PASADENA, Calif. –Actor Alan Tudyk literally rode to fame on a horse. He was 11. Given the assignment in speech class to recite a tall tale, Tudyk says he came up with a story about a grizzled old-timer.
“I come from Texas, so I guess this was part of it,” he says. “I wrote a tall tale that didn’t exist. I think maybe that’s what we had to do. And I told it in character like an old prospector: ‘Oh, ya never heerd the story of Pecos Pete? Well git ready because this will knock yer socks off and yer boots too,’ – whatever I said.
“I did cause a little bit of trouble,” he admits, “because I came into the scene with a stick horse… I brought a stick horse and rode it into the classroom. I left the class and had an entrance which was me going, ‘Yee-haw, whoopie!’ and I made my speech and when I finished, I got back on the horse and left. When I was done, the teacher said, ‘You need to leave this class and maybe find a different one.'”
He did.
Then his mother signed him up for community theater, and the next thing he knew he was playing the equally prestigious role of the hare in the fable “The Tortoise and the Hare” at the local mall.
“He was called ‘the jive-talking hare,” Tudyk remembers. “And I had a transistor radio that I held in my big ear and I talked a big game — that I was going to win the race. And then I lost. But he was a real outsized character and all my neighborhood friends came to see it at the mall… 1983 or something, and they came to see it and they didn’t make fun of me. What I started to learn was that they were impressed; they enjoyed it. I was wide open for ridicule, and they didn’t. They kind of had some respect after that.” He was still 11.
That respect has followed Tudyk throughout his polychromatic career. People know him from TV roles in “Firefly,” “Arrested Development” and “Suburgatory,” and movies like “Knocked Up,” “Knight’s Tale” and “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” as well as countless voice-overs in animated films like “Frozen,” “Wreck-It Ralph,” “Young Justice.”
But they’re yet to see Tudyk in his new incarnation. He plays an alien who crash lands on Earth and assumes the guise of a small-town doctor in “Resident Alien,” premiering Wednesday on the Syfy Channel. Tudyk’s comic timing infects the newcomer with hilarious gaffes as the alien tries to “fit in” to American society.
According to Tudyk, getting here has been half the fun. He attended a junior college for two years then studied at Juilliard for three, but never graduated. While there he was supporting himself and his mother would send him cans of chili, worried he wasn’t eating properly.
“And I had this chili that I never ate because that stuff looks like dog food when it comes out of the can. But I never threw it away,” he says.
He landed a job with a theater company that was waiting to rent an off-Broadway theater. But the wait lasted six months.
“I had quit my waiting table job and I was trying to just make it as an actor,” he recalls. “And while we were waiting to get a theater in New York, I lived on that chili — chili and Fritos. I could buy Fritos and I had chili. I lost so much weight. When we finally did the play, it was, like, ‘Gosh, you’ve lost weight.’ I actually was losing weight ’cause I didn’t have food to eat. But I didn’t want to ask for any money or didn’t have that option available to me.”
Realizing he couldn’t depend on acting for survival, Tudyk landed a job bartending. His girlfriend was appearing on Broadway in a play with Allison Janney (“Mom”). She brought her cast members to visit Tudyk’s bar one evening.
“I said, ‘No, no, no!’ She said, ‘We all love a dive bar.’ I said, ‘This is not a dive bar like that, this is really depressing.’
“The guy who owned it taught me how to pour bad vodka into the Absolut vodka bottle. All the olives looked like they’d suffocated themselves years before – it was the worst place. Anyway, she brings some of her cast from Broadway, and I’m serving Allison Janney not-Absolut vodka martinis at this bar, depressed that I’m in this situation… I thought if I’m ever going to write a novel, I’ll stay in this job. But the theater came through and I quit.”
Married for four years to choreographer Charissa Barton, Tudyk says even that was not part of his plans. They’d met at Juilliard and always kept in touch, reconnecting at mutual friends’ birthday parties.
“We were pals; would always get in trouble together. We both had the same idea of what was fun,” he says. When they first started dating, Tudyk says he knew “this is it.”
Now Barton mentors young dancers and teaches at Juilliard. Tudyk also teaches acting classes there.
“So we’re back full circle at Juilliard,” he says. “We’re there, in the same hallways where we met.”
