I hear Richard Kind before I see him, his voice slicing through the upper section of London’s Garrick Theatre like a sort of truculent, glottal air raid siren. He’s yelling the name of a publicist. If you don’t know Richard Kind by name, you might know the face – but you’ll definitely know the voice. It’s one of the most distinctive in Hollywood, heard stealing scenes in Curb Your Enthusiasm, as Larry David’s carping cousin; in the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, as the disturbed brother of Michael Stuhlbarg; or in Pixar’s Inside Out, where he voices the imaginary, elephantine Bing Bong. Truly, nobody else on Earth really sounds like Richard Kind.
“Personally, I hate my voice,” he tells me, once we’ve sat down in a small, cosy room adjoining the auditorium. “Whenever I hear it, I go, ‘Oh my God, how could you sound like that?’” The New York Times once described Kind’s voice as “aggressively nasal”; it’s true there’s a certain sinus-y quality to it, but the accent is just as much a distinguishing feature – a bespoke concoction forged during childhood, half-New York, half-Philly. “And my mouth happens to move like a muppet,” he adds, flopping open his jaw in demonstration. “It’s very malleable.”
Kind, now 69 years old, has his feet up on the chair. He looks knackered. This makes sense, as he’s spent all day in rehearsals for The Producers, the stage-musical adaptation of Mel Brooks’ irreverent 1967 comedy film. For seven weeks, he’s taking over the role of Max Bialystock (from Ghost Stories’ Andy Nyman), the unscrupulous Broadway hack who seeks to scam investors out of a small fortune by mounting the worst stage production ever conceived – a cheery paean to the Nazis titled “Springtime for Hitler”.
“I mean, we’re not allowed to talk about the bad taste that’s in The Producers – and Mel Brooks wrote lots of bad taste,” he says. “Doing a musical about Hitler and making it very gay… Could The Producers be made today? The movie could not.” Brooks has, says Kind, been “cancelled and celebrated, all at the same time. Those of us who are of a certain age embrace him, and revel in his bad taste.” His kids, however – the three he shares with ex-wife, charity executive Dana Stanley, now all adults in their early twenties – are another matter. “I’ve shown them Blazing Saddles, and they don’t just not like it: they’re horrified by it.”
This is Kind’s third stint as “Bialy”, having previously played him back in 2004, succeeding original Broadway star Nathan Lane, then again in 2012 for a three-night run at Los Angeles’ Hollywood Bowl, playing to crowds of nearly 18,000 people. “Nathan was so brilliant,” he says. “Andy is very similar to Nathan in that he glides, and he’s impish. I’m lumbering. I do not move well. These guys move better than I do. I’m a big hulking gargoyle, okay? Andy and Nathan were more charming, and I’m more Shylock.”
The Producers follows a rather ridiculously busy year for Kind: across 2025, he featured in nine TV series (including Only Murders in the Building, Poker Face and a three-month stint as John Mulaney’s sidekick on the talk show Everybody’s Live), two short films, a podcast series, and a brief spell on Broadway (performing live readings of New Yorker short stories as part of the starry bagatelle All In: Comedy About Love). His career as a whole now extends to over 300 screen credits. “I’m a lucky son of a bitch,” he says. “People cater to me a lot more than I ever wanted – I have this modicum of fame and I’m not used to it.”
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It’s not hard to work out why Kind is so in demand. There’s something unique and specific to his sort of slightly outsized mannerisms – if a role called for a “Richard Kind type”, I’m not sure who else would possibly fit the bill. It helps, too, that he’s besotted with “show people”, and has seemingly worked with them all.
Take Stephen Sondheim, the late musical theatre icon who worked with Kind on 2004’s Bounce (later renamed Road Show). “He was an interesting, fun, observant man,” says Kind. “Witty at times, not particularly funny. His lyrics are hilarious. The first time I met him, he said, ‘I am not my lyrics. I’m just a nice Jewish boy from the Upper West Side.’ But his lyrics are masterpieces. You have to take these words literally: I believe he’s every bit as good as Shakespeare.”
Then there’s Mulaney, the brilliant stand-up whose unpredictable Netflix talk show Everybody’s Live was a TV highlight of last year. (The season culminated in Mulaney, a 43-year-old man, physically fighting three teenage boys.) “I love him so much. I admire his talent, his goodness – he’s cynical without being mean. He is always ironic. Always.”
Kind seems to pour cold water, though, on the idea of more Everybody’s Live: “I think it was very difficult for him. He’s got a family, he’s got a stand up career that makes him a lot of money. I think he wants to be an actor. And this thing, for 12 weeks… he worked hard.”
The list goes on: Kind is, well, kind about everyone from the Coens, to Steve Martin, to George Clooney – the A-lister having lived, somewhat incongruously, as his roommate during the 1980s. Kind and Clooney even played mismatched siblings in a sitcom pilot, The Bennett Brothers, in 1987. It was not picked up.
That Bennett Brothers never panned out was probably for the best: within a decade, Clooney had shot to stardom on ER, while Kind found his own niche, holding down regular roles in series like The Carol Burnett Show, Mad About You, and then the Michael J Fox politico comedy Spin City. (Kind was, after all, a trained improviser, having cut his teeth with Chicago’s famed Second City troupe.)
Other cancellations would carry more of a sting: he mentions mournfully the recent cop show East New York, ended after just one year. And then there was Luck (2011), HBO’s short-lived racetrack drama that had real championship pedigree: created by maverick TV maestro David Milch (NYPD Blue; Deadwood), the series saw Kind star alongside names like Dustin Hoffman, Nick Nolte, Michael Gambon and Kerry Condon. It was cancelled after its first season, with the given reason being animal safety concerns, following the deaths of two horses during filming.
“They all said it was the horses, but it wasn’t,” says Kind. “It was a successful show artistically, but they wanted a Sopranos at the time. They didn’t get another Sopranos, and the money was outrageous, so it got cut. But Luck was magnificent, could have gone on and on, could have been great.”
I never knew I wanted it, but I like respect. It’s a nice ambition
Richard Kind
Does he, I ask, take cancellations like these in his stride? He responds, quickly: “Of course I take it in my stride. God hates me.”
Kind grins. “I’m kidding. It’s business. All this stuff, it’s business. People think the TV was made to create fun things. They don’t understand: TV is the bookends for commercials, for advertisements. And you wait till all this streaming starts getting advertisements again, because they can’t sustain [the current model]. That’s just the way it is.”
If there’s a jadedness to Kind’s sentiments about television, then it hasn’t stopped him from throwing himself into it – but it might explain why he revels in the (somewhat) less commercialised world of theatre. I get the sense there are depths to Richard Kind. We chat about theatre, and I mention seeing a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Kind throws his head back, sighs, and begins quoting from it. “That third act, I just sob and sob,” he says. “I read part of that at my mom’s funeral.”
We talk about his parents, briefly – his father owned a jewelry shop in Princeton, New Jersey, and was a dab salesman. “I learned a lot there,” Kind says. “You know, that coming to work was you playing pretend. There’s a kindness to that. There’s an innocence. That kind of goodness comes out when I go to work.”
I ask, finally, what has changed down the years. His ambitions; his desires. “I’d like to be respected,” he says. “I used to just act. Anybody can sit on their couch and turn the remote control and go ‘Oh, he’s there. He’s funny.’ But is he any good? And I never knew I wanted it, but I like respect. It’s a nice ambition.”
He smiles. And for a second, Richard Kind – surely one of the loudest people I’ve ever met – enjoys a moment of quiet.
Richard Kind is in ‘The Producers’ at the Garrick Theatre until 10 May
