Five Guest Stars Who Hated Appearing on ‘Seinfeld’
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While guys like Danny Woodburn (Mickey Abbott), Larry Hankin (Tom Pepper) and Larry Thomas (the infamous Soup Nazi) loved guest starring on Seinfeld, not everyone else felt the same way. And so, with the help of Eric Dobin and Adam Pacecca, co-hosts of The Place to Be: A Seinfeld Podcast, I pulled together the less-than-favorable accounts of actors who hated their Seinfeld experience as much as critics hated the series finale.
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Sarah Silverman
On her podcast in 2021, Silverman said, “I was in an episode of Seinfeld. I was Kramer’s girlfriend, and I will tell you this: Everyone was really nice, but I had a bad experience with Michael Richards. The first scene I shot, I’m in bed with Kramer, and he’s scared because he hears noises. He says something like, ‘What was that noise?’ Then my line is, ‘It’s probably the wind.’”
But because she was nervous, Silverman instead said, “It’s probably the rain.”
“Michael Richards breaks character and just starts ripping me a new asshole,” Silverman continued. “He points to the window and goes, ‘Do you see rain in that window? Do you see rain in that window?’ I’m like, ‘no,’ and he’s like, ‘Then why did you say ‘rain’?’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know. It was a mistake.’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah! It’s not rain! There’s no rain in that window! The line is ‘wind.’’
“I had such a lump in my throat, and I just had to get through it.”
Kathy Griffin
When Griffin was on Seinfeld, she said that Seinfeld himself “was such a dick that I then went and told a story about him in my special. He actually, to his credit, thought it was funny. He didn’t clutch his pearls and go, ‘How dare you? I’m a star.’ So they wrote the second episode where my character becomes a stand-up comic whose whole act is making fun of Jerry Seinfeld.”
Lisa Arch
On an episode of The Place to Be: A Seinfeld Podcast, Arch, who played Kramer’s girlfriend Connie in the “The Friars Club,” said that working with Richards was “was a really difficult introduction to ‘Here’s television’ for me.” Arch was Kramer’s first kiss on the show, and as she explained, “It was uncomfortable. It was a full-on French kiss. Then Andy Ackerman, the director, who was so friggin’ sweet, was like, ‘You guys, that feels way too much. Let’s not do that.’ There was a small part of me that feels like it was a dare, like, ‘I dare you to kiss this newbie on camera.’” (The scene was shot with her kissing Kramer’s neck instead.)
Arch’s discomfort with Richards didn’t end there either. “In the second scene, he’s asleep on top of me because he’s doing the Da Vinci sleep, and he’s essentially dead to the world. So I’m going, ‘Oh Cosmo, oh Cosmo,’ and then, ‘Cosmo? Cosmo?’ Then I go, ‘Kramer wake up! Wake up!’ But Michael Richards goes, ‘What is she doing?’ and Andy Ackerman is like, ‘What do you mean?’ He goes, ‘Why is she yelling in my ear? That would wake me up.’
“So I’m like, ‘I’m done. I completely fucked up, and this is the end of it. Fine. I probably never should have been in this business anyway.’ Then Andy Ackerman goes, ‘Actually, Michael, you’re so asleep that you might as well be dead. That’s the entire point and that’s how I directed her.’”
The scene was indeed filmed with Arch screaming, but she admitted that when “we finished the scene, I ran to my dressing room and sobbed.”
Kim Chase
In a recent interview with Dobin and Pacecca, Chase recounted her time playing Kramer’s girlfriend Charmaine in “The Wig Master.” The episode was Larry David’s second-to-last, and she said the entire set was very stressful. The episode had lots of rewrites, and at one point, Chase didn’t get the newest pages. Because of this, “Larry flipped out. And he was flipping out throughout the whole week. He was freaking out and screaming.”
The biggest issue, though, seemed to be that Richards was a no-show for several days. Of Richards, Chase said, “I won’t say anything bad, but I also won’t say anything nice. It was very weird. He wasn’t nice to me. That was very, very difficult.”
Armin Shimerman
“I hated them,” Shimerman, who played Stan the Caddy in Season Seven, responded when he was asked what it was like to work with the Seinfeld cast. “They were noncommunicative, ugly, nonresponsive. What’s the word? Insular. I was the guest star. The episode is called ‘The Caddy’ — I played the caddy. I was on that show for six days, and every day, nobody said a word to me except for cues. Nobody came up and started a conversation. I was already on Deep Space Nine. I was already a series regular on a TV show. That’s not acceptable. If you have a guest star, if you have a day player, if you have an extra, you don’t avoid them, you speak to them. We’re all human beings together.”
