BILL TIMONEY
The face is familiar. Maybe the voice, too.
But if you can’t place the name, Bill Timoney understands.
“For actors who haven’t succeeded in branding themselves, which is me, the key to survival is versatility,” says Timoney, 68.
So he has played leads at Cape May Stage, and supporting parts on Broadway. He has done commercials and sitcoms and soap operas and movies. And he has done countless invisible-man jobs, dubbing foreign films or providing background dialogue for crowd scenes.
“Actors are like athletes,” he says. “I may be the utility player, but at least I get in the game.”
And if sometimes he is only there for an inning, those games have often been huge, including the 2019 film “The Irishman” and the recent all-star Broadway revival of “Our Town.” He just finished work understudying four actors in the New York City Center production of “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been,” and on Sept. 25, he starts another standby job for three performers in the Roundabout Theatre Company revival of Molière’s “The Imaginary Invalid.”
But for now, Timoney is home in the Leonardo home he shares with his wife, actress and playwright Georgette Reilly, their two dogs and their three cats. And he took some time there to talk about that rarest of animals: the steadily working “working actor.”
Q: You got the bug early.
A: Oh, yeah. I always loved movies. I’m a monster kid: Growing up in River Edge, Saturday nights were always “Creature Features” on TV. So once my folks gave me a Super 8 camera, it was off to Van Saun Park to shoot movies with my friends. Then, in high school, I got cast in a high school production of “Camelot,” and that was it. I told my boss — I was scooping ice cream at The Bergen Mall — and he said “Sorry, you can’t do this job and do a play.” So I quit.
Q: Was anyone in your family in show business?
A: My mother was a print model for a while. She was working in an office and her employer sent in her photo and she was picked as a Miss Subways — this was back in ’53. She did a touring trade show for Motorola, a TV game show. A talent scout from MGM even offered her a screen test, but she wasn’t interested in acting — she was too self-conscious.
I was interested, though, and after college I asked her if she could call up her old contacts. “They’re all dead,” she said. But a friend from church was the casting director for “All My Children” and my mother asked her to get me an audition. Their plan was, they were going to scare me off: “Once he sees what’s it really like, he’ll lose interest.” But when she called my mom that night, she said “I’ve got bad news for you, Mary. He was the best actor we saw.”
Q: Which is how you ended up playing Alfred Vanderpool, who sounds like he should have come with an ascot and a sneer.
A: I think they initially saw him as a young Thurston Howell III from “Gilligan’s Island.” I played him as more real, more vulnerable, uncertain around girls his own age. Daytime’s Dork, we called him. I had three great years there in the early ’80s. It was a terrific education. I mean, soaps still weren’t that far from live TV. They were shot on video, but they hadn’t mastered editing tape. If you really messed up a line, you had to do the whole scene over again.
Bill Timoney with Bryan Cranston.
Q: I know you’ve had a long friendship, and collaboration, with Bryan Cranston. Is that how you two met?
A: Sort of. There was this annual charity event for the USO that all the soap opera people did. Bryan was on “Loving” then, and we met and became instant pals. Later, when we got back to New York, if we were taping the same day, we’d go to Central Park afterwards and play Wiffle ball, and plan our careers. Everything Bryan has achieved since was mapped out then.
Q: And you’ve stayed friends all this time.
A: For a time, we were in competition. Now, I’m not a competitive person. I’m sort of, “Hey, there’s enough here for everybody, why don’t we share?” But Bryan had a tough life. He saw his dad struggle as an actor: One year they had a swimming pool, the next year they had to drain it because they couldn’t afford the chemicals. So when Bryan started going up for parts, he could be kind of ruthless.
I remember in ’94, I booked this national ad campaign for Avis. It was amazing: With one check, I paid off my back taxes. And I called Bryan, ecstatic, and he was just, “Damn it! I was up for that!” So after we hung up, I called the agency and said, “Um, there’s another part in this commercial for someone, right? Because I think you already saw this guy, Bryan Cranston, and he might be free.” And he got that job and I think that caused a real shift in attitude, on Bryan’s part. We got even closer then. And we still work together a lot. We talk about projects, I run lines with him, we’ve acted together.
Q: You’ve done a lot of understudy work. Have there been any “42nd Street” moments, where the star breaks an ankle and they push you onstage?
A: On “Are You Now …,” I did go on for Michael (McKean) once. Brooks (Ashmanskas), too. I was still on my way to the theater, grabbing a slice in Times Square, when I got the call. So it happens. It’s definitely a different kind of acting job, being an understudy. I believe you take a Hippocratic Oath: “First, do no harm.” And you will do harm to the other actors if you come onstage and are very different from the person you’re replacing. It’s not like when you’re originating a role and you get the script and now you’re discovering the character, finding your way to all these different choices. It’s more like mimicry.
Bill Timoney with Bob Odenkirk, who co-starred in “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been.”
Q: You’ve also done a lot of voiceover work — foreign films, anime, background dialogue for party scenes.
A: Most of what I’ve done is dubbing: synching to whatever’s already been done — putting English over Japanese or Russian or Hebrew. I’ve done all sorts of stuff. The coolest jobs, pictures like “Kolya” and “Il Postino.” And then incredibly trashy stuff. Weird stuff, too. I did Bruce Willis’ groans in “The Sixth Sense,” after he was shot. When Gary Oldman gets thrown to the hogs in “Hannibal”? That’s me. Plus a lot of orgasms for “Sex and the City.” Hey, it’s a gig.
Q: What advice would you give someone interested in acting? Should they take classes?
A: I was on “All My Children” for years without ever having taken a class, and finally I thought, “Well, maybe I should,” so I signed up with this guy. And a woman there told me, “He’s marvelous: I’ve been studying with him for seven years and I think I’m finally ready to start auditioning!” “Uh-huh.” So, you need to be careful. A lot of these teachers, I think they just want to manipulate people. I do coach some students — I don’t advertise, it’s word of mouth — but I’m known as someone who gets his students work, who looks out for them. And I’m proud of that.
I knew one young woman who told me she’d answered an ad for a horror movie — it was supposedly a “proof of concept” thing, where a director gets a scene on video to show possible investors. So she did it — in her underwear, tied up, gagged, some guy threatening her — and the next morning the director called her and said, “Sorry, they weren’t interested.” I told her, “There weren’t any investors. He wouldn’t have had a finished scene by then. This creep just wanted to film you in your underwear so he could sell it to a fetish site.” So I called him, pretending to be her very angry lawyer, and told him he’d better not put one second of that tape online.
That’s an extreme example but, believe me, there are lot of people out there trying to take advantage of young performers.
Q: And what’s your advice to them about breaking in?
A: That there is no breaking in. It’s like, there’s this big party in an enormous mansion, but the walls are 12 feet high and there’s a big guy guarding the front door. You’re not going to break in. But maybe you can sneak in. Maybe there’s a big tree on the other side you can climb, and drop over the wall. Maybe there’s a basement window someone left open. Or maybe, even better, there’s an empty lot across the street where you can set up your own party and everyone will notice you. And then they’ll invite you in.
The Roundabout Theatre Company will present “The Imaginary Invalid” at The Todd Haimes Theatre in New York from Sept. 25 to Nov. 22. Visit roundabouttheatre.org.
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