Simpsons writer Josh Weinstein has some wild stories about working with Lawrence Tierney
When he was alive, Lawrence Tierney was often a go-to whenever Hollywood needed a heavy. He was stone-faced, had a gravelly voice, and, to paraphrase Reservoir Dogs, “Motherfucker looked like The Thing.”
But as a recent Twitter thread from former Simpsons writer and showrunner Josh Weinstein reminds us, sometimes actors are good at playing grizzled assholes because they really are grizzled assholes. Just in time for the holidays, Weinstein has shared a timeline of the crazy shit Tierney did during the creation of “Marge Not Be Proud,” one of the series’ best Christmas episodes. In it, Bart tries to steal the highly coveted video game Bonestorm and runs afoul of a rough-around-the-edges security guard named Don Brodka, voiced by Tierney.
At one point, Tierney insisted that the character would be funnier with a Southern accent.
And it just got worse from there.
Weinstein’s fellow Simpsons scribe Bill Oakley even chimed in to recall how Tierney was “somehow irked by me ‘dressing like a baseball player.’”
All of this dovetails with the Seinfeld crew’s stories of working with Tierney on a season two episode. “I’ll tell you something about Lawrence Tierney,” said Julia Louis-Dreyfus. “He was a total nutjob.”
The point is, if Tierney were still alive, you definitely wouldn’t want to work with him, gripping as he was onscreen. Read the whole thread, which has plenty of other details, over at Twitter.
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