INTERVIEW: Marc Kudisch joins ‘The Tick’ for season two
Photo: The Tick, an Amazon original series, stars, from left, Peter Serafinowicz, Griffin Newman and Marc Kudisch. Photo courtesy of Myles Aronowitz / Provided by Amazon press site with permission.
Marc Kudisch is an accomplished, Tony-nominated actor who is comfortable on a Broadway stage or a TV/film set. He has been around show business for decades and remains in demand for creative, interesting roles. This past year, audiences could have seen him in the Public’s production of Girl From the North Country, and now TV audiences can catch him on season two of The Tick, an Amazon original series.
On the comic-book show, Kudisch plays Ty Rathbone, an original character certainly with a story to tell.
“I went in, and I auditioned for it,” Kudisch said in a recent phone interview. “I watched as much of the first season as I could before walking in. That said, I’m a comic book geek. I was always a huge fan of The Tick in college.”
The Tick, of course, is the animated creation of Ben Edlund. It started out as a character in print and had a TV adaptation a while back. This new reboot has become a successful staple in the Amazon original programming block. The new series stars Peter Serafinowicz as the title character, a somewhat boneheaded superhero whose mishaps are an obvious riff on comic-book culture.
“It’s a brand-new character,” Kudisch said of Rathbone. “So there was nothing to compare it to or nothing to look at, which in many ways I think was good for me because I came up with my own idea of it. I got a very specific idea of the character when I read it, and luckily that I think was exactly what they were looking for — subtle and kind of crazy at the same time. Who doesn’t want to do that?”
The actor loves the irreverence of the comedy series and its homage to the joy and love of reading comic books. To join the team and add to that irreverence was yet another impressive bullet point on a long, long résumé for Kudisch.
“It was this interesting thing of I did [the audition],” he said. “I kind of forgot about it. I didn’t even know I was in the running, and then I found out I was the running. And it all worked out. Day one even in the costume fittings, Ben Edlund was there and literally figuring out what the costume was going to be and having conversations: ‘We’re thinking this, we’re thinking that.’ I was like, ‘Oh, well, what if we did this, or what if we did that. This could be this here. Oh, cool, cool, yeah.’ It’s a very creative place.”
Shooting for Rathbone took approximately two to three days per episode, and the overall production kept Kudisch busy from mid-April all the way to July 2018. On the set, he had to get used to the many green screens and CGI used for the series.
“Day one you walk on to the set, and there’s all these big green screens everywhere,” he said. “I’ve never walked on the set where the crew was so into the show. … The only other show I’ve worked on where I have to say the crew was as into the show as the actors were is Billions. Like everyone loves being on Billions. Everyone is proud of being on Billions, and with The Tick, I felt the same exact way. The crew loved The Tick. The crew loved the costumes, the storyline because season two was such an exciting departure even from season one in its tonality. Everyone was like, it’s the coolest show. It’s so fun to be here. It’s awesome. It’s an awesome, very creative place to create.”
Kudisch appears in seven of the 10 episodes in the new season. This meant he was able to keep busy on the TV set, but also have some free time for his other acting pursuits, which are many and varied. During production, he actually performed On the Town with the Boston Pops at Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts. He also took part in the workshop for Girl From the North Country, which he performed at the Public in fall 2018. There are still hopes this Bob Dylan-influenced musical will make it to Broadway, a place Kudisch is quite familiar with; he has appeared in 9 to 5, Finding Neverland, Hand to God, The Apple Tree, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Assassins, among many others.
“I was also shooting a film in and around my shooting schedule for The Tick,” he said. “It’s going to be coming out this summer, Late Night with Emma Thompson and Mindy Kaling. It couldn’t have been actually a nicer mixture.”
Transitioning back and forth between the stage world and the film/TV world seems to be easy for Kudisch. For him, it all comes down to the tone of the project he’s working on.
“It’s all about tone,” he said. “I remember when I got cast as Dr. Gus in Billions. I read the character on the page, and he was so big on the page. … There’s two ways to play this. There’s the television way, and there’s the way that I instinctively am reading this character. And I remember when I got into the room to audition, I said to the guy, ‘There’s two ways to play this.’ They’re like, ‘Dude, we wrote him to be big. Don’t worry about that.’ Dr. Gus is bigger than anything that I’ve ever done on the stage. I swear to God. It doesn’t matter, honestly; it’s whatever the tonality of the piece is. It’s just the tone of it, and it’s the connection to whatever the truth is in the moment. I don’t act to impress. I act to engage, so whatever that is, you just trust that and go with it.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Marc Kudisch appears in season two of The Tick on Amazon. He most recently performed in Girl From the North Country at the Public Theater. Click here for more information.
