Ray Romano Is Embracing His Murky Side: “I Feel Very Raw”

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Ray Romano Is Embracing His Murky Side: “I Feel Very Raw”

When Ray Romano finished his near-decade-long run on Everybody Loves Raymond, he felt hungry for a novel challenge. He started saying no to sitcom of

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When Ray Romano finished his near-decade-long run on Everybody Loves Raymond, he felt hungry for a novel challenge. He started saying no to sitcom offers, developed his own well-regarded but short-lived drama, Men of a Certain Age, and put himself out there by directly asking for a dramatic role on Jason Katims’s Parenthood. (He wound up starring in the NBC hit’s final three seasons.) “When you’re coming off of nine years of a sitcom, you’ve got to take baby steps,” Romano says. “The audience doesn’t see you in that light.”

He’s put in a lot of work since those early breakthroughs—see his terrific supporting work in everything from The Big Sick to Bad Education and The Irishman—but still, viewers may not be primed for just how obscure Romano goes in No Good Deed (streaming December 12), the latest genre-busting Netflix series from Dead to Me creator Liz Feldman. This half-hour show veers from broad comedy to wrenching drama, following various couples whose fates converge at an open house in a leafy Los Angeles neighborhood—to both emotional and shocking ends.

Romano and another sitcom legend, Lisa Kudrow, anchor the swirling action as the home’s owners, Paul and Lydia, whose motivation to sell comes into clearer view with each episode. The spouses carry secrets, resentments, debts, and petty feuds that start to overwhelm them, allowing the two Emmy winners to hit some pleasingly familiar comic notes—but also far more convoluted ones of desperation, grief, and regret. As Romano says, he’s developed ways to go to those kinds of places as an actor over the years. He’s still learning on the fly, though—and has some substantial ideas for where he’d like to go next.

Vanity Fair: This is novel territory for you as an actor. What did you make of Liz Feldman approaching you for No Good Deed?

Ray Romano: I can’t remember if she said why, and I would never ask—I don’t think I would risk asking her that. [Laughs] But I do believe she told me she had me in mind right from the get go. It’s labeled as a obscure comedy, and that’s true, but I kind of feel like it’s a obscure dramedy if you’re going to be really specific. There is a caricature to some of the people and some of the humor, but it’s all still grounded. And if I have to go out on a limb and say something nice about my stupid self, I think what she saw in me was that that’s kind of my wheelhouse. I like comedy, and if it’s substantial, it’s substantial. But I always want it to feel grounded in some type of reality. That’s the way this show goes.

There’s a darkness to your performance too. Paul is haunted, but we don’t exactly know why until the end of the season. How did you approach those scenes, teasing out what’s going on inside of the character while not giving it away?

There’s a whodunit aspect to it, there’s a mystery. I just played it the only way I knew how. And for that I needed to know—because there was a mystery to us, also. Not all the episodes were written, and we weren’t given them all. Myself and Lisa, we needed to know: What are we playing here? What really has happened? Liz knew as an actor that we needed to know, and she did tell us. I took all the information I had on that character, and I did what I always do: I made up a whole little backstory for him, with the house and with his brother. I just put that in my own head and that stays in the back. You write it, you read it, and then you put it away.

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