The Problem with People star Paul Reiser: ‘We’d sit out with our Guinness, chatting with people. We don’t have that in New York’

Early in The Problem with People, a hugely likable new comedy co-written by and starring the veteran funny guy Paul Reiser, we hear a traditional air as Ciarán, an undertaker played by Colm Meaney, looks out at a twinkling rainbow. Then it starts bucketing rain. It’s a characteristically playful moment in a film that acts as a riposte to Hallmark (or Lindsay Lohan) Ireland.
“One of the nicest compliments was when Colm read the script,” Reiser says. “He said, ‘Whenever I read scripts by Americans taking place in Ireland, they are full of cliches and “top of the morning to you”. I was so relieved that you didn’t do any of that and that you captured real people.’”
The undertaker’s elderly father, Fergus (Des Keogh), has a deathbed wish: he wants to reunite with the family’s estranged American cousins. Enter Reiser’s character, Barry, a divorced property developer and New Yorker who – hint, hint – loves the movie Local Hero. He and Ciáran become fast friends, and then even faster enemies.
Reiser’s return to the “motherland”, as he jokingly calls it, was a major motivation in making the film.
“I grew up in New York. My parents were born in New York. Their parents were all from eastern Europe and Romania and Russia and Poland. There’s not a drop of Irish blood in me. My only connection was Frank McCourt, who wrote Angela’s Ashes. He was my high-school English teacher. I wish I could say he turned me on to James Joyce. I just thought he was a cool guy.
“And I’ve always been drawn to Ireland. The beauty and the greenness and the underlying melancholy. My wife and I drove all over Ireland in the 1990s. We were so enamoured with it. I had always wanted to get back.”
Reiser emerged from the stand-up scene of the 1980s, a golden era for the observational comedy of Jerry Seinfeld and Garry Shandling. He made it on to Comedy Central’s 2004 list of the 100 greatest stand-ups of all time. His musings on family photographs, eating alone in restaurants and the correlation between stupidity and muscle knots in the shoulders found voice in Mad About You, the smash 1990s sitcom buoyed by snappy dialogue and sparky chemistry. When he’s not on stage or TV, Reiser channels his relatable insights into humorous books, including Couplehood and Babyhood.
“I started a little ahead of the boom,” he says. “It was in the late 1970s when I was in college. There were already people who were on TV and had big hit television shows. And a year earlier they were unknown. They came out of those clubs. The people who opened these comedy clubs realised that there was an easy way to make money: they just get a brick wall and a microphone and can charge people $20 to watch unknowns. We all flocked to it. I would not have aspired to be a comic if that path hadn’t been laid out.”
Drawing on his home life – Reiser has been married to Paula Ravets since 1988 – Mad About You starred Reiser and Helen Hunt as Paul and Jamie Buchman, a documentary film-maker and publicist, chronicling their relationship from first date to parenthood. When the TV marriage ran into difficulty, an alarmed New York Times headline asked, “Can it be? Are Paul and Jamie kaput?”
Hunt and Reiser were paid $1 million an episode for the final season, and the show won four Golden Globes and 12 Primetime Emmys. During its initial seven-season run, Mad About You inspired remakes in the UK, Chile, Argentina and China. A 2019 reboot revisited Paul and Jamie as empty-nesters.
“People said, ‘Why’d you break up?’ They were upset. We showed that they separated for a bit because all marriages have bumps, but they ended up happily forever after. And a few years ago a whole bunch of shows were rebooting. We had that conversation. And we thought, What story do they tell? We can’t play newlyweds any more. That ship has sailed. But we realised that if our kid has grown up, then these two idiots are all alone again, just like when the show started. I’m glad we did it. We had a great time.”
Reiser’s film career was entirely accidental: after he accompanied a friend to an audition, the casting director asked him to call back the following day for a meeting with Barry Levinson.
“I was only there because I wanted to have lunch,” Reiser says. “And the next thing you know I’m making a movie. And not just any movie but Diner. A classic movie.”
He has subsequently appeared in all four Beverly Hills Cop movies, Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra and James Cameron’s Aliens. Reiser’s portrayal of the corporate villain Carter Burke left an indelible impression on the franchise. “Look, those two specimens are worth millions to the bioweapons division,” he tells Sigourney Weaver’s embattled heroine. “If you’re smart we can both come out of it as heroes, and we will be set up for life.”
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On that subject, he says: “I read the script, and I had seen Terminator. I knew what James Cameron could do, and I adored Sigourney Weaver. We did the first reunion a few years ago. We all got together at a Comic-Con convention in a packed 3,000-seat theatre. And we’re signing things. And I’d meet people who are discovering or rediscovering the movie. And others would say,‘Oh, I’ve watched that movie every Saturday for the last 35 years.’”
Reiser has often joked that Carter Burke was merely misunderstood. Three decades later he and his son Leon Reiser teamed up with a crack team from Marvel Comics to create a five-comic cycle for the alternative-reality imprint What If?, asking “What if Carter Burke had lived?”
“My son knows comic books and the worlds of DC and Marvel and all these characters,” Reiser says. “And he really thrived. I called him the Paul Whisperer, because he would explain to them, ‘This would be funny if Paul said this.’ And then he would explain to me what the hell was going on in this world. Because I didn’t understand it.”
Nowadays, Reiser has his pick of Comic-Con events. Since 2017 he has played Dr Samuel Owens, a chief investigator into the strange goings-on in Stranger Things. Since 2022 he has played the Legend, a profane version of the Marvel comic-book legend Stan Lee, in the subversive superhero series The Boys.
“When I perform stand-up I see the audiences broadening,” he says. “If I see people of my age, well, they’re obviously Mad About You fans. And if I see anybody under 20, that must be a Stranger Things fan. And the 70-year-olds? They have watched The Kominsky Method. And the guys with the tattoos and the beards, they watched The Boys.”
Reiser says he’s hoping to return to Ireland soon. He sounds lyrical describing his daily Problem with People commute between Dalkey, the south Co Dublin, where he and his family were based, and the set in Co Wicklow. Reiser even sounds poetic recounting an evening pint.
“We were there in the height of summer,” he says. “I didn’t realise how late it stays light. We would come home from work at 7pm and then we’d say, ‘Let’s go to the pub.’ We’d sit out with our Guinness or two Guinnesses and chatting with people and petting dogs. We don’t have that in New York. It’s bar culture, not pub culture. In Ireland they’re not watching the ball game or CNN. They’re talking.”
The Problem with People is in cinemas from Friday, November 8th