It's the feel-good snack food origin story of the year. In director Eva Longoria's "Flamin' Hot," she traces the rise of businessman and author Richard Montañez (played by Jesse Garcia) from Frito-Lay janitor to the self-proclaimed inventor of Flamin' Hot Cheetos — with a little help from another visionary man in his corner. And as PepsiCo's legendary former CEO Roger Enrico, Tony, Golden Globe and Emmy Award winner Tony Shalhoub brings a warm, lighthearted touch to the kind of character who rarely gets to be the cinematic good guy — a C-suite executive.
The helmet-haired Enrico is a far cry from Shalhoub's five-season turn as midcentury dad Abe Weissman on "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" — or OCD-enhanced detective on "Monk," a role he's reprising in an upcoming movie. Yet if there's a through line to Shaloub's body of work, it's his fascination with the American dream, and the ways in which our aspirations and traditions are passed from generation to generation.
"My father was not a math professor at Columbia," Shalhoub said on "Salon Talks," "but he was a self-made successful man, and he had a certain kind of love slash frustrating relationship with his children." And with "Flamin' Hot," the actor finds a similar story about "assimilating while clinging tightly to your own heritage and trying to find the balance in all of that, which is not always easy."
With a career that has included three long-running television series, classic films like "Galaxy Quest," "Men in Black" and "Big Night" and Broadway, Shalhoub would seem, as he approaches age 70, to have already achieved any actor's dream life. Yet from his perspective, he's still just getting warmed up. "I have more dragons to slay," he told me during our conversation. "From my own crazy point of view, I haven't been doing enough or that much. Does that sound insane? I suppose it does."
Watch Tony Shalhoub on "Salon Talks" here, or read our conversation below to hear more about the upcoming Monk reboot, why Shalhoub did not want "Maisel" to end and what he's learned from being a father.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
When we first heard about this movie, a lot people thought "Really? They're going to make a movie about . . .?"
About Cheetos.
About Cheetos. It's a great story.
It really is. I was not familiar with this story or the main character. I got hold of the script, and they reached out to me. Eva Longoria is the director, and this is her first directorial debut. I just loved the script. It was such an interesting story and characters. My character, Roger Enrico, was a real guy, the CEO of PepsiCo, which owns Frito-Lay. I did a little research on Enrico, and they brought me out to New Mexico, and we shot. It was really, really exciting.
One of the things I love about your character in it is he is a corporate guy who's actually a good guy.
I like him too. Based on the research that I had done, he, like our main character, really started at very, very modest, humble beginnings. Grew up, like me, in a smaller town in the Midwest, and became an American success story and was quite bright and ambitious. He just had a feeling about this guy, this janitor, and listened to him, bet on him, and it all turned out good.
What was it like for you being part of this? This is a true passion project for Eva Longoria. This is her first film directing. She really wanted to tell this story.
It's about a Mexican American. It's about an immigrant family. It just checks all the boxes for her, certainly, and for me. My father was an immigrant, and it resonated with me in a lot of ways. I think people are really going to respond to this film.
"I don't have the same perception of my career or my body of work that maybe people do from the outside."
It has a certain tongue-in-cheek component to it. There's a lot of, beyond comedic elements, more fantastical elements because it's all from the point of view of that main character. It's almost like he's narrating his real life, which is also intertwined with his fantasy life, which just gives it another layer.
And you get to be in a kind of period piece, yet again. You get to wear a crazy wig.
It's kind of my dream hair because when I was growing up, I always envied my friends who had that sort of bone-straight hair in those days. They would do that thing where they just flip their hair, and it would fall into place perfectly. Mine was just a complete nightmare rat's nest and it's always the bane of my existence. But Roger Enrico . . . Not sure if he was actually wearing a wig, but in my approach to it, in my estimation, he was not wearing the greatest wig. So we went with that.
When you talk about these immigrant stories that are so essential to you, and these stories of people coming to America, I think of that as the story of your whole career. I think about movies like "Big Night," or "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" where it's about the American dream.
It is. It's about, in some ways, assimilating while clinging tightly to your own heritage and trying to find the balance in all of that, which is not always easy.
You have talked about how you've really drawn on your own family and your own father.
Certainly in a number of roles I've done, certainly in "Maisel." My father was not a math professor at Columbia, but he was a self-made successful man, and he had a certain kind of love slash frustrating relationship with his children. Like "Maisel," I was a child during the time that story is told. It was a cultural shift going on. Roles of men and women were shifting, which is what "Maisel" really is all about. Like Abe, like my character in "Maisel," my father was experiencing that cultural shift and midlife crisis and midcentury crisis that men were experiencing.
I want to ask you about that, because when people come to this country or they're of another generation, they don't necessarily dream that their kids are going to go into show business.
They dread it, I think.
Abe has to go through this with Midge. What was it like for your family when you made that leap? It's an unusual choice for a kid whose parents are immigrants from the Middle East growing up in the Midwest.
Luckily, I'm the second-youngest of 10 children. One of my older sisters, Susan, is 10 years older than me. She actually went into it first, so she paved the way for me. It was, I think, much harder for her, especially being a woman at that time, in the '60s. She went off to acting school, and that was a little harder for my father to come to grips with, moving away at 18 years old on her own, going into that business that my parents didn't know much about. Fortunately for me, she had already hacked through the brush with the machete. By the time I was going through it, my parents were like, "Yeah, OK, well, maybe. Why not?"
"Maisel" and "Flamin' Hot" are also stories of parenting and how we bring the American dream to our kids. You're a girl dad. You were raised in a hardworking family. What have you tried to instill in your two daughters as a father?
It's interesting you ask that because I feel I've learned from them as much or maybe more than I was ever able to impart to them. You try to teach them, give them a good work ethic, and you try to give them support. But ultimately you want them to be advocates for themselves and to find their voice and to find their strength. Then what you discover, like Abe discovers in Midge, they know things that you don't know and that you didn't impart to them and you couldn't have taught them. There's some kind of interesting satisfaction and gratification in that.
I saw you a couple of years ago on Broadway in "The Band's Visit." I've seen you in movies for decades. When you're doing the same role night after night where you have to be very on-point in the same character arc night after night, and then you're on a long-running show where you get the evolution that Abe or Monk had, how do you bring that tension of spontaneity and consistency to these roles that you're doing?
I was trained in the theater, and so I had a lot of experience doing theater before I got into film and television. The training was strong in all of my early career. It really is trying to choose the right kind of material, certainly when you're doing theater, material that is challenging and in some ways is ever evolving and that you can grow in, and that you can never lay back and never become complacent within. Even though you are doing the same thing, if you're working with good people, which I've been so fortunate in doing, and everyone is kind of bringing their A game, there is a subtle evolution to the run of a show.
You just finished filming a reboot of "Monk." How is Monk doing now, post-pandemic?
Not well. It's been 14 years since the series wrapped, and we kicked around the idea of rebooting it a number of times over that decade and a half, but there was never ultimately a compelling reason to do it. Then the pandemic hit and then we thought, "OK, well now there's a game changer, certainly for society at large, but for Monk, for this fictional character that really, really struggles."
"The pandemic hit and then we thought, 'OK, well now there's a game changer, certainly for society at large, but for Monk.'"
How is that going to impact him and how is it going to impact all of the people around him who thought of him as somewhat neurotic? Now they've taken on, or we have all somewhat taken on, a little bit of that thing in the back of the mind like, "Oh my God, what if? Is that person I'm meeting a danger to me?" That seemed like a compelling reason to revisit that story, so I think it's going to be an interesting peek into that.
He was a breakthrough character in terms of showing a type of mental health issue on television. We know so much more now than we even did then. How has the conversation changed now in approaching this character again and knowing that you're representing someone with OCD?
That's one of the things we discussed at length when the writer approached us with this really, really strong script. We wanted to make sure that we were highlighting how much COVID has impacted people who really struggle with mental health issues. We all are impacted. But all of those people, the ones with OCD or whether it's bipolar disorder, any phobias, how much harder is it for them? We were really drilling down into that idea, and I think that we've served that really well in this particular story.
You're at a point in your career where you can do anything. You've left a long-running show, you've just done a movie. What do you want to do now? Is there a stone left unturned? What's keeping you motivated?
Well, it's funny. I don't have the same perception of my career or my body of work that maybe people do from the outside. To me, I always feel like, "Boy, I've got to get going. I'm getting older and there's so much I want to do." I have more dragons to slay. From my own crazy point of view, I haven't been doing enough or that much. Does that sound insane? I suppose it does.
It does to me. But that's good because it means you're going to keep working more. Maybe you'll be in "Flamin' Hot 2."
Maybe. You mentioned "The Band's Visit." That was six years ago almost now, and certainly time to do another play. I would love to do another play. Certainly, we're going to miss "Maisel." That was five seasons. We all wished it could have gone on for at least one or two more years, but we also are very proud of the way it ended. We feel it went out on a real high note.
Yeah. It's hard to end these things, wrap them up well. Especially when you have that many characters to serve and to honor. I feel like they did it so well with Joel, Michael Zegen's character, certainly with Susie, Alex Borstein's character. For Marin [Hinkle] and myself, a great evolution, for Caroline Aaron and Kevin Pollak, Shirley and Moishe, really, really even wrapped up that couple's story. That's a real daunting task for writers.
