Austin Basis interview: Playing a teacher is all in the family
Math is one of those characters you can't help but root for -- he's such an all-around good guy. So it stands to reason that Austin Basis is a stitch to talk to as well. We spoke with the actor about his impressive acting education, playing a teacher and getting advice from Mary Tyler Moore.
Math is such a likable character because he seems to represent that really great teacher we all had at one time or another. From your bio it seems like you had a lot of educators in your life; do you draw a lot of inspiration from them playing a teacher?
I think I draw the most from my mom, who was a teacher for about 40 years in the New York City Public Schools system. When I was a kid she would sometimes take me to school with her and I would watch her with her students. She was kind of like that cool teacher that everybody likes. I think the difference is Math tries a little too hard to be that teacher. He isn’t exactly with it.
Yeah, he does have that man-purse. Do you have one of those?
I do have a masculine male-bag, I want to put it that way. This last week Jerry Levine, who has directed a few episodes, came in with a leather man-purse that reminded me of this one a teacher of mine in high school had. It looked like this hippie-ish, rawhide purse. I was like, “Jerry, that’s a man-purse.”
We suspect things are going to get a little hairy at school with Lux having hooked up with a teacher. Is Math going to be involved in the drama?
I don’t know exactly how that is going to resolve itself. Even if I did I probably couldn’t tell you anyway. He is going to be involved somehow. Talking about it with Jerry Levine, right off the bat he wanted to make it clear that if Baze, myself or Ryan took any note of a dynamic between Lux and the teacher that it would be over, they would immediately be onto it. So what we tried to do is create a situation where Lux and Eric could relate to each other that was not in front of us. We want to avoid a scene that would betray that relationship, because we want the guys to seem like real people, and real people would be able to see what's going on in that situation and discern that connection.
I’ve never heard studying to be a doctor as a “complex form of procrastination,” as was mentioned in your online bio, which is kind of an awesome way to put it. What made you want to pursue that career?
I'm a Jewish kid from Brooklyn and, not that it's either you're-a-lawyer or you're-a-doctor, but there's an overachieving sense to your upbringing. I was going to magnet schools, and I wouldn't have attended my junior high school and high school if I wasn't able to test into them. Along with that, I was constantly in the care of doctors growing up. My uncle was a nurse administrator in a hospital. From the age of nine I had diabetes and I was seeing doctors a lot, so I thought I had a grasp on what that entailed. And then, obviously, after watching ER I wanted to be like George Clooney. But it came down to having to go to eight more years of school or what I was doing in drama and I just chose what I enjoyed more. Thankfully, it was a choice that paid off.
If you were actually a high school teacher like Math, what subject would you teach?
If I were a high school teacher I would probably teach American history. I was never good at English. I don’t like reading because I do so much of it with scripts, so that's how I get my reading in. I read slowly, so I always get impatient with the process. When I was a kid I had one teacher, Ms. D, and she would act out her history lessons. She would bring it alive with the energy she had. The impression of a teacher being able to bring a boring history book to life in front of you, it just made it way more interesting than sitting at home and reading about serfs. She had a character named Joe Serf and she would have this scene that would go back and forth between the Lord and the Serf and would teach us about the kind of relationship those two classes of people had.
You’re highly educated, having earned a masters degree in fine arts. What inspired you to pursue that degree?
When I was in college I looked like I was a high school freshman, I looked really young. I felt like because I looked young, I had a little more time before I needed to get out there and pound the pavement as an actor. Also, I didn’t get all I wanted in college. I didn’t get full vocal training or a movement class and I wanted to be a fully-trained actor. I wanted to be a part of this small group of people that has a full bag of techniques that they could use when they perform. One of my teachers, Gene Lesser, encouraged me to work harder. He was the one that told me [when] I go to an audition there are going to be 10 other people there who look exactly like me going for the same role, and I need to set myself apart. He always said if you want to be an actor go to New York, and if you want to be successful go to school. When I went to the Actors' Studio it was just starting out. It was just the right fit and it really changed me as an actor.
Did you ever get to go on James Lipton’s show and ask a question?
He was the dean of the school and his masters class was having a guest like Tom Hanks or Sean Penn or Stephen Spielberg every week. On the show you see kids in the audience taking notes, I was one of those kids. I got to ask a lot of questions, but the only one that aired was with Mary Tyler Moore. She has diabetes as well, so I asked her about working in the industry, how do you maintain your professionalism and how do you keep diabetes from impeding your career or getting a role. She said that you know what you need and you just have to be on top of it. Every time she was on set she'd tell the directors that she needed apple juice or something on stage, so if she needed it it would be right there and she could get back to work. She said you just have to pay attention to what your body is telling you.
You did a lot of stage acting throughout your early career, do you prefer stage or television acting?
I don’t have a preference, I enjoy them both. I like the dynamic between an actor and an audience that you only get in theater. You get it in TV and film to a certain degree, but it’s more the camera man and the boom operator trying not to laugh or trying to be quiet and do their job. When I was first on TV it was on a sitcom. It was kind of an epiphany, I thought if I could do an episode in front of a live audience and getting that energy from them, that would be the ideal situation. Of course then I got moved into non-sitcom television immediately after that. Somehow whenever I'm trying one kind of acting I get magically moved into another. I think if I ever want to go back to sitcoms I'll have to do movies or something.
Speaking of different kinds of acting, you got to act in the web series “Ghostfacers,” the Supernatural spin-off. How is that experience different from television acting?
It's very different, actually. You don’t have a lot of time to get stuff done, but there’s more freedom. In our situation I happen to play one of the camera men, so we shoot our own stuff. They get security shots with real camera men for special effects, but we would get three to five takes on our cameras. There was also the added dynamic of being the camera man as a character. Like if he’s filming a really good-looking girl, how would Spruce play that? Would he be listening to the girl and focusing on her face or would he be filming her body? You have to think about those things, how this character sees this scene.
Did you have any previous experience from school working with a camera?
No not in school, I had some experience when I was kid. For my bar mitzvah I got a video camera. It was this big camera that was made just at the end of the era when they made cameras that used the full-sized VHS tapes. Now on the show we use much smaller cameras or flip-cams and their stuff looks much better than anything I filmed on that big piece of machinery.
But before filming as the camera man I read a lot of books and watched a lot of films to get a sense of what looks good in the frame. Even if I had no skills, if someone was talking I would know to get them in the frame. So I'm not TERRIBLE.
If for some reason you couldn’t act tomorrow, what other career would you like to pursue (besides doctor)?
I've always wanted to sing and that led into my acting. Good singers can turn music into this expression of emotion and I lack that ability. When someone who can actually do it well, whether it's on American Idol or singing the National Anthem at a ballgame, they can hit those notes and it gives people the chills. That’s an awesome gift to be able to ignite those emotions and focus the audience. So I guess I’d be a rock star.
It's funny, Kris Polaha said the same thing.
Well, he actually can sing.
You traveled to India to shoot a film. What film was that? What was your experience like filming there?
It's called "The Other End of the Line." It was a cross-cultural kind of romance where I play the lead role's best friend. We both work in an ad agency. He loses his credit card and has to call a call center. He starts a relationship with this charming woman in the call center in India. The irony of my going to India is that none of my scenes take place in India. All of our scenes were interior office scenes that were supposed to be New York or San Francisco. So it was funny being in such a different culture and having to pretend you were somewhere else. It was also very difficult because there is a lot of poverty in India, so it was hard to see that and then go be funny and act as if you're back in the United States.
You’ve also done some improv, which seems like a terrifying thing to do. What do improv actors do to keep up such a constant flow of dialogue and ideas?
I should explain that after I graduated from grad school it was right around 9-11, there really wasn’t a lot going on to audition for. I wanted to do something creative that I didn’t have to worry about and could just blow off steam, and improv was that place. I did it every Friday or Saturday and it would be a build up of all the energy I had going from grad school. You have to be able to roll with it and not break character. You have to have fun and not worry about being funny, just do the requirements of the scene. If you want to be a method actor, the Actors Studio is the place to be, but I really liked comedy and I'm kind of funny-looking, so I got into comedy. Ironically, the method-acting training at the Actors Studio helped me be a better comic actor because most comedy is about the truth of the situation.