‘Night Court’s’ Prosecutor Confesses to a Serious Side

Back when he was still looking for his big break, back when he did the narration for the 1974 horror film “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” John Larroquette had no idea that he would become the first actor to win four consecutive Emmy awards.

“Sure, fantasies were rampant back then, while you’re lying in the tub late at night and it’s dark and you’re thinking about the road ahead,” Larroquette said recently during a break from taping episodes of the sixth season of “Night Court,” scheduled to premiere in its new time slot Wednesday at 9 p.m. (Channels 4, 36 and 39).

“We’re all egotistical enough to think that winning awards is a place that we would like to be. But back then you think, ‘If I could just get one good review’--forget about winning an Emmy award. And nobody, I think, is stupid enough to ever think they’ll win four.”

Nonetheless, for his portrayal of the appallingly depraved, ego-maniacal, sex-crazed prosecuting attorney, Dan Fielding, Larroquette has won the Emmy for best supporting actor in a comedy series four years in a row. And “Night Court,” part of NBC’s blockbuster Thursday-night lineup for the past several years, has become one of the most popular programs on television.

Though it has been nominated for best comedy series, and though Larroquette said that the show’s pratfalls and sight gags are reminiscent of Jackie Gleason and Art Carney or Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows,” only Larroquette has ever walked away with an award.

“We do great jokes,” Larroquette said of the immense popularity of the series. “The show may not be in any way intellectual and we don’t make any pretenses of dealing with issues that are impossible to address or solve in the sitcom format. And some have been critical of our vaudevillian, burlesque kind of approach. But if you just want to forget it all for a minute and laugh at pies in the face and pants around the ankles, that’s what we do very well.”

If not completely shocked, then, Larroquette, 40, seems at least a bit sheepish about his recent domination of the Emmy awards. Though he jokes that it rankles him to no end that the number of congratulatory flowers and letters from “big wigs and friends” has decreased substantially every year, he scoffs at the suggestion that his winning streak makes him the best actor on television, at least in the mind of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

“The awards, I think, merely reflect the fact that people really love my character,” Larroquette said. “He is very flamboyant, very different from other characters on television, and he benefits from this people-love-to-hate syndrome. He is at this moment the ultimate villain on TV, yet there is a lot of humor in him as well.”

“John’s a very unique talent,” said Reinhold Weege, creator and executive producer of “Night Court.” “There’s a peculiar quality about him that only a few people have--John Cleese is another one--that allows him to play a character with an edge and yet you still like him. The audience certainly doesn’t believe Fielding does all the things that he says he does, and that’s what makes it funny. There are very few people who can play that.”

Relaxing in his trailer in front of a Macintosh computer, sporting a graying beard he grew for Wednesday’s season premiere, the 6-foot-4, baritone-voiced Larroquette doesn’t look or sound anything like his hyper character.

Though the pervasiveness of a hit series such as “Night Court” makes it difficult sometimes for the audience, journalists and casting directors to imagine the actor as distinct from his character, the real Larroquette is sensitive, thoughtful, literate, soft-spoken, even sedate.

He is married and a devoted father of three. He cares about starving children in Africa and registering the non-voters of this country. He has a picture of poet Charles Bukowski hanging above his desk, and he collects first edition books by such authors as Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs and Anthony Burgess.

Larroquette clearly leaves Dan Fielding behind the minute he walks off the set.

“Except sometimes when I go to shopping malls,” Larroquette said. “People really love this guy, and they’ll walk right up to me and call me a ‘sleaze.’ But I have always said that Dan Fielding could not exist in the real world. He would have been killed a long time ago.”

Larroquette said that he would have been dead long ago if he had not quit drinking in 1981, just over a year before he was cast in “Night Court.” A native of New Orleans, Larroquette said that for a period of several years his need for alcohol began to overshadow everything--his health, his family, his work.

“My heroes were writers and actors who wrote and drank and wrote and drank and acted--people like Bukowski,” Larroquette said. “I looked at his life and I thought that was the way to do it. I thought that alcohol was the elixir that allowed the inner man to really rise. Some of the greatest actors, Burton and Barrymore, just seemed to really grab life by the throat and choke it. Fortunately, I realized one night that that didn’t make sense anymore.”

It is obvious that the pure frivolity of “Night Court” is not the be-all and end-all of Larroquette’s life or ambition. But it is not at all obvious how such a serious, thoughtful man could slip so effortlessly and convincingly into the role of a wacky, perverted “sleaze bag.”

“He’s awfully intense,” producer Weege said. “He has a Type-A personality; he’s extremely obsessive and if he does something--whether its collecting rare books or studying Samuel Beckett--he does it all the way. That’s how he approaches everything. But John can be outrageous, too.”

“Good comics are sometimes rather morbid people,” Larroquette said. “It’s out of their own Angst that they draw their humor. The irony in life is very apparent to me, and a lot of humor is pointing out that irony and twisting it just a bit.

“Besides, it doesn’t take a great spiritual voyage to bring this character to life. A lot of it is mechanical, timing, how many seconds do I wait before I say this. I don’t have to sit in a room and go into some emotional recall in order to do what we’re asked to do here.”

Larroquette spends breaks in his work schedule sitting in front of his Macintosh trying to write novels, screenplays, anything that twists the concerns and ironies of his own life in a more substantial form.

Though he has been dubbed, perhaps even typecast, a comic actor from his role in “Night Court” and movies such as Blake Edwards’ “Blind Date,” in his writing and his acting, Larroquette envisions himself embarking soon on some serious creative voyages.

“I’d like to write screenplays about New Orleans, stories about people going through changes, stories that say something, that count, that do more than just make people laugh.” Larroquette said.