Over the past 15 years, Mark Feuerstein has received critical acclaim for his roles in feature film, television and theater, but he is best known for his lead role as Dr. Hank Lawson in the series Royal Pains.
Inspired by his real life experience, he wrote and created 9JKL with his wife, executive producer Dana Klein. Most recently, he appeared on Prison Break as arch-villain Jacob Ness. Additional television credits include The West Wing, Sex and the City, Once and Again, Fired Up! and Good, Morning, Miami.
Feuerstein made his Broadway debut starring in Alfred Uhry’s Tony Award-winning play The Last Night of Ballyhoo. He was on stage for two hours straight at the Geffen Theatre in Some Girls, written and directed by Neil LaBute. Also, he played to sold out audiences and garnered great reviews for his performance in Roger Kumble’s dark comedy Turnaround. Additional theater credits include Twelfth Night, Awake & Sing, Dark Rapture The Misanthrope, MacbethThree Sisters, A Streetcar Named Desire and King Lear.
In his spare time, Feuerstein enjoys mountain biking, yoga, jogging and photography. In addition to coaching his son’s baseball team, he enjoys biking with his kids through his Hancock Park neighborhood and jumping on trampolines with them. He has completed the Malibu Triathalon six times to raise money for the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) pediatric cancer research. He volunteers much of his time with CHLA because they saved his daughter Addie’s life when she was born with a congenital heart defect diagnosed when she was 5 months old. Additional charity involvement includes Leadership Circle of the Waterkeeper Alliance (Bobby Kennedy Jr. charity), Food on Foot, LA Young Playwrights Festival and Ovarian Cancer Research, among others.
Feuerstein attended Princeton University and studied at the LAMDA on a Fulbright Scholarship. While in London, he also studied Clowning at the Ecole Philippe Gaulier. He is based in Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife, Dana Klein, and their children, Lila, Frisco and Adelaide.
Art Eddy: Let’s first talk about your new show 9JKL. You and your wife, Dana created this show and produce the show. I heard that you guys got this idea for the show while you were working on your hit series Royal Pains. Tell me about the series and your character.
Mark Feuerstein: Yes, that is true. While I was shooting Royal Pains in New York I was living in an apartment that my parents owned on the upper eastside of Manhattan to save money because my wife and three kids were all in LA living in our house. I lived in an apartment that was right next to my parents.
Every morning my father would come in with his tighty whities and ask me what I wanted for breakfast. He would say, “Do you want scrambled eggs, French toast? What can I get ya?” I would tell him that I wanted to sleep another five minutes.
I would go to work shooting for fifteen hours. I would come home at the end of a long day and my mother would be waiting by the door. The second my hand would touch the door knob she whipped open the door to her apartment and asked if I would like to come in for a salad. As the dutiful good son that I am I would go in and have a lovely salad. It was really great. It was time that I got with my parents that I never would have had if it were not for Royal Pains. It was about two years where my brother, his wife and their baby were subletting the other apartment on the other side of mine. It was three apartments in a row. I was talking to a producer and said isn’t this like a sitcom? He said yeah I should write one. I asked my wife to join me in that effort and here we are.
AE: You have some great co-stars in this series. Were you part of the casting process?
MF: Yes, very much so. We were so lucky to get all of our first choices. There was this very Hollywood moment where a show called Doubt on CBS had premiered. Unfortunately for everyone involved in that show didn’t do very well. I shouldn’t be too cavalier about that. We are about to air ourselves. The same could happen to us. They didn’t do great. The next morning our killer producer, Aaron Kaplan calls and says that we can have Elliot Gould. We plucked him literally from the immediate ashes of that show.
We got Elliot and it was so clear that Linda Lavin would be his perfect counterpart. David Walton was a gift from the gods. He was willing to do this show. He has been the lead in his own show. He is so talented and so handsome. Then we got Liza Lapira and Matt Murray, who people are as familiar with, but they are fantastic. There is not one person that cannot go to for jokes, for heart, for drama, for story. Our writers are brilliant. I love them like the new family I never knew I wanted.
My wife is a genius of running this room of crazy writers and keeping track of seven different episodes all at one time. We do it together. If she can’t watch a cut then I watch a cut. I certainly can’t be in their breaking down outlines every day, but when we are off on hiatus I get into the writers room. I sit there from nine until seven at night or ten o’clock or sometimes one in the morning.
AE: Since this series is you and your wife’s creation what do you hope viewers will take away from 9JKL?
MF: I hope that viewers will sympathize with some of the obligations that I have had to take on in my family. (Both laugh.) I also hope that they appreciate that family is the one contract that you are born into in this world. It is the one contract that you should really honor. It is the most rewarding commitment and sometimes the most frustrating. I hope that people will feel in their bones the phrase can’t live with them and can’t live without them. Maybe take a little of the onus off of everyone’s constant awareness, struggle, joy, and pain that they experience with their own family.
AE: Do you guys ad-lib or improv during scenes or for the most part do you guys stick to the script?
MF: Ad-libing doesn’t happen too much. There is a little bit for sure. There are moments where expressions come out or you have to feel a response, an utterance, a grunt, a sound, a laugh when those things come out. In the sitcom format there is an incredible importance played out on the words. Writers spend fifteen minutes haggling over the order.
There are phrases that I now know. Like a dolphin slip is when you take the first half of the sentence and you flip it with the back half of the sentence. So the specific order of words and the words that we choose is kind of important. We try to respect that. Every scene there is something where I want to add or something that I want to take away. The writers are incredibly amenable to that. It is always a little heartbreaking when you lose a joke because it just doesn’t work. 95 percent of the time the writers have another brilliant one to follow right behind. It is a real team effort. Our writers are the final gatekeepers of what we say. We often weigh in on that.
I wouldn’t say that there are a lot of moments where we are just freely improvising. I am saving that for our webisodes which will hopefully be something funny that will shoot soon.
AE: What popped into your mind when you found out that you were going to be a father for the first time?
MF: Oh my God. There is no way to prepare for that moment when you become a father. There is no way to know. You are this guy, who your biggest concern was that your coffee would be hot and there wouldn’t be a line at your coffee bean at 8:30 in the morning when you decided to roll out of bed and maybe read the paper.
Suddenly you are on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I remember those days so fondly when they were babies of putting them in my backpack and hiking up Runyon Canyon and diapers and no sleep. I didn’t know what to expect. I have lived my life without really thinking too much about the future. Trying to stay in the present moment. With a certain amount of confidence whatever comes up I am going to be able to handle it.
That is kind of how everyday fatherhood has been for the past eleven years. I have three kids. Lila is eleven. Frisco is nine. Addy is about to turn eight. Not a day goes by where there isn’t a moment of impov. You talk about improv on our show. We don’t go through it nearly as much as we do it as fathers. (Both laugh.)
AE: Our founder, Tommy Riles here at Life of Dad started up the website when his first daughter was born with a congenital heart defect. His daughter is doing great. You and your wife experienced the same thing as one of your children has a CHD. You do a lot to volunteer work at different hospitals to give back. What did you take away from that experience?
MF: Man, Art it is the hardest thing that can ever happen to a mother or father is to watch their child suffering. I was in the middle of shooting Season 2 of Royal Pains. I had to leave Children’s Hospital to go to Puerto Rico to shoot just witnessed my child having open heart surgery, the first of her two. It was a random day in L.A. I was doing some DVD commentary on some ridiculous movie that I did for the WWE with The Big Show. I come out onto Burbank Boulevard as my wife calls me.
We were trying to figure out why Addy wasn’t gaining weight. They thought it was reflux. There were times that I said as a father which is interesting for Life of Dad I think I said it is okay honey relax. It is just the reflux. We have been through an endocrinologist. We have been to a gastroenterologist. My wife was very rigorous. She said that the reflux medicine isn’t helping. She isn’t gaining weight. She had an appointment with a cardiologist that afternoon. As hard as this is to admit she asked me if she should go. I told her that she didn’t have to go. If you want to and it works in your day. It is really far out in the Valley. She said that she would go.
That afternoon after the DVD commentary I get a call from my wife screaming that we have to go to Children’s Hospital immediately. Addy needs open heart surgery. She has a rare congenital heart defect called ALCAPA which stands for Anomalous left coronary artery pulmonary artery. There is one guy that can do it. Dr. Vaughn Starnes. He is the same doctor that operated on Jimmy Kimmel’s son. He saved his life. He saves about five to seven children’s hearts a day. When I think about that and I am quibbling over a joke in a scene I just remember that. It doesn’t really matter.
He operated once. Addy was in the CTICU for 89 days. Taking one step forward and then two steps back. It was the worst summer of our lives. I was flying home every single weekend and every single day off from New York. I was texting my wife the ejection fraction numbers from the nurse because I was on New York time and I could get them earlier. She would wake up with a text with the numbers. I would say 75 percent of the time they sucked. She was not doing well until he performed her second surgery in I believe it was May of 2010. That one did the trick.
He operated on her mitral valve. The doctor said to me that she it was 80/20 that she makes it. It was 80 percent chance she will make it. Then it was 50/50 that they would have to use a cow’s valve to replace it. That means she would be on Coumadin for the rest of her life. He used her own tissue, thank God. That did the trick. She got better. It was a week later she was looking so much better. She started getting off of all of those horrible pumps that they have in a hospital room. She was home a month later. She was eating. Now she is the most adorable and is the funniest person I know. She walks around like she owns the place. In our minds on some level she does.
AE: Thank you for sharing that with me. Here at Life of Dad we feel that we create a sense of community as we share things about fatherhood with other dads to let them know that they are not alone.
MF: Well that one issue that I was dwelling on is that issue of your attitude as a father. There is nothing like a mother’s love. They can be the gatekeepers of the slightly more neurotic ones. It is a very fine line you have to tow as a dad between trying to be the positive one and trying to be the one who is laid back and respecting that there might be something to it. Respecting your wife’s paranoia and neuroses and going okay honey let’s check it out.
Life of Dad Quick Five
AE: Do you guys have a favorite family movie that you all love to watch together?
MF: You asked that at a perfect time. My son Frisco and I have been taking down the whole Rocky saga. It has been heaven. To show them Rocky I, Rocky II. My daughters kind of fell off, but recently with my son it has been in Rocky III and Rocky IV. It is so awesome to relive all of that with him and watch him take it in. It is the best.
AE: Do you guys have a favorite song that you all like to sing to or dance to as a family?
MF: Currently it is Cake by the Ocean or Can’t Stop the Feeling by Justin Timberlake. The Trolls soundtrack is killing in in our house.
AE: Describe the perfect family vacation.
MF: We are about to have one that could either be that or it could go the other way. My father is turning 80. I am so happy to say that he has had such a long, full, and wonderful life. We are going to a place that as you may learn in the show that my brother is always the one living the high life. He makes us take the most luxurious vacations that my father would ever take for himself. So we are forcing my parents, my brother, his wife and their baby and their three kids and my wife and three kids to a place called Nevis. It is a beautiful hotel in St. Kitts. I hope it is as great as I imagine it will be.
AE: You teamed up with WWE Superstar, The Big Show. In one word describe your WWE experience.
MF: Absolutely awesome. That is two words. They are an unbelievable company. I had the good fortune to hang with Stephanie McMahon. I got to meet Vince (McMahon) a couple of times. I got to host Raw. I am undefeated in the WWE. The Big Show and I beat Ted DiBiase Jr. and Virgil. I pinned Virgil. It is not liking pinning John Cena, but I did the worm on stage in Charlotte. That was phenomenal.
AE: What role would you love to take on for your next project?
MF: Whenever I am playing a character that is clean cut or a little too nice which I did on Royal Pains I like to follow it up with something darker, edgier, and grittier. I got to do that on Prison Break recently. I played the lead villain to Michael Scofield played by Wentworth Miller. It was great to go head to head with him.
It doesn’t always have to be of that nature. It could be anything from your irresponsible father to some tough guy in the military. I would love to do something period. I would love to play someone with an accent. I would love to create some character that is very different from myself because I am currently playing someone that is very similar to myself.
Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @markfeuerstein. Plus go to the 9JKL show page at CBS.com. The show premieres Oct. 2 8:30/7:30c on CBS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPYegZi4R8E