Connor Ratliff is a comedian, improviser, actor, and podcaster based in New York. A long-time member of the Upright Citizens Brigade theatre, he created The George Lucas Talk Show in which he plays ‘retired’ film director George Lucas. Over nearly a decade guests have included Jon Hamm, David Harbour, and Janeane Garofalo among many others. He’ls also appeared in recurring roles in shows such as The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Orange Is the New Black. He also presents the Dead Eyes podcast, named after the incident early in his career in which Tom Hanks fired him from a small role in Band of Brothers citing Ratliff’s eyes as the reason. He is making his Fringe debut with the George Lucas Talk Show, a play based in the Star Wars universe, The Baron and the Junk Dealer, and George-prov: An Improvised Theatrical Experience, where he will once again take on the role of George Lucas. We spoke to Connor about the shows and his relationship with Star Wars and its attendant fandom, and got an insight into the filming of prestige television.
Can you tell us about the shows you’re bringing to the Fringe?
We’re bringing three shows. And two of them stem from the other one, which I’ve done for almost a decade. I’ve been doing the show in New York called the George Lucas Talk Show where I pretend to be retired filmmaker George Lucas. Griffin Newman plays George’s talk show sidekick Watto, and we interview real guests who play themselves. And we’ve we did it for six years at Upright Citizens Brigade right up to the Pandemic and then it became a live online show. I think within a month of it being a live stream we’d actually calculated that we had exceeded the number of hours of show we had done in the previous six years. We did like 300 hours of live stream during lockdown basically, and it was a great time for booking guests as nobody could go anywhere!
So when people got the invitation; ‘Would you like to come on a Zoom with someone pretending to be George Lucas?’ It was a golden age of people saying yes to that. It was lockdown and you lose your mind a little bit. You’re crazy. And so we decided we wanted to bring the show to the Fringe. But we didn’t want to just come and just bring the talk show. We wanted to come up with something special for Edinburgh. So I’ve written a play called The Baron and the Junk Dealer which is a George Lucas Talk Show original play. It’s a science fiction tragic comedy, or comic tragedy, whatever you prefer. And it is a standalone play. You don’t need to know anything about Lucas or Star Wars going into it, but if you do know such things you might have a different night. But like any good play it should work to just anyone who comes in off the street. I should stress that it’s the play that really led to us committing to the Fringe.
And what’s your relationship to Star Wars itself? Have you always been a fan, and how do you feel about the franchise fandom as it is now?
When I was three, one of my first memories is going to see the 1978 rerelease of Star Wars in the theatre [The 1978 run begun literally one day after the original release ended]. For my generation, once you saw the movie it was another couple of years before there was another movie, and then another couple years. There wasn’t a lot. Now if you’re a kid and you decide you like Star Wars, you have 1000 things to watch. You’ve got a lot of homework to do just to get caught up. A lot of my experience was playing with the toys and making up my own things, which is essentially a lot of what I do as an adult now professionally. My entire career as an improv comedian is essentially that I am the action figure and I interact with other action figures. It would have been the dream as a kid to actually have the other toys talk back to you. That is a lot of what I do. And it’s sort of what the George Lucas Talk Show is. Instead of playing with a Star Wars toy, I dress up and pretend to be one. I spray my hair white and pretend to be George Lucas, the ultimate Star Wars action hero. He’s the actual figure that made all the other action figures exist.
The whole reason I developed the George Lucas impression that I do in the ’90s to amuse my friends. They started coming out with the Special Editions which were so exciting to see and I loved all the things they cleaned up, but like a lot of people I wasn’t crazy about any of the new scenes that were added by George Lucas. So I started doing this character that my friends would interview. ‘Why did you do this?’ I’m like, ‘Oh, I have other other big things planned, other big changes’. And that became sort of a game to be like, this defiantly meddling creator. They kept changing the movies. And then when he came out with the prequels a lot of people were devastated or angry. For me it was fun because these movies are for the most part not for me. These are children’s movies that I’ve been waiting for. There are things I like in the prequels, but I’m also no child anymore at that point. It should be shame on me for getting excited about a thing for children, but it was so comedically interesting. George comes back and there are certain ways that he could have made the prequels that would have been very satisfying to everyone. But those weren’t the films he wanted to make. He had very specific ideas. And to me, there’s nothing funnier than people trying hard and failing as a comedic baseline for a comic character.
What’s great about George is that he’s one of the most successful artists of all time, for good reason. Even his failures often have a tendency to change the way we make movies. Regardless what you think of Attack of the Clones as a film, it changed the way we make movies, technologically and aesthetically. He doesn’t make small moves and some of them are more about tools than the content in many cases. But he is still one of the great innovators of the past 100 years, and it’s so funny to play a goofball version of him that is trying to host a talk show. He’s a great baseline comedic character for me because his confidence and his ambition are both at the same level as his neuroses. That’s a funny character. So my reaction to anything I don’t like about Star Wars is to laugh and to have fun with it. I don’t have a lot of patience for people who are angry about it. I think it’s a smaller percentage of the fan base. They’re just loud. It’s like in politics, a loud, angry person will often puff themselves up. It’s almost like in nature like this tiny bird puffs up its feathers to keep predators away. That’s sort of how a lot of sci fi Star Wars fandom is. The people who were like, ‘I’m furious! My life has been ruined!
Do you have a favourite guest that you’ve had on the the talk show? And is there a dream guest you would have liked to have been able to get a hold of?
We’ve had a lot of like guests who have been really fun and surprising. We have some regular people like Jason Mantzoukas or D’Arcy Carden, who return to the show again and again and almost compete to see who can stay on the on the live stream the longest. It’s hard to pick a favourite, but I will say that Rachel Zegler from West Side Story and Shazam 2, came on the show during the Pandemic before anything that she had filmed had been released, while waiting for theatres to open up again. So she came on the show and was such a good sport and such a breath of fresh. She was just so funny and down to clown on the live stream and also trusting in us. A lot of times people will come on the show and they don’t know us and we could be a nightmare so it feels very nice that they come on and we strive to make them have a good time.
One early guest was Aimee Mann, when I went out to LA and did a show. I’ve become friends with her since but at the time she did not know me from anyone and she came onto the show and she sort of was apologetic like, ‘I don’t know anything about Star Wars‘. But we immediately started bonding over the fact that George and she had both been nominated for Oscars and lost. She had the nomination for Magnolia, and he’d been nominated for Star Wars. We immediately had something in common, and then we started talking about American Graffiti because that’s a movie she really loves. It feels so good to find the point of connection. Whenever I guess we don’t have anything to talk about I will find something for George to have in common with the guests, you know?
Another favourite guest I just thought of was an early one that we did in the East Village. Natasha Rothwell, who was on the first season of The White Lotus, is one of the funniest most talented actors and comedians and such a nice person. She noticed that in the back row of the theatre there were two completely full rows of people who were dressed in gowns and tuxedos. They showed up for the show in formal wear. And she’s like, ‘I just have to ask what’s happening in the background of the theatre’, and we found out it was a bunch of high schoolers who had gone to their senior prom. And then when the prom ended, they came to Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in the East Village to see the George Lucas Talk Show and we turned our show into a continuation of their prom. So we had our musical guests play songs, we invited them up on stage, we changed the lighting, and basically the rest of the show turned into a George Lucas Talk Show high school senior prom. That only happened because Natasha was such a great guest. She was so attuned to what was happening in the room that she she saw something interesting, called it out, and then immediately everything that was going to happen in the show was changed. Whatever would have happened it was like, nope, this show is now the George Lucas Talk Show prom.
Do you have your guests lined up for your Fringe run at all?
We do not. That is what the month of July is for, and some of that’s probably going to happen in the month of August. Because I think in some ways we want to have it all arranged for that first show, but I think we want to keep some possibilities open so that in weeks two, three and four, we might discover somebody that would be a perfect guest. The guests change the flavour of the show. The reason every one of our episodes is different is entirely down to who we have on as guests. It’s almost like a chemical reaction where everybody has a different reaction to talking to pretend George. I assume that at the Fringe, I’m going to be very excited as I have no sense of of what those shows are going to be like. It’s always a shot in the dark, you know, but I don’t think we’ve ever had a bad show. We’ve had weird shows and very rarely we’ve had a show where our guest is difficult and it changes the flavour of the show. Most of the time the guests are great. Every now and then we’ve had we’ve had a guest where you realise that you’ve accidentally booked a heckler and the call is coming from inside the show. But most of the time, we’ve had incredible luck. There’s only one thing they have to commit to; that they’re interacting with the real George and the real Watto. And other than that, they don’t have to try to be funny. We will make it funny. They can be funny but they don’t need to they can just relax and be themselves.
How familiar are you with the format of the Fringe? Do you have any expectations of August is going to go in terms of both the show and the play?
All I really know is what I’ve been told because I lived in the UK for a while but I’ve never been to Edinburgh. That’s why I’m really relying on things I’ve heard and things that friends who’ve done shows have told me over the years. You get both good advice, some warnings, some recommendations, the whole range of things. The one thing I know is that even if it ends up being a great experience and a good idea, I’ve already in the preparation felt a tremendous feeling of, ‘Why did I do this?’ I cannot express to you the number of times over the last four months that I have thought, ‘Why did I write this play? Why did I get into this mess?’ Because we’re now in a position where we need this to go well, it’s really a level of stress and the chaos of the mind. Just like right now. There are so many things I’m fixated on. Even the fact that like normally the most George Lucas Talk Shows that I would do in any given month would be during the live stream Pandemic era. We’d do it once a week. So once a week I need a can of white spray to spray my hair and beard. Now I’m having to actually factor that I gotta do 30 shows in 27 days. So I’m gonna need 27 cans at least of white spray or figure out another way to do it. I talked to a professional about maybe just professionally dye my hair white. What I found out is it is against state law in New York for a professional to dye my beard!
So even though I got my hair professionally dyed, I have to still get 27 cans of spray to dye my beard for all these shows or figure out some other way and I know people have said talcum powder but I don’t really like that. It gets everywhere and it takes a lot of talcum powder to make dark brown hair white. And so even just on the practical level figuring out I have a box here that has 30 cans of spray, but I can only bring a certain number of them in check luggage from New York to Edinburgh. So maybe I’m going to split it so half of them will be in my bag, half will be in Griffin’s bag.
Maybe I don’t need to bring all these. There’s a costume shop near the venue. I’m trying to figure out if I can get the spray from there and then I only have to bring a week’s worth of spray. But that’s just one practical thing out of so many. My character has in the play has a cane. So I need a cane that I can bring from here to there. So I need one of those canes that can break down and pack in my luggage. I guess I could walk on the plane with a cane but I’m like, how does that work? And one of the props in the play is a full size skeleton. I ordered this full sized skeleton and then I started thinking, ‘What do they do at the airport when you check a bag and when it goes through the machine they see a skeleton in the bag. I mean it’s very obvious they open up the bags and it’s a Hallowe’en-related kind of prop but I just don’t want to have that experience and airport security is stressful enough. I’m trying to figure out if there’s a skeleton in Edinburgh? That’s easier than packing all of the all of the costumes and set items. I either need to figure out a way of getting them there to a place so they’re ready in time or figure out how to bring them, and just the practical stuff alone is driving me crazy.
Regarding your TV work, you’ve had small but really memorable roles in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Orange Is the New Black. How was how was it working on successful shows and how does working on television compare to theatre and improv?
It’s great being on those shows. And it’s great being asked to come back. Initially, my character on Maisel was only supposed to be in two episodes and it was so thrilling when they asked me to come back the next season and the season after that. They only bring you back if they like they like you and like what you’re doing. It wasn’t that the fans were demanding that Chester the psychopath return to the world of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel. It’s not like they were responding to popular demand, that the fans have made their preferences clear.
What’s great with both of those shows is they’re both shows I’ve watched before I got hired. I watched the first season of Maisel before I got cast in it. So it’s fascinating to then professionally enter into a world that prior to that had only existed in my imagination as an audience member. Those are real worlds to me, and then suddenly you’re walking into it. It’s very surreal, particularly amazing because one of the things that really changed the way I watched that show is that there’s a lot of movement, and in every shot a lot of extras. When you experience what that feels like in reality you can’t watch the show the same way again because every shot, I’m just so aware that when looks like there’s 10 extras, it means there are 30 or 100.
There was a scene in that show, which were these long walk and talks which I’d never done before. You know, I’ve seen countless TV shows like The West Wing and things like that when people walk and give speeches. You realise when you do one of those shots they’re so stressful because it’s not just a matter of knowing your lines. It’s making sure you don’t accidentally flub a word or trip or other things that could happen no matter how well prepared you are. And in this case, the camera person was walking backwards on a real outdoor garden path. So sometimes the camera person would veer off and they’d stumble and then you’re back to [position] one. |I was very aware of this young guy who, at the beginning of every shot, would run up the hill in the background. That meant every time we had to go back to one he had to run back down. So I just thought every time we do this shot, this poor guy has to run all the way back down the hill and run up the hill again. And there’s 100 people like this guy.
And then we were doing a scene that was in a studio apartment with a tiny little half-window. And I thought, ‘Well this will just be the three of us. Just the three characters in an apartment. And I get to set and there are a dozen extras in full period costume. I thought they must be for another scene. And what I realised is if you watch the scene, the tiny little bit of light you can see in the window are people walking back and forth on the sidewalk so it looks like we’re on a Manhattan city street with foot traffic, but they’re wearing fur coats and hats and all these things that you don’t see. They’re covering their bases, that is the level of detail. You open up a refrigerator on that set, and you’re not going to find a modern day beverage or an empty shelf. They have art directed just in case the camera might catch a sliver of something.
But it’s a different matter when you do an improv show. That belongs to me and my fellow performers on stage and we can make the show anything we want to. You make your mood you make it go a certain way. Whereas when you’re an actor on a TV show, especially a TV show where there’s so many people working to make this one thing, it’s the vision of a handful of people. You might have an idea about what your character is, but you’re there to serve the show. My favourite part of being on the shows is getting the job and then having done the job. When I’m there you spend a few seconds acting and then you spend minutes or hours getting ready or waiting or doing something else. On a show that has a good budget, there’s a certain amount of comfort. But comfort is different than glamour. It’s not glamorous, and to be honest in show business, glamour is the worst thing. If there’s anything that I have to show up where there’ll be photographers and you have to wear a suit, that’s my nightmare. The glamorous part of show business is no fun. A premiere screening the few times that I’ve ever been on a red carpet with cameras have been spent with photographers yelling for me to get off of the carpet because they don’t know who I am. I was once at a screening of a movie that my friend Zach Woods was at and I didn’t know what was about to happen. He was like, ‘Come with me’. And he walked me out onto the red carpet and I saw like 50 cameras all go down. And everyone just starts gesturing and saying in different languages, ‘Just Zach! just Zach!’ and he had done knowing that would happen.
It is like working on those shows. I’m always proud to get the job and proud to do a job and have that as a credit. It also makes things easier when you’re trying to prove to anyone that you really are a professional. You just need something that your parents can tell their friends, ‘That’s really acting’. But when you were actually filming the thing it feels like a job. You know, it feels like you get called at a time that you don’t want to be there and you have to stay until way past after they are done. Every day on every show I’ve ever been on, my call will be 5am and I won’t be needed until two or three in the afternoon. And then I’ll think, ‘Okay, well they’re probably done with me now it’s 9pm. And the moment that I think they’re done with me is always hours before they’re certain they’re done with me because they’re trying to make their thing. So they wait until they know we got everything we need until they go, ‘That guy. Oh yeah, he can go we’re completely done. We don’t need him again!’
The George Lucas Talk Show runs Fri 4, 11, 18, & 25 Aug 2023 at Assembly George Square Studios – Studio Two at 23:35
The Baron and the Junk Dealer runs from Wed 2 to Thu 24 Aug 2023 (except Tue 15) at Assembly Roxy – Downstairs at 17:55
George-prov: An Improvised Theatrical Experience runs from Fri 25 Aug to Mon 28 Aug 2023 at Assembly Roxy – Downstairs at 17:55