Jim Gaffigan Was Offered the Worst Possible Role on ‘Law & Order’

While he began his career telling jokes about frozen garbage pastries, Jim Gaffigan has since become a solid dramatic actor. Recently, he starred in the surreal indie dramedy Linoleum, and before that, he appeared in not one, not two, but three different Law & Order series, for five episodes total. 

The TV procedural empire has frequently given comedians opportunities to take on more series roles, including Kathy Griffin, Martin Short and Gilbert Gottfried, who popped up in two episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, playing an NYPD technical wiz opposite fellow guest star Adam Driver.

Gaffigan guest starred in two episodes of the original Law & Order, one episode of Law & Order: SVU and two episodes of Law & Order: Criminal Intent. And he played different characters in each one, thus destroying the believability of the Law & Order-verse.

The most prominent episode of the bunch for Gaffigan was Season 20’s “Reality Bites” in which he played an aspiring reality show star with a ton of kids who seemingly murdered his wife. 

The comedian recently chatted with Seth Meyers on the Family Trips with the Meyers Brothers podcast, and the subject of this episode came up. Meyers asked whether or not it was just “dumb luck” that Gaffigan, who has five children in real life, was cast as a dad with a whole lot of kids. “No, they did it on purpose, I think,” Gaffigan speculated.

He also revealed that the fame-hungry wife-killer part was actually way better than some of the other roles that the franchise’s producers have pitched to him. “I think I was offered one — they’re like, ‘You’re gonna be like a Jeffrey Epstein character.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know if I wanna be a Jeffrey Epstein. Why would you want me for that?’”

Incidentally, the reason why the Law & Order brass thought of Gaffigan for a mega-creep part, may have been because he already played a mega-creep in Law & Order: SVU.

And they did end up making an episode inspired by the Epstein case, but instead of just hiring Tom Papa, they seemingly moved away from the idea of casting a comedian. 

Meanwhile, Meyers claimed that he, too, had been offered a less than ideal role in a Law & Order episode. Apparently, during the 2007-2008 writers’ strike, Meyers met some Law & Order writers on the picket line, and asked if he could play someone who “gets killed” or “somebody who finds a body” in the opening minutes of an episode. 

When the strike ended, they came back to him with an idea: Meyers would play “a labor leader” who gets murdered. “I’m like, ‘That’s a little on the nose,’” Meyers recalled. “Like literally the strike just ended. I don’t wanna do a scene where I’m carrying a picket sign and then get beaten.”

At least they didn’t ask him to play one of the biggest pieces of shit in modern history.