Letting Them Talk with Will Harris

This time I'm letting Jackie Hoffman talk. But first, I want to thank you, the listeners, for your continued interest in this podcast, because “Letting Them Talk” is now officially a year old. When I started this podcast, I was convinced that it was never going to be a big moneymaker for me, and let me just say that, by God, I was right on the money with that prediction. But having said that, I al...

This time, I’m letting Grey DeLisle talk. Grey is a voice actress who’s also a singer. The first time I talked to her, her career was sitting squarely in the former category, but over the years she;s expanded her music career considerably, to the point that it was her new album, Don’t Turn Around, that spurred our conversation this time. To give you an idea of how long it’s been since that initial...

This time I’m letting Marshall Crenshaw talk. I’ve been enjoying Marshall’s music ever since I picked up a cassette copy of his album Downtown in a cutout bin at a Roses department store. I don’t know why I decided to buy it, since I didn’t know anything about it at the time, but after hearing the song “Blues is King,” I instantly became a Marshall Crenshaw fan, and I’ve remained one ever since. M...

This time I’m letting Parker Young talk. Parker basically got his big break as an actor when he secured a role in the hilarious ABC sitcom Suburgatory, and although he’s been working steadily ever since, he’s had to endure being a part of too many short-lived series, which is particularly disappointing when those series invariably tend to be pretty great. As such, I for one am rooting for his luck...

This time I’m letting Mike Viola talk. I’ve enjoyed Mike’s music even before I knew he was the one doing it. It all started with an amazing little movie called That Thing You Do! It was – and remains – one of my favorite movies of all time, about the brief life and times of a ‘60s one-hit wonder band called the Oneders, a.k.a. The Wonders. Big thanks go out to Tom Hanks, of course, since he wrote...

This time I’m letting Neil Flynn talk. Neil always surprises me when he actually agrees to talk, even though he’s done several interviews with me at this point. In my defense, though, he’s made a career out of playing characters who tend to be men of few words. Take Mike Heck on The Middle, for example: the guy spent virtually the entire run of the series actively trying to avoid conversation, and...

This time I’m letting Brittany Ishibashi talk. Brittany absolutely qualifies for the descriptor “that gal who was in that thing,” because when you look at her filmography, you quickly notice that she’s been in an episode of just about every hourlong drama of note that’s been on the air in the last decade or two. Here’s just a brief list of shows on which she’s appeared over the course of her on-ca...

This time I’m letting Renny Harlin talk. This man’s films have been part of the pop culture fabric of my life dating back to the late 1980s. I’m not going to lie and pretend that I saw his first two films – 1986’s Born American and 1987’s Prison – when they were initially released, but I did rent A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master on VHS, and I most definitely saw both Die Hard 2 and Th...

This time I’m letting Mykelti Williamson talk. I’ll just go ahead and admit it: this is someone whose name I had somehow never actually heard spoken aloud before until mere moments before starting my conversation with him. As such, I discovered that I’d been mispronouncing his name wrong in my head for the entirety of the time I’ve been watching his work…and I’ve literally been watching this guy f...

This time I’m letting Jeneva Rose talk. Jeneva is an author who became a full-fledged phenomenon when she released her novel The Perfect Marriage during the pandemic and found that TikTok was an amazing marketing tool. As a result, the thriller sold millions of copies, thereby making her into a pretty big deal and someone whose name immediately became one of those that you include on your lists of...

This time I’m letting John Ross Bowie talk. Yes, that’s right: I’m letting John Ross Bowie talk again…although in my defense and his, you may recall that during the course of his initial appearance on the podcast, he was promoting the premiere of his HBO Max series “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe,” a series which – at the time we recorded the episode – I hadn’t actually seen. As such, at the ve...

This time I’m letting Allan Havey talk. I was introduced to Allan way back in the days when there were two cable stations devoted to comedy: The Comedy Channel and HA! In short order, they combined to form a single entity known as – you guessed it – Comedy Central. If you were watching back then, you may remember a quirky talk show called NIGHT AFTER NIGHT, and if you do, then like myself, you pre...

This time I’m letting Tommy Stinson talk. Tommy was busy touring the world and elsewhere when he was still in his teens. Of course, that necessitated dropping out of school, but considering the journey that he went on as a member of the Replacements, it’s easy enough to argue that he made the right decision. Of course, the Replacements haven’t really been a going concern – at least as a full-time...

This time I'm letting Mark Sheppard talk. Mark's availability for an interview came up with a press release for his latest film, a horror movie called EVER AFTER, but my reasons for asking him to do the podcast were admittedly tied to the fact that he plays a key role on my wife’s favorite TV series of all time. Yes, Mark Sheppard plays Crowley on SUPERNATURAL, and given that my wife is part of th...

This time I'm letting Christopher Plummer talk...because, yes, that's right, it's another stopgap episode, owing to the fact that I have no new episode in queue and I am currently in the process of trying to stockpile some additional episodes for your listening enjoyment. I suppose there are worse times that I could find myself in this situation than after dropping the 50th episode of the podcast....

This time I’m letting Wesley Stace talk. Wes is a singer-songwriter whose work I’ve enjoyed since the release of his debut LP for Sire Records, Here Comes the Groom. That LP, his first full-length studio album, came out in 1990, so not only have I been a fan for 26 years, I’ve even seen him through the loss of his musical pseudonym, John Wesley Harding, in favor of his birth name. Wes has consiste...

This time I’m letting Robin Shorr talk. I hadn’t actually seen or talked to Robin since the summer of 2013, but despite the fact that 13 years had passed since our previous conversation – which was, in fact, the only conversation we’d ever actually had – you’d never know it from the way she and I were chatting about her life and career. But there’s a reasonable explanation for that connection: Rob...

This time I’m letting Michael Hampton talk. Michael has been a professional guitarist since he was in his teens, earning his place in one of the most influential funk bands of all time by being able to reproduce a ridiculously difficult solo when he was 17. By the time he was done, there was no chance that he wasn’t going to be in contention for a spot in the lineup in the musical collective known...

This time I’m letting Chris Loggins talk. Chris is someone I’ve been describing as an outside-the-box guest for this podcast. In realty, though, he isn’t, since he’s squarely within the realm of pop culture. It’s just that the pop culture in question is for a slightly younger demographic than most of the folks who’ve been guests thus far. Chris is supervising producer for Daniel Tiger’s Neighborho...

This time I’m letting Josh Joplin talk. I’ve been enjoying Josh’s music for 25 years now. He’s actually been making music longer than that, but I don’t mind admitting that it wasn’t until the release of his single “Camera One” that I first found myself listening to Josh Joplin and his Group. Josh actually released his first single in 1989, and while it isn’t available for streaming on Spotify or a...

This time I’m letting Spencer Garrett talk. I’ve been watching this guy’s work since he made an appearance in a season four episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “The Drumhead.” No, I didn’t know who he was at the time, nor should I have, since he’d really only just gotten started at that point, but in short order he began to appear in everything. No, but for real: Spencer Garrett truly...

This one's a bit of an experiment, folks: since I knew I wasn't going to have two episodes available for download this week, I decided that I'd venture into the archives and find the audio from an interview that you've hopefully read but certainly have never heard. In this case, it's what I'm guessing is probably the last third of the Random Roles that I did with Alex Rocco for the A.V. Club when...

Today I’m letting John Ross Bowie talk. John has a true gift for comedy, but he’s also a gifted actor. Case and point: when he’s playing Barry Kripke, you often want to punch him in the face, but by the end of this podcast, you’ll want to buy him a drink just so that you can keep hanging out with him and having him tell you stories. John got his start in the theater, but you almost certainly know...

This time I’m letting Jane Seymour talk. Jane has been a staple of TV and film since the start of the 1970s. Having gotten her start as an uncredited extra in the 1969 film Oh! What a Lovely War. By the following year, she was actually being credited, and by 1973, she was a Bond girl, so it’s fair to say that she moved up the ranks pretty quickly as an actress…and she’s yet to stop moving or actin...

This time, I’m letting Bruce McGill talk. I’ve talked to Bruce many times in the past, and it’s because he’s always got stories to tell. In fact, he’s got so many stories that I continue to try to talk him into letting me help him write his memoir. To date, it has not happened, but he says that if he does it, the only person he’d collaborate with is me, and by God, Bruce McGill is a man of his wor...