Victory gardener

If you ever need a pitchman to sell something, you might consider character actor David Rasche. Talking about In the Loop, which presents the lead-up to a fictional war in the Middle East as a series of farcical power squabbles among political appointees (ahem…), Rasche’s enthusiasm for his costars and for writer/director Armando Iannucci is, frankly, infectious. Even if we didn’t already like the movie a lot, Rasche’s careful balance of gushing and dry wit would spark our interest. He honestly sounds goddamned happy to be involved.

It’s not like he needed the job. Rasche has worked steadily on television, in theater and on film since the 1970s. He’s a quintessential “Hey it’s that guy”: You might know him from the cult hit 1980s TV comedy Sledge Hammer, or as the President in The Sentinel, or as a CIA operative in Burn After Reading, or as a passenger in United 93, or from his brief run as Cal Hartley on Ugly Betty, or his 38-episode run as Robert Gardener on All My Children…

But you probably wouldn’t know his name. He’s used to it. When we ask if he gets stopped on the street, his reply is typically deadpan. “People say, ‘What’s your name?’ I usually say Jamie Foxx. And if they’re totally dazed, they say ‘Yeahhhh! That’s it!’”

He actually came to acting by a rather circuitous route. In college, he heard the comic routines of Mike Nichols and Elaine May. “When I heard those routines, that was it for me. In my heart of hearts, I wanted to do nothing other than do Mike Nichols and Elaine May routines. I didn’t want to be an actor. I just wanted to be Mike Nichols. So the next summer, I worked on the last pleasure cruiser in the Great Lakes. I was a bellboy. On the weekends, they would ask the crew to do a little show. So I would get a Mike Nichols and Elaine May record and rip them off and get some waitress and force her to, like, say exactly what Elaine May said. Exactly as she said it.” After a detour through a master’s degree in English from the University of Chicago and two years of divinity school, Rasche found his way to Second City. Then he branched out and became one of the early interpreters of new work by a young David Mamet, and was a founding member of Victory Gardens. When we ask about his memories of Chicago, he’s ready with a comeback: “I wanna know why isn’t my picture in the lobby of Victory Gardens? That’s what I wanna know.”

To prepare for his In the Loop role as State Department hawk Linton Barwick, Rasche drew on real people for inspiration, and he doesn’t hide his feelings about them. “I’ll give you the list,” he says. “Donald Rumsfeld, David Addington, John Bolton, Condoleezza Rice, Karl Rove, all of these superior, supercilious, arrogant, condescending, belittling, officious people who populated our government for the last eight years.” His one regret about the film is that many of his best lines got left on the cutting-room floor. Iannucci shot all of his 200-page script, and then encouraged his actors to improvise even more material. But much of that had to go in the editing. “I am a little heartbroken. I guess Armando made it a little bit more black and white than it was when we shot it.” And then Rasche goes back into cheerleader mode: “All we can do is say that the guy did a wonderful job.” Spoken like a politician.

In the Loop opens Friday.

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