Jerry Boyd, a 77-year-old from Alabama who plays the uptight-but-goofy Curtis, doesn’t have any grandchildren of his own but spent much of his downtime on set chatting with his 8-year-old colleague. As a child in a family of sharecroppers, Boyd said he was about 10 years old when he started longing for a better life.
“One day, I was out working and the sun was hitting me. I looked up and said, ‘Lord, if there’s a better life for me, may I have it?’” he told me. “That Saturday when — I hate to say this, but it’s true — all the Black people were allowed to go to town, I saw my first television show through the window. I wanted to be the kid on TV.”
Years later, Boyd found himself in Hawaii after serving in Vietnam. He met a man in a nightclub who told him he should audition for a role as a pimp in Hawaii Five-O. He got the part, but that was his last on-camera opportunity for a long time.
“I never made anything out of it. I was absolutely messed up in the head,” he said with a shrug. “I was chasing skirts and doing drugs.” Leaning into his Alabamian accent, Boyd declares that “time waits for no one.” Boyd feels that Retirement House has given him, decades later, the chance to be the actor that he wasted in his youth. At this phase of his career, he appreciates the love for him on the internet, but he’s not going to trouble himself by reading any comments.
Monterey Morrissey, on the other hand, loves them. The 71-year-old San Franciscan, who plays the rap-loving Larry, is taking a break from dramatically flinging himself on a couch for a shot by scrolling through Reels on his phone. Morrissey said he was thrilled that followers tell them how much they enjoy the content, because he loves making people laugh.
“I was always doing goofy things as a kid, like wandering into an industrial building and seeing how far I could make it without someone stopping me, then I’d run from the cops,” he said. “I tried radio theater and voiceover work, but when I had a son, I knew I had to get serious.” He buckled down for decades, taking care of his wife when she became ill and dabbling in small acting roles on the side.
After their home was affected by two different California wildfires in recent years, his wife suggested they go to Los Angeles to see if he could “make something of himself.” On his second day in the city, he auditioned for the Retirement House role, but at first was nervous to take it because he thought people might not take him seriously as an actor.
“Then I figured — hey, my phone’s not hanging off the hook here — I’ll give it a shot,” he said. “Now I’ve got these guys, plus Adi and Brandon, so who could ask for anything better than that?”
Reatha Grey, the 73-year-old Los Angeles native behind the feisty Rose, had to leave the set before I arrived. She told me during a phone call after that after discovering the thrill of being applauded as a child onstage, she was cast in a few small roles throughout her career — but the highlight was her stint as a “hip, sexy, ready-to-party-senior pranksters on the TV show Betty White’s Off Their Rockers.” She said that working with White taught her how to be “kooky.”
“I have grandkids who don’t even understand TikTok. They’ve never understood my acting, either, because I’ve never done traditional things,” she said. “The sketches are so unlike who I am in real life. They give me license to act out.”
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2022-07-19 19:16:09