Christopher Lloyd Ignored Sitcoms Five Decades Ago — Then ‘Taxi’ Happened

One clear thing emerges from Christopher Lloyd’s vast, eclectic oeuvre: all the characters he embodies become larger than life when he lifts them from the printed page and inhabits them. His latest role, playing silent film legend Fatty Arbuckle’s grandson, Larry, in “Hacks,” continues that trend and has earned him his first Primetime Emmy nomination (for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series) in 32 years.

In the episode “Hacks” for which he is nominated, Lloyd plays an eccentric man who lives in a house surrounded by memorabilia and memories – and a pet falcon. Shot on location within the historic Queen Anne-style Andrew McNally House, built in 1887 in Altadena, the nine-bedroom mansion features a three-story rotunda and an aviary.

“I’m not looking for strangers; I don’t want people knocking on doors trying to sell magazines, none of that. I keep my little island and I enjoy doing so,” Lloyd says of Larry. “He is not a social being. He gets angry, and when he is in a situation where he has no control over the things that happen, he starts to sputter. He probably grew up in this house and feels safe in it.”

The great character and smart, funny dialogue he got in “Hacks” are old hat for Lloyd, who made his mark on “Taxi” in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In “Taxi,” Pastor Jim Ignatowski was a cab driver with a gigantic heart and an uncomplicated mind, who was more into drugs than casual business. Although he won two Emmys for the role, sitcoms in general were not the path he originally wanted to follow.

“There was this stupid prejudice in New York in the early ’60s or mid-’60s that it was like selling your soul to go to Hollywood and do a sitcom,” he tells Variety. “If you’re a serious actor, a real actor, you’re not going to look for sitcoms anyway.” He was a theater guy, but he still ventured to Los Angeles – “but with a bit of that attitude.” Once in LA, he informed his agent of his attitude toward sitcoms, who occasionally let him appear on sitcom auditions just to meet casting directors. “You never know when that might be important,” Lloyd remembered his agent saying. One of those moments led to his appearance in “Taxi.”

“I dug the role just by reading it,” he recalls. Before he was offered the role in the second season, he went to the set to see the actors working together. “I thought, these guys are great. In New York you always hear about the ideal theater [which] is creating an ensemble. And I thought, ‘It’s here before my eyes. It’s ideal. And I’ve never changed my feelings about it. I just thought it was an incredible company. I loved being part of it. I thought, ‘This isn’t going sideways. This is a good thing. So I quickly got over my reservations about sitcoms,” he adds with a grin. “I mean, I don’t have much to complain about.”

Pastor Jim was without a doubt a unique character. Always sloppy, stoned and therefore clueless. As soon as he opened his mouth and said something – anything – you couldn’t help but laugh. (Got some spare time? Find clips of Jim scenes on YouTube with his “Taxi” co-stars Danny DeVito, Judd Hirsch, Marilu Henner, Tony Danza, Andy Kaufman and Jeff Conaway. You won’t regret it.)

“I just felt like I knew the man,” Lloyd says. “I understood what he was talking about. At that time, there were people like him on the streets. So I just observed them and my feelings about them, and it worked. … A lot of those achievements came from the freedom I felt working with that cast and the amazing writing team. They made it easy.”

Jim was just the beginning of a series of character types that Lloyd played that have something very unique in common: they still make great Halloween costumes to this day. Think: Reverend Jim in ‘Taxi’, Doc Brown in the ‘Back to the Future’ trilogy, Judge Doom in ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit?’, Uncle Fester in ‘The Addams Family’ films and Klingon Commander Kruge in ‘ Star Trek’ III: The Search for Spock.”

Lloyd is humbled by the longevity of his love for Doc Brown, the brilliant, benevolent, eccentric inventor of the flux capacitor (“great Scott!”). “I’ve done my share of work, and nothing compares to the way ‘Back to the Future’ has become ingrained in people’s minds,” he says. “It’s phenomenal. Practically every day – and I definitely go to Comic-Cons – people come up and say, “You made my childhood.” And another reference similar to that, where ‘Back to the Future’ fills the gap in many lives of young people who have become doctors, scientists and whatever. So a lot of gratitude and that makes me feel very good. I feel very lucky to be part of that.”

Uncle Fester in the ‘Addams Family’ films was another character who had special meaning to him. He tells how, when he was a child, his family subscribed to the New Yorker magazine. He never read the articles at the time; he just watched the cartoons. And very often there was a Charles Addams cartoon and a cartoon featuring Uncle Fester and the rest of the family.

“I thought that was great,” says Lloyd. “It was mischief about Uncle Fester and not malicious. He could just play a little bit. And then, that period of my life passed and decades later I got a phone call: Would I like to be Uncle Fester in a movie? What are the chances? It was very exciting to be able to play the character I loved as a child.”

Back then, that kid probably never would have believed he would one day become an action figure, but so is Lloyd. Trekkies there know what I’m talking about: the meter-high Klingon Commander Kruge doll is a spitting image of Lloyd. From the moment The Search for Spock director Leonard Nimoy asked him to don the character’s prosthetic forehead, angry eyebrows and goatee, a supervillain was instantly born.

“I came to the Paramount Studio at four in the morning to put on that makeup — the way it was on my forehead — and then the costume. How can you not feel like you’re the character when you’re doing all that? he asks. “I loved it. I was trying to figure out what is it about this man that I can relate to an audience that will make them feel something about themselves in this man – even if it’s someone you don’t want at your dinner table, you know? It doesn’t change his undesirable qualities, but I want the audience to feel like they’re not engaged to someone from another planet. They’re engaged to someone they can talk to.”