of my cheek and my jaw is clenching because I’m really trying not to laugh. And I didn’t laugh during any of the takes, although I came close. I hope it wasn’t too obvious. And when I went home that night, I realized had taken a huge bite out of the inside of my cheek.”
Kapelos said Richards was quiet and solitary between scenes. “It kind of reminded me of working with Steve Martin in ‘Roxanne’ (from 1987). There was a very contemplative way he approached it, as opposed to this manic scattershot thing sometimes other comedians do, to contrast it with Robin Williams, who came and did a set with us one night at Second City. That was a totally different experience.”
When did Williams come to Second City?
“Robin came by, I think around the time they were making ‘The Blues Brothers’ in Chicago, so I would put that around 1980? He wasn’t in the movie, but there were a lot of people that were in town to hang out with John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd while they were making the movie. John did a set with us and I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced before or since that kind of electric response from an audience.
“And Dan Aykroyd did a set with us and he helped me develop this thing I did called ‘The G—— Greek Halsted Street Blues.’ The first time I did it, he improvised it with me. I basically came out as this blues man from Athens who is a restaurant owner in Chicago named Nikko Papaoomaomaopapdemakopoulos who played a slide bouzouki.”
Originally from London, Ontario, Kapelos said he dropped out of college with the intention of becoming an actor. His parents gave him one year — if it didn’t work out, he agreed to go back to school. He started taking classes at the Second City Toronto location where he met John Candy, who encouraged him to go to Chicago. “SCTV” was shooting in Toronto at the time and Kapelos was hired as an extra; while on set, he approached Second City co-founder Bernie Sahlins and asked to audition for the Chicago location.
“And Bernie said to me, ‘Are you ready, kid?’ And I said, ‘Well, I dunno. I think I am.’ And I gave him my phone number. A couple weeks go by and I realized, he’s not going to call me. So I told my father that I had a job offer in Chicago. I took a Greyhound bus and auditioned for Second City and lo and behold they offered me a job. And I called up my mother and said, ‘I got a job!’ And she said, ‘Didn’t they already offer you one?'”
“Animal House” had just been released in theaters when Kapelos joined the touring company in 1978. “In my view,” he said, “Second City was flipping from counterculture to popular culture and it had a huge bounce off the popularity of Bill Murray and John Belushi and their incredible success. So when we went out on the road — it was 35 states and all the Big Ten schools — we’d go and they’d be screaming, ‘Toga! Toga!’ and it was like, wait a minute, we don’t do that. We still managed to entertain them. But I think anybody from that time will admit that it certainly gassed our tank that all the alumni were becoming extremely popular.”
Second City CEO and executive producer Andrew Alexander remembers Kapelos being a “very ambitious and charismatic performer” who was eventually promoted to the mainstage. It was during his time there that Kapelos recalled a brief period when Eddie Murphy came to sit in on workshops.
“He actually worked out with us for a while. He came before his first season at ‘SNL.’ He was encouraged by Tim Kazurinsky that maybe the best thing for this guy is spend some time at Second City and do some improv games and hang out for a little bit to get a sense of that. And he was around for a couple of workshops. Not many. But I remember him sitting there with his headphones on and his arms crossed (laughs). And that fall we saw him on TV and he was quite brilliant.”
It’s worth pausing to get Kazurinsky’s memory of that.
“I was touting Second City and saying those guys — meaning Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo — could maybe benefit from some stuff at Second City,” Kazurinsky said earlier this week. “The rest of the cast — which included me, Mary Gross, Brian Doyle-Murray, Robin Duke — we were all Second City people, Joe and Eddie were the only ones who weren’t. They came from stand-up.
“So the three of us flew in for a week. I still had a condo at 4652 N. Hermitage, I just sublet in New York for the four seasons I was on ‘SNL.’ So one of them stayed on the couch and the other was on a sleeping bag on the floor. And they came in and improvised every night at Second City for a week. Joe found it difficult, he struggled. The stand-up mentality is ‘it’s me against the world’ kind of thing. Whereas Eddie is literally the only person that I ever met in my entire life who could walk on to the Second City stage and do it without any lessons, without any training whatsoever. He had that ability to let go and play and easily fit into whatever the game or scene was, whereas Joe was like a deer caught in headlights.”
Kapelos never got a “SNL” audition, but he and his castmates did a Second City run off-Broadway in New York at the Village Gate. By this point, Kapelos had started getting tiny roles in a handful of movies. They were dispiriting experiences, including an entry on his IMDb page that lists his role in 1982’s “Tootsie” as “Actor at Party (uncredited).”
“(Laughs) Uncredited. Yeah. That was weird. They had me fly to New York and shoot all these scenes, but as the days were going by Dustin (Hoffman) and Bill Murray were giving these lines to other people and I ended up doing very little except for improvising this one thing with Teri Garr. She’s stuck in the bathroom and I’m standing outside. I wasn’t very good. I was pretty new and I was really scared. I was basically a glorified extra. And then when I came back to Chicago they said I wasn’t going to be credited in the movie and I said, wait, that’s not fair. At the time, the experience was debilitating because I told my friends and family that I was going to be in this movie and it didn’t go quite as planned. It was overwhelming to be on set with (director) Sydney Pollack and Dustin and Billy were kind of rough on me and not entirely welcoming; I’m trying to be politic about this. And I was a real neophyte. I hadn’t developed my showbiz armor, I think.
“But then I came back and did a very small part in the Michael Mann movie ‘Thief’ with Del Close. Del and I did the scene together and I’m sort of under a car — I was a mechanic — and the camera goes by very quickly.”
“Sixteen Candles” would be his first movie role that involved more than a line or two. “After those first initial experiences in movies where I was burned or spurned or not included, this was actually a part! He had a name and a function in the plot! That obnoxious, blustery part of the character really played into my wheelhouse, those were the characters I was exploring at Second City. And things started changing after that and I was gaining more confidence as a performer.”
It was while he was in New York that he got hired for “The Breakfast Club,” replacing Rick Moranis, who was let go after insisting on playing the role with a Russian accent.
“I remember I was in New York and opening Variety and seeing a story that said, ‘”Breakfast Club” lensing in Chicago.’ When I was doing ‘Sixteen Candles’ John had said, ‘I’ve got this great movie that I’m going to do next and you’re going to be in it.’ He was making all sorts of cool promises. And then I saw this story that Rick Moranis was in it and I thought, damn. And that afternoon I got a call from my agent and she said, ‘They want you to come and do ‘The Breakfast Club’ tomorrow, can you do it?’ They had been filming I think for a month or so. And I was in shock. The cool thing about Second City was they said, ‘OK, you can leave the show — this is a big opportunity, go and do it.'”
What was Hughes’ idea for the janitor?
“The thing that I think annoyed him about what Rick was doing was, he was coming in with this preconceived, almost ‘SCTV’-notion of the character. And if you understand the script, this guy Carl Reed, the backstory for him was that he was one of the hotties of the school like seven or eight years before — and what happened to Carl between the ages of 18 and 26? He might be a janitor, but he’s no fool. I was 27 at the time; Judd Nelson was only three years younger than me, but he was playing a teen and I was playing the adult.”
The film was shot at Maine North High School in Des Plaines, which was unused at the time. The set for the massive school library was built inside the gymnasium, but Kapelos said he looked for — and found — the actual janitor’s office in the building. “It was about the size of a closet and it had a bed in there and I would go in there, read, learn my lines and then grab a power nap.”
Last year, Molly Ringwald wrote a piece for the New Yorker looking back and reconsidering some of the portrayals in the movies she made with Hughes.
“I always found the Long Duk Dong character in ‘Sixteen Candles’ a little bit uncomfortable,” Kapelos said. “I’m a Greek Canadian, my father was an immigrant (his mother is from Boston) and it was not an easy road. So I always thought the Long Duk Dong character was broadly drawn, and I winced when I saw that. It just doesn’t work for me. To this day I watch that and it strikes me as racist. That’s my take on it.
“In so far as the behavior of the kids in the school, it’s one of those things where I see her point. The movies are sort of discussing this subject matter and putting a funny twist on it, when actually it’s not funny. The whole underwear beat in ‘Sixteen Candles,’ I find that really uncomfortable. So I think her points are valid.
“I don’t know how we handle looking at these movies, to be honest. Do we never watch them again? Or do we watch them with the view in mind that people have changed and evolved and this is not funny? Can we talk about these things in a way that’s constructive? That’s what I would prefer. You know, John had sort of an unexpurgated look at all this stuff and I don’t know how he’d feel about it now. He’d probably be defending it in some way, but then again I can’t speak for him. It’s a really complex topic, I think.”
Up next for Kapelos is a role in the second season of Netflix’s “The Umbrella Academy.”
“I can’t tell you anything because I’ve signed an NDA. I can’t even tell you who my character is. He’s a historic person, as opposed to a fictional made-up person, and I can’t even tell you what century. But it’s one of the coolest roles I’ve done.”
And he recently put out an album of songs he wrote called “Too Hip for the Room.”
“I’m using my comedy skill set and my love of jazz to record these humorous jazz songs. They’re songs that used to be called novelty songs in the ’60s and ’70s. Also, I cover ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’ from ‘The Breakfast Club.’
“I like the song,” he said, “and I wanted to do another take on it.”
