“Your school doesn’t intimidate me whatsoever. Understand that.” This was Jerry O’Connell’s mock-threat to me after he, albeit circuitously, answered the question I posed to him during a conference call in early October. For the first few minutes of the call, in fact, it was unclear who was interviewing whom. It was a week or so after Ahmadinejad came to Columbia, and O’Connell asked me whether I protested him, and if I held a sign. Provocatively, he continued, “How did you personally feel about him?” Not wanting to commit myself politically, I responded with what O’Connell referred to as a “safe answer.”
O’Connell was extremely excited to learn that he was speaking with a student from Spectator of Columbia University. “Wow—Ivy League!” he exclaimed, adding, “First of all, my mother got a master’s from there.” The threat came after O’Connell explained that he had been a New York University student from 1991 to 1994, and was on the fencing team for a couple years when it was a “fencing powerhouse” and “did in fact beat Columbia”—which is why Columbia didn’t intimidate him.
This season, O’Connell stars in the new ABC comedy Carpoolers, but you might know him better as Vern from the 1986 movie Stand By Me, or from his role as Detective Woody Hoyt on Crossing Jordan. Or maybe you think of him as brother to Charlie O’Connell, who searched for true love on The Bachelor in season seven. No matter what role you know Jerry O’Connell from, you must associate him with his wide grin, goofy voice, and on-screen fervor for fun.
Carpoolers is a half-hour show that chronicles the carpooling adventures of four men. When the show first premiered, it seemed disconcertingly androcentric and one-dimensional. Its saving grace was its informality and nonchalance, which might be because it is shot with only a single camera, and because, according to O’Connell, the cast is full of “cutting edge improvists? ...Improvisationalists?”
Another redeeming feature of the show is the presence of two actually funny characters, neither of which happened to be O’Connell’s. In fact, his character, as written, might be the least entertaining.
O’Connell said that Carpoolers is different from anything he has ever done before, but he has a positive outlook. “By no means am I the best on this set. I’m actually—of all the cast, I’m probably the a weakest improviser ... I’ve got a lot to learn, but hopefully this will go for a while and I’ll get better than them all.”
O’Connell peppered every other sentence with the word “fun”, and it’s easy to see why he uses this word so frequently. For O’Connell his work does not feel like “work” in the traditional sense. While these insights inspire more respect for Carpoolers, O’Connell portrayed himself as someone who got into acting because of the attention it garners and the easy lifestyle it can afford. When asked what aspect of show business he preferred, he responded that it was acting because it’s “the one that gets me past lines and into restaurants.”
O’Connell engaged with every interviewer and shared many personal anecdotes. Either he wanted to distract the interviewers from asking questions about Carpoolers—he did have a permutation of the same response for every question—or he truly is just a chatty, friendly guy who is interested in connecting with people. It’s probably the latter, and he did represent the show as a fun, creative venture that would be attractive to watch.
O’Connell had some advice for Columbia students. “I think everyone at Columbia should read Who Moved My Cheese?,” he said. Apparently, it’s a good lesson on being spontaneous, a necessary quality for today’s actors. “It’s a different world these days. I think gone are the days when people just write scripts and read them, and some of those comedies aren’t garnering as much attention as some of the more improvised, loose, wacky comedies a la The Office, a la Arrested Development, a la Carpoolers ... you just gotta sort of roll with the punches...” Its a lesson worth learning: whether you’re an actor looking for work in Hollywood or a Columbia student looking for something to do on a Saturday night, you’ve got to have spontaneity.