Frank Barone on “Everybody Loves Raymond,” is surly, crass and crusty. He’s a suburban Neanderthal.
Peter Boyle, the actor who plays him, is not.
“Peter is quite erudite and forward-thinking,” says the CBS sitcom’s creator, Phil Rosenthal. “In many ways, he’s a child of the ’60s. The best man at his wedding was John Lennon. He’s playing Frank Barone, but he’s nothing like Frank Barone, and that makes his performance even more impressive.”
Impressive, yes. Unusual, no. The Philadelphia native, 68, has been portraying characters who are the antithesis of his personality for much of his career.
Boyle is a free spirit with a sensitive artistic temperament. But for a long time, all casting directors could see was that plumber’s body, clenched face and shiny head.
“I’ve been doing this character–angry, blue-collar guy–so many times in different versions that it’s really easy for me,” Boyle says.
His breakout role came in the 1970 film “Joe,” in which he was a barroom bigot, a bitter precursor to Archie Bunker. His performance electrified filmgoers, coming at a time when construction workers were attacking peace protesters and National Guardsmen were firing on college students at Kent State.
Boyle, who had been radicalized while living in Chicago during the pitched battle that was the 1968 Democratic National Convention, was distinctly uncomfortable as the embodiment of working-class rage. “It was painful, actually,” he says.
But similar roles continued to come his way, right up through 2001’s “Monster’s Ball.” He played racist prison guard Buck Grotowski.
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“It’s very hard if you try to do different things,” he says, “because the business wants to put you in one spot. People don’t believe in acting.”
But inside this forbidding character actor was an impish cutup longing to get out. Then serendipity struck with the 1974 comedy classic “Young Frankenstein.”
Boyle’s role as the misfortunate monster revealed the actor’s deliriously wacky side and gave his resume a new flavor. He continued to get the lunch-bucket roles, but he also was being offered the occasional madcap turn, as in the forthcoming “Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed,” in which he plays Old Man Wickles, a crucial figure in the Scooby mythos.
It was CBS chief Les Moonves who suggested to Rosenthal that Boyle would be perfect for the part of the corrosive grandfather on “Raymond.”
“He came in to audition, and he scared me, so I gave him the part,” Rosenthal says. “He’s hilarious. For a lot of people, he’s their favorite character, because there’s no filter on what he says.”
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale ([email protected]) and Joe Knowles ([email protected])