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[0:54] Lauren Van Hemert: Hi everybody, I'm Lauren Van Hemert, and this is Beltline to Broadway, where we talk about the theater from inside the Beltline in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I am, to the bright lights of Broadway and beyond.

[1:08] Lauren Van Hemert: I need to ask you all to do me a favor and click on that subscribe button so you don't miss any of my candid conversations and interviews with Broadway insiders and theater makers across the globe.

[1:45] Lauren Van Hemert: Dreamed of becoming a newsman. Instead, Ed Asner pursued a career in acting and went on to play the role of one of the most iconic newsmen in television history, Lou Grant. Asner earned five Emmy Awards for playing the role of Lou Grant, first on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and then in the title role of the spin-off series. He earned two more Emmys for his work in Roots and Rich Man Poor Man, making him the most honored male performer in the history of the primetime Emmy Awards. Some of our younger listeners might know Asner best as voicing the role of Carl in the Pixar animated movie Up, or playing Santa Claus in the movie Elf. But for me, as a young girl in Miami, pounding out stories for her high school newspaper with aspirations of working in a newsroom just like Mary Richards at WJM, Asner will always be Lou Grant. Here's our conversation.

[3:04] Ed Asner: Walked by my desk one day and he looked down at me and he said, uh, are you thinking of journalism as a career? I said, Yeah. Because of course we had University of Missouri, which is quite accomplished as a teaching factory. And the University of Kansas, which also is no sludge in terms of journalism. So I said, Yeah. And he says, I wouldn't. I said, why not? You can't make a living. This is 1947. My journalism teacher telling me it'd be hard to make a living in nineteen forty seven and think of what it's like now. And so his uh harsh cold words drove me to become an actor.

[4:00] Ed Asner: An overnight success as an actor. But I have a feeling it wasn't that overnight.

[4:06] Lauren Van Hemert: I don't think so. How did you start acting? Because it looks like you started acting in college or was it earlier?

[4:14] Ed Asner: No, I was always a ham bone. I did radio uh studied radio in high school. We would uh do a radio program once a week. We often write our scripts or produce them, act in them, direct them. I didn't do most of that, but I did act and I loved it. I loved radio. Then I went to college. I had a uh roommate from New Jersey who um was an avid uh theater uh aficionado and um they decided uh uh we lived in the Burton Judson dormitory system one guy there uh said it would be appropriate to start a uh closed circuit radio station there so uh the first project they were going to do is going to be a production of Richard the Second and I uh I read for the uh piece and I ended up doing the uh Duke of York I think. That's how I got started.

[5:18] Ed Asner: You joined Playwright's Theater Company in Chicago, which we now know as the Second City. Is that where you honed your knack for comedy or I guess uh I I never thought of honing myself. Um I think one gets placed into the hot tub and one has to either build up the resistance to the heat or you have to get out. So I guess I built up my resistance to heat.

[5:58] Ed Asner: I told you before we went on air that I was so inspired by the character of Mary Richards and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. So talk to me about auditioning for that show.

[6:09] Ed Asner: I read for them, my two producers, and Jim Brooks said, Oh, that was a very intelligent reading. He said, Well, we have you back to read with Mary, well that was a good sign. Pull all the stops out. Well I didn't know what the hell he was talking about. I started to walk out and um I turned and said, Lo, why don't you have me try it that way now? And if I don't do it, don't have me back. I've never talked that way before or since. So they kind of grumbled and said, Oh alright, go ahead. Try to read it as we say in Yiddish, like a machuguner. And they laughed their ass off, and they said, Do it just like that when you come back to read with Mary.

[6:59] Ed Asner: Well, how did what do they do? What did it what do what? I just accentuated everything. I was I was demonic. So I came back and I read with Mary a couple of weeks later, and they laughed again. And I found out a couple of years after that, and after I left the audition, Mary turned to them and said, Are you sure? So she knew that there was a phony there. But I got the I got the role. And what a role it was and what a show it was.

[7:47] Ed Asner: It's part of television history. Well, I just think that we had great writers, and we were fortunate enough that they knew how to cast, filled a role sufficiently to handle their golden dialogue.

[8:02] Lauren Van Hemert: I heard in an interview you said that you felt the character of Lou Grant helped perpetuate decency. You lived with the character of Lou Grant for so long. What would Lou say about the current attack on the news media, do you think?

[8:20] Ed Asner: Uh in my own way I've had my own concern about prejudicial reporting, primarily uh on the theater scene in New York, and uh how I was treated whenever uh I uh did a job. But as far as current events and the news, I feel that they're uh fascists crying out about managed news, managed uh whatever they call it, I don't know. But uh w whatever Trump called it, but on a big scale and involving road shaking events and they're lies. Primarily lies. So how can I enlarge on that?

[9:12] Ed Asner: And I you've been so outspoken in your political views throughout your entire career. Some speculate that might be why the show Lou Grant, the spin-off of The Mary Tyler Moore Show was canceled. Do you think the entertainment industry gives actors more agency now to voice their political views?

[9:57] Ed Asner: And the American people I feel are grossly misinformed about what socialism is and who has it and who doesn't. And having uh having my popularity reduced by the frequent calls at the time of Lou Grant that I was communist inspired. Uh it doesn't take much to wield a village. The rumors are uh are hot and they uh they sell like hot cakes. Like a modern day blacklist, it sounds like.

[10:36] Lauren Van Hemert: Yeah.

[10:37] Ed Asner: Yeah. And I experienced it in a milder form than what uh one of my predecessors of five and ten years earlier had undergone.

[10:49] Lauren Van Hemert: Is the industry better now? Because you've been on a lot of newer series. My you were just on Blue Bloods, Good Wife. Is it is it better now?

[11:00] Ed Asner: Uh I guess so. I I don't I don't really know. Uh I I think my mini blacklist did not last that long, a few years, because there were still people out there who wanted to use me, who wanted to employ my talent.

[11:22] Ed Asner: And if they don't make it a complete blacklist, then it's going to fail.

[11:28] Lauren Van Hemert: Especially if you're talented.

[11:30] Ed Asner: Agreed.

[11:31] Lauren Van Hemert: Absolutely. You know, you were talking about your audition for The Mary Tyler Moore Show and how you read it the way they wanted you to read it in that initial audition, and I know, or I had seen an interview with you about Roots that they had offered you a character that you didn't want to play because you thought it would be too easy.

[11:54] Lauren Van Hemert: I feel like your entire career is really defined by you using that instinct and using that gut. Would you agree with that?

[12:06] Ed Asner: Yes.

[12:08] Ed Asner: To be simple, yes.

[12:10] Lauren Van Hemert: Where does that instinct come from? Tell me about that.

[12:13] Ed Asner: I have good taste. A good example of what you're talking about is before I was blacklisted or whatever happened to me. I was presented with two scripts. One Christmas for a rich family and two Christmas for a poor family. I decided to take the rich family and then went down as the gathering where a rich man, me, realizes he's got cancer, and he brings his family together. He's separated from his wife, and he brings his family together for a last Christmas, and it became sort of a cult film. The poor family Christmas didn't get off the ground really, so I was correct in choosing the one I did.

[13:18] Lauren Van Hemert: Do you have a favorite role in this long career of yours, or is there a favorite part that you've played?

[13:29] Ed Asner: Well, I love doing Rich Man, Poor Man. That's where I finally felt I was offered something someone that I looked up to that I respected such as Axel Jorge. Most of the time, I'm just filming a slot. I'm the boss man, I'm the hard-boiled boss man, and that's about it.

[14:03] Lauren Van Hemert: Do you feel maybe because so many people my age anyway know you as Lou Grant that that became a stereotype for you? Was it hard to break out of that kind of stereotype role?

[14:19] Ed Asner: No, it has not been hard. I was with a very bright agent initially, and both of us dedicated ourselves to when offered roles to always grant that we would not take an inferior role if there were a better one, but at least do a role that would serve as contrast to what I had done previously, and it worked. I would say it did work, yes.

[15:08] Lauren Van Hemert: Let's talk about the play A Man and His Prostate. You call this show a story of life, love, and death. I don't think there's a person alive who hasn't been touched by cancer in one way or another. So is the hope with this play not only to entertain but to kind of get the message out about screening?

[15:36] Ed Asner: Yeah, and how did the play come about? How did you become involved with this project?

[15:42] Ed Asner: Well, Ed Weinberger, who was a producer, writer for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, he wrote it. It's about his own experience on a cruise trip to Italy with his wife, and he made it funny, and I helped make it funnier.

[16:08] Lauren Van Hemert: You've supported so many causes from the Holocaust to refugees, but one that really touched me in doing my research is the Ed Asner Family Center.

[16:22] Ed Asner: Yeah.

[16:23] Lauren Van Hemert: So can you talk to me about how autism has touched your life and what your dream is for this organization?

[16:33] Ed Asner: I separated from my wife during my Playboy times. I impregnated a woman who had a child, a lovely boy, and he was deemed autistic. He has a BS degree from the University of Southern Connecticut, and he's working at the wonderful program that Home Depot has, whereby they work a day or two of the week and receive instruction on how they're dealing with the public. He's doing a good job there. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I had three kids. My son Matthew, on his second marriage, had two boys, and the younger one is autistic. He eventually married his third wife, who was the mother to two boys who are high on the spectrum with autism, and eventually he and she decided to try opening the center, and they called it the Ed Asner Center, and it's open and it's running, and it's got a good head on its shoulders, and I hope the coronavirus does not kill the fundraising efforts that my son has to go through.

[18:52] Lauren Van Hemert: I do too. I do too, because I think what the center is trying to do from what I've read online is so exciting and important.

[19:03] Ed Asner: It's important. I read a letter that you wrote on the Ed Asner Family Center website in which you said your son once asked you what you would be doing if you hadn't become an actor.

[19:22] Lauren Van Hemert: So I'm kind of curious. What would you have done if you hadn't gone into acting?

[19:28] Ed Asner: Archaeology always appealed to me with its tons of history. I would have probably aimed at something close to that. But at the same time, my father was a junkman. I love the business. The junkyard would have been a decent place to spend my days as well. There was a time there where I would get up, my son witnessed this, and it always affected him. Where I would go out on Saturday nights to buy the LA Times so I could peruse the one ads, see what kind of jobs I could get to assist my life support system. If I had been made to suffer for too long, I perhaps would have swallowed my pride and said, Dad, let me come join you in the junk business. But I never got there. Never got that bad.

[20:42] Lauren Van Hemert: And lucky for us, because we have all your incredible characters and roles and books.

[20:48] Ed Asner: Thank you.

[20:49] Ed Asner: Well, the pleasure has been all mine, believe me.

[20:55] Lauren Van Hemert: Last November, Ed Asner celebrated his 91st birthday. When I asked him what he would most like to be remembered for professionally and personally, he summed it up in one word: perseverance.

[21:14] Lauren Van Hemert: Asner was supposed to come to the Triangle last April to perform the one-man show A Man and His Prostate at Temple Theater. Unfortunately, the show was canceled due to the pandemic. I had the opportunity to see Asner on stage just once in the production of Born Yesterday with Madeline Kahn. It was such a treat to see him on stage performing, so much so that I still remember that experience fondly.

[21:45] Lauren Van Hemert: Here's hoping we get past this pandemic so we can see him on stage in our area soon. Leave us a review, follow us on social media, and visit us online at www.beltlinetobroadway.org. Until next time, I'll see you at the theater.