Playing Dr. Phil’s Working Out Pretty Well for Adam Ray

Plenty of comedians develop characters they perform, without breaking, on stage and screen. What separates comics like Diane Morgan (aka Philomena Cunk), Martin Short (aka Jiminy Glick), Tyler Perry (Madea) or the late Bob Einstein (Super Dave Osbourne) from Adam Ray is that the character that got him a Netflix special isn’t exactly a character: it’s the former daytime talk show host Dr. Phil McGraw.

Ray talked with me last week, before his sold-out show at New York’s Beacon Theatre as part of the New York Comedy Festival. Read on to find out how he developed the character; translating it from a Comedy Store show to a Netflix special (Dr. Phil Unleashed, dropping November 19th); and what it’s like playing Dr. Phil with Dr. Phil.

You wear some pretty serious makeup to play Dr. Phil. How involved is the process of putting it on?

It takes about two hours. I've done some other characters that take about four, four and a half. I can’t imagine doing this for something that took even three. That feels like just a little bit too long. But two actually flies by, and I’m always working on the show or a billion other things in the makeup chair.

Dr. Phil isn’t the only impression you do. How did he become the one that you wanted to keep doing in this live talk show format?

I never really planned on it. A few months before COVID, I hit a wall with the business and was losing some of the joy for it. I was in a very monotonous cycle of stand-up, podcast, auditioning, doing videos here and there and just trying to create content. But it was becoming stagnant. I didn’t feel like I was moving the needle.

Then I just said, “Well, fuck it. If I had my druthers and had my own show, what would that be?” 

The guys that shoot the Dr. Phil show now in L.A., we met in 2006 and were doing YouTube videos for five, six, seven, eight years. Making videos back in the early 2000s was the happiest I ever was. We’d shoot all day, we’d get dinner and then we’d stay up all night, edit it and put it out the next day. It was so satisfying and fun. I was like, “I got to get back to that.”

I thought the show I’d want to do is playing three different characters in a dysfunctional family: this nerdy kid, Jeremy; Elaine, the grandma; and then the dad, who was a hairstylist that left his family and is now gay and runs a hair salon. Each day was a different character. And we got Joel McHale and Ron Funches and David Koechner and Tom Lennon to all be in it. It’s called Jeremy.

The hair salon dad was tattooed, bald and had a mustache. A friend of mine goes, “You look like Dr. Phil.” I started doing the voice, and people were laughing. I was going to go do a set at the Laugh Factory, so I hit up Joel McHale, who was over there, and had him bring me up as Dr. Phil. It went really well. And then COVID hit. 

Jeremiah Watkins now plays a different character in the show every time. He played Rocky in Philly. He played a Starbucks barista in Seattle. He’s playing a pie tonight that Jason Biggs will reunite and fornicate with on a bed while Johnny Rzeznik plays “Iris,” which is going to be wild. But back in COVID, Jeremiah and I both needed to kind of flex our creative muscles, and we were bored as shit. So we got this black-box studio, and we sat far apart and improvised these lost Dr. Phil episodes for about two hours. We’d do it for about two hours and put about 30, 40 minutes online with all his different characters. It was a way to just have fun, and to create and give people that were bored something to watch.

That was where I honed my version of whatever Dr. Phil was. A little abrasive. To be honest, it’s not like I sat down and watched a ton of episodes. To me, you can be overly familiar. And I was like, “I got the voice. I like my version of it. It’s close enough, and people seem to respond to it.” 

Going to acting school and always loving playing characters, I feel like I have a pretty good ability to commit and be locked in and stay in character. But it’s all just still me through it. It’s all my silliness through it. I just have an extra layer to play with as far as being a little more dickish at times. I feel like Adam Ray has a pretty good balance of hit ‘em and hug ‘em. That’s what I like to do with my comedy, and I feel like I’m doing that through Phil. If you’re likable, people will go to the ends of the earth for you. And I think that having that, at least, as a base for whatever the character is that I’ve found for him is really important. If a guest is being a certain way, the audience is on Phil’s side.

So then I was doing these Adam Ray and Friends shows at The Store, just showcase shows with people that I’d gotten to know over the years. More and more people were doing “...And Friend” shows, and again, it put me in a space of, “Man, I’m not doing anything different, and I feel like I have more to offer from what I’ve been honing. I also just want to do something different. I need to throw more darts at the wall and not be afraid of failing.”

I think most people can relate. You have these big ideas, and then there's so many ways to talk yourself out of doing it. It’s really a kryptonite for a lot of people in the business where you’re just like, “Oh, I don’t want to bomb. I don’t want to suck. What if it doesn’t go well?”

I really love the George Bush show Will Ferrell did on Broadway. Nick Kroll and John Mulaney doing Oh, Hello was one of my favorite things I’ve seen in a while. I always wanted to do a live character show like that. Because I come from a theater background, too, so I just love being on stage. That’s why I started doing stand-up: Once I stopped doing musicals in high school and plays at USC, I started doing stand-up because I just loved the live fix. And I always knew that people on SNL came from a stand-up background, and that was a dream. 

So when I asked Bill Burr to be a guest, he couldn’t have been quicker to be like, “Dude, fucking sounds hilarious. I’m in. Make fun of my anger issues.” That got me really fired up to at least do it. 

Since then, he’s done it a second time, he’s doing it a third time coming up. I started calling on friends to come do it and everybody was down. Now we’re doing this 20-city theater tour in all these 2,000- to 5,000-seat theaters. We’ve got a December show that’s got Jay Leno, Wayne Brady, Tony Hawk, Rob Riggle and Harry Mack. 

I’m also shooting for the stars. I DM people on Instagram. I started messaging with Michael Bublé, and he was like, “Yeah, dude, I’m a fan. Here’s my publicist’s info.” Sometimes that works, and then sometimes you message Ryan Reynolds and they leave you on seen. 

But there’s no rhyme or reason for why people are responding to him. It’s not like I said, “Which talk show host would be fun to do it?” That’s why I think it’s funny when people are like, “Oh, so how come you did Phil and not like Phil Donahue? Or how come you didn’t do Oprah?” I wasn’t even trying to do that. It goes back to just needing to create. You have to create your own good luck and your own opportunities and be self-sufficient. In any business, but especially in ours.

The original Dr. Phil is in this special. Was this the first time he did the show? 

His son had hit me up on Instagram and was like, “My dad loves your shit. We’ve got to get him on the show.” I FaceTimed with him maybe an hour before the show. Then he came into the green room, and we chatted for about 15 minutes. I gave him a rundown of how I wanted the opening to go — how he’d enter on me doing some crowd work and saying, “I don’t like your fucking attitude” to somebody in the crowd. That was his cue to enter. People go nuts because we locked the phones up for the first time, and nobody had a clue he was going to be there. 

He walks on stage, grabs the mic and goes, “Uh, I don’t like your fucking attitude.” Then I go, “Who are you?” And he goes, “Who am I, bitch? Who the fuck are you?” Then we start doing the mirror thing where I put my hand up and he puts his hand up and we kind of mirror each other. Finally, he goes, “We’ll be right back.” That was the only part that I needed him to hit. From then on out, we just riffed.

I had no game plan. I thought it was maybe going to be 10 minutes. We did about 35. And he was down to clown. He was really game. People are going to be really pumped on how he played on the show. Patton Oswalt, Jay Pharoah and Joe Gatto were great too. It’s like 49 minutes, which is pretty awesome. Netflix was like, "Keeping things tight on this platform behooves you.” Forty-five minutes is a lot for a little comedy special, and we pack a lot in. So it moves, and hopefully, it’s the first of many.

How different is the special from what people get when they see the show live?

Nothing’s different. There’s another 30 or 40 minutes, maybe. We shot two hours and cut it down to 49. When people are out and about, they’re usually down to see a little bit longer show because they made a night of it, versus at home, we’re all too fucking distracted. But you get a strong sense of the show in 50 minutes. I mean, you get a strong sense of the show in 10 minutes. 

Ninety minutes to two hours is a sweet spot for comedy. Anything more than that can get a little greedy. You want them to leave pumped.

With that in mind, we can wrap up with this: Do you think playing Dr. Phil has improved your ability to give advice?

I peer-mediated between my sister and single mom when I was eight and they were at each other’s throats. So I think I grew up real quick, which is why, in most of my relationships, I’m a good listener. But I’ve also had girls be like, “You don’t have to fix everything. Just listen to me.” I’m like, “Sorry, this is who you chose. You should have told my dad to not cheat on my mom.”

I do find that balance during the show to try to be as Phil as possible. You don’t want to just be a heightened goofy character. I think one thing people dig about my version is that it’s grounded, and that’s me trying to pull out my actor strings and make him feel like a real person. Sometimes it’s sillier, and sometimes I really try to be real about stuff and then hit them with a joke right after. 

I do say things, though, sometimes in everyday life, even if I’m talking to my wife or a friend or whoever — something that sounds like a Phil-ism. I’ll say it in my voice, and then I’ll usually follow it up with, “(Dr. Phil voice) We’ll be right back,” because I can’t help it.

With my wife and I, for example, if one of us is walking into the kitchen to get a snack, I’ll walk away going, “All right, babe. I’ll be right back.” And then I’ll go, “(Dr. Phil voice) I’ll be right back.” And she’ll go, “(Dr. Phil voice) We’ll keep it right here.”

So yeah, it’s definitely fucked with me a little bit. Sometimes I’m like, “Oh, shit. I can’t escape this now. I’m trapped.” But there are worse ways to be trapped.