Carl Weathers came up with his own weirdo Arrested Development "character"
Take a Rocky joke Mitch Hurwitz was too embarrassed to pitch, mix in Weathers' own willingness to make fun of himself, and baby… You got a stew goin'!
In the grand pantheon of actors playing weird, crappy version of themselves for comedy, it’s damn hard to top Arrested Development and the late Carl Weathers. (Who died on Friday, at the age of 76.) The key to Weathers’ performance, as is so often the case in comedy, comes down to specificity: “Carl Weathers,” the Rocky star and acting coach who insinuates himself into the Bluths’ lives as an acting coach for David Cross’ endlessly deluded Tobias, wasn’t just vain, or arrogant, or any of the other easy routes for celebrity self-mockery: He was gloriously, transcendently cheap, scamming money from overbooked flights, and always hunting for the next spare bone to toss in a brewing stew—an idea that Weathers himself brought to series creator Mitch Hurwitz.
This is per a Vulture piece from a few years back, tracking the origins of several of the series’ most famous gags, and which has been making the rounds again in the wake of Weathers’ death: Hurwitz revealing that the whole origin of Weathers’ run on the former Fox sitcom had its origins in a joke he was too ashamed to pitch to the star.
Specifically, Hurwitz says, he’d intended to bring Weathers on for an extended reference to Rocky 3, and specifically a training montage that features lots of long, luxuriating zooms on the legs and crotches of Weathers and Sylvester Stallone. When the series creator approached Weathers about being on the show, the response was enthusiastic, with one caveat: “Great, but let me ask you something. It’s not going to be just a bunch of Rocky jokes is it?” To which Hurwitz responded, obviously, “No! No! Give me a little credit, Carl. Of course not! It’s a multidimensional character.”
Weathers went on to pitch the “cheap” angle for the fictionalized version of himself, which the writers, obviously, ran with to great effect, taking what likely would have been a one-off celebrity gag and transforming it into one of the funniest recurring bits of the show’s whole run. Hurwitz lays it out plain: “All credit to Carl for that;” Weathers himself told a similar story to us in 2014, noting that he’d met plenty of people who always “tried to get on someone else’s tab,” and decided, “I’d like to play that guy.”