Well, this is awkward.
Here is blond, toothy Cheryl Hines, who plays the vivacious and perpetually wary wife of Larry David on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” sitting on a sofa in a midtown hotel. She has just begun a daylong publicity push for a new movie, which typically means lots of vaporous repartee with reporters and questions like, “Where’d you get those shoes?”
There will be some of that today, but there will also be talk of a heartbreaking crime. “Waitress” was written and directed by Adrienne Shelly, who was killed in November in the West Village apartment where she kept an office.
The details are ghastly: Disturbed by the noise of a renovation on the floor beneath her, Shelly complained to a 19-year-old construction worker and illegal immigrant named Diego Pillco. Pillco, who is now awaiting trial for second-degree murder, later told the police that Shelly threatened to call the cops. He followed her into her apartment, struck her and then tried to make her death look like a suicide by hanging, according to police. A detailed confession notwithstanding, he has pleaded not guilty.
It all seemed more plausible as — though no less horrific than — an episode of “Law & Order” that aired in January. “Waitress” was the third movie directed by Shelly, who was better known as an indie-movie actress, 40 years old at her death. Exactly how to market a film made by a murder victim is a dicey question, but Fox Searchlight Pictures has apparently decided that the conventional promo playbook — the marathon junket in a suite of hotel rooms — is the way to go.
Remembering a tragedy while selling a film
So Hines has the bizarre job of selling a bittersweet romantic comedy and hashing over a tragedy, in a context set up for showbiz fluff. It has already led to some excruciating moments. Like the on-camera interview she did in a room full of onlookers at the Sundance Film Festival, where the film debuted, with a TV correspondent who clearly needs to fire his producer.
“He said, ‘You must be so excited to be here, and Adrienne must be so excited!’ ” Hines recalls. “I said yes, hoping that maybe we could move on and I’d tell him once we stopped rolling. And he said, ‘She must be so proud!’ And I said, ‘You know, she’s not here.’ And he said, ‘Why isn’t she here?’ And I said, ‘Because she’s no longer with us.’ You could hear a pin drop in that room.”
It’s hard to imagine an actress better equipped to handle this unnerving assignment. As Larry David’s wife on HBO’s “Curb,” Hines must wing it through one mortifying scene after another. The show, which is improvised each week from a seven-page story outline written by David, takes sacrosanct subjects — death, religion, the Holocaust — and mines them for agonizing silence, foul-mouthed rants and laughs.
Hines, of course, isn’t making jokes on this dismal morning, but her background in improv is serving her well.
“It’s helpful,” she says, “because you really have to read the mood of each person who interviews you. Some of them want to just talk about the movie. Others ask you questions like, ‘If you could talk to Adrienne now, what would you tell her?’ Another told me, ‘We’re from a college campus, so you can say (four-letter word)!’ Every interview is different.”
Hines is petite and, even in these mostly grim circumstances, kind of sunny. Before landing the role of Cheryl David, she had small parts in sitcoms but was known, if known at all, as a member of the Los Angeles improv troupe the Groundlings. Landing the “Curb” role was one of those lightning bolts of fame that rarely strike people in their mid-30s, which she was when she auditioned for the show in 1999.
‘She’ll sacrifice herself completely for the scene’
She had little hope going in for the reading, she says, largely because in the pilot Mrs. David was Jewish and Hines, who delicately describes her father as sort of a redneck, is not. She got the part anyway. At an audition with David, she brought the mix of assertive but unpushy that he was looking for.
“I made up this scenario,” says Larry David, on the phone in Los Angeles, “and I think the scene was that I told her I’d given up chicken. And I ask her what’s for dinner and she says ‘chicken.’ When I complained, I just loved the way she handled it. She didn’t get angry. She actually made me laugh, and when that happened, it was all over.”
David auditioned 15 women, but the search was over.
“I don’t want to embarrass her,” he says, “but I can’t say enough good things about her. She’s unoffendable. And she has less ego than anybody I’ve ever worked with. She knows exactly where to take a scene to make it funny, and she’ll sacrifice herself completely for the scene. She knows that it’s more important for the scene to be funny than for her to get a laugh.”
Hines grew up in Tallahassee, Fla. Her first acting job was at Universal Studios in Orlando, in a production that sounds uncannily like a Larry David gag waiting to be filmed. As part of a tribute to Alfred Hitchcock, she and a crew re-created the filming of the shower scene from “Psycho,” with Hines in the Janet Leigh role. A bathroom set was rolled onto the stage, and Hines would step into the shower wearing a flesh-toned body stocking. A guy from the audience was invited to fake-menace her with a rubber knife. There were 12 shows a day.
“People were standing nearby to make sure that nobody really went at me,” Hines recalls, sighing a little. “It wouldn’t really hurt, but it would be far creepier than you’d prefer on a work day.”
Once Rob Reiner’s personal assistant
She moved to Los Angeles in 1994 and took a job bartending. A year later, she signed up for the first of many classes with the Groundlings, later joining the cast. She also worked for three years as Rob Reiner’s personal assistant, mostly running errands and helping to plan parties. The Reiners, Hines says, were the first people she met who she realized were Jewish.
“I remember picking up some Seder coloring books for their kids,” she says. “And I started reading one at a traffic light and I was going, ‘Oh my gosh. Bitters? Plagues?’ That’s how I started learning about Judaism.”
“I hope that we upheld the Jewish tradition and presented ourselves well,” says Rob Reiner on the phone. He doesn’t recall Hines as a laugh-a-minute comedienne, but “it’s hard to be funny when, you know, you’re just picking up prescription drugs, or whatever she was doing.”
Though he and Larry David are friends, Reiner didn’t even know that Hines was trying out for the role of Mrs. David, let alone put in a good word. After the pilot was shot, her character quietly became a Christian, largely because David dropped Yiddish into ad-libbed dialogue and Hines, with cameras rolling, asked, “What does that even mean ?” Over the course of five seasons, she has become a kind of shiksa fantasy, Larry David readily admits—a woman tolerant of her husband’s neurotic and antisocial manners and hot in a second-wife kind of way. The sixth season of the show has wrapped and will start airing in September.
Hines has started winning film parts, including the role of Robin Williams’s wife in the hit comedy “RV.” In “Waitress,” she works at a diner in a small town, one so reminiscent of “Mayberry R.F.D.” that Andy Griffith plays the owner. She didn’t know Adrienne Shelly before filming commenced, and the shooting lasted just 20 days. The two bonded over their respective love affairs with their daughters, but they never really spent much time together.
“I imagine she hung out with really cool theater people and talked about smart things,” she says. In November, when Hines’s husband called to tell her that Shelly was dead, she didn’t believe the initial news reports indicating suicide. Shelly seemed too happy for that.
With “Waitress” rolling out across the country in the coming weeks, Hines will be discussing the movie and the murder for a while. She still hasn’t figured out how to balance the two, so she’ll do what she’s good at: improvise, one interview at a time.
“I went on the Conan O’Brien show recently, and there was discussion beforehand, do we talk about it or not,” Hines says. Not, was the eventual answer. “We’ve got four minutes and you want people to see the film, and it’s not a sad film. And I’m sure that Adrienne wouldn’t want people to watch it with a heavy heart.”