NEW YORK — Before he was compared with John Belushi and Jackie Gleason for his comedic turn on Broadway in “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” Dan Fogler acted in what he calls “the immigrant show” at Ellis Island. In it he played Italian, Irish and even Russian men, teaching the audience daily about what the immigrant experience was like. Fogler remembers a particularly stifling August day when he played a doctor. During his monologue, he informed the crowd that if a man had an eye problem, Folger would take a piece of chalk and write the letter I on the man’s lapel.
“It tripped me up because I was like, ‘Why am I not writing an E?,'” Fogler recalls, starting to giggle. “And then I started cracking up, and then everybody started cracking up.”
It seems to be something of a habit, for during a recent performance of his new play, “The Voyage of the Carcass,” opening tonight at the SoHo Playhouse, Fogler broke character again, cackling when his castmate’s fake mustache became loose. Perhaps it’s one of the luxuries of working without the pressure of a big-time Broadway audience.
Not that he doesn’t know that as well. In 2005, Fogler brought to the stage William Barfee, a character he created, in “Spelling Bee.” His turn as the nasally nerd won him the Tony, as well as a number of agent’s phone numbers. They came calling, he says, with grand comparisons not only to Belushi and Gleason, but also to Philip Seymour Hoffman and Jack Black. And while it may be too quick to put him the same league as two comedic legends and an Oscar winner, Fogler has already wrapped five films and been cast in roles one could easily see going to Black. For instance, in this winter’s comedy “Balls of Fury,” he plays a Ping-Pong player/CIA operative opposite Christopher Walken, a Ping-Pong-loving crime lord.
“We’re cut from a similar cloth,” Fogler says of Black. “When I was going for commercial auditions, they would say, ‘That was great, but could you do it more Jack Black?’ And that sort of gets to you. So I was sort of shunning Jack Black and then I heard his band Tenacious D and I fell in love with him again. If people want to associate me with him, that’s great. It would be another thing if I suddenly became Jack Black’s little brother. That would suck.”
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Of course, these days, comedians like Will Ferrell and Jim Carrey are taking roles as dramatic leads and Fogler, who’s performed Shakespeare and Chekhov, is following suit. The 29-year-old will next step into the role of Alfred Hitchcock in “Number 13,” a film about the director’s unfinished first film. Shooting begins in February, after “Carcass” has ended its run, with Ewan McGregor and Geoffrey Rush in talks for the other roles. Nonetheless, Fogler insists he’s not nervous.
“Nobody knows what Hitchcock was like as a 20-year-old, so I have that going for me,” he explains. “And here’s the other thing: You want to do Hitchcock in his 20s? Well, Hitchcock in middle school was just like Mr. Barfee. So I have an idea of what that’s like.”