A Conversation With Spencer Garrett

Spencer Garrett looks into his laptop screen with an easygoing humor about him, like he’s ready to chat about anything rather than have an interview over Zoom. His calm smile is disarming, and welcome! 

A third-generation actor, Garrett’s been in this business a long time. His grandparents and parents operated and lived on a showboat, in a bygone era when these colorful luxury vessels, with everything from gambling to restaurants and live entertainment, dominated America’s Midwestern rivers. For Spencer’s family, it was the Goldenrod, and it was docked on the Mississippi River in St. Louis. Essentially, Spencer grew up on a floating theater, and his grandparents imparted on him a love of the theatrical from a very early age, something his parents and aunt reinforced. 

He regales me of his youth with candor, and of his great love and reverence for film. His mother was a television star in the sixties and seventies, and notably she was the first woman president of the Screen Actors Guild. “There was a part of me that wanted to see if I could do what my grandparents did,” Garrett says. “I had a lot of that in my blood and in my bones growing up. I guess you could say I got my start because I wanted to test the waters when I was young and see if it was something I was any good at. And, you know…I’m still trying to figure it out.”

His family theater training gave him an edge from the moment he left the boat. “There’s a place called Blueberry Hill on the Delmar Loop [in St. Louis]. If you go into Blueberry Hill, there’s one of the great honors of my life. My picture is on the wall of stars with Joe Edwards, the guy who ran Blueberry Hill. I was there many years ago for the St. Louis Film Festival for a movie that I’d done called Casino Jack. I met Joe then, and he said, ‘Can I take your picture and put it on the wall?’ And that to me was like, me having my picture on the wall in Blueberry Hill, where Chuck Berry was playing that night…it was a great thrill in the city that my grandparents and my mom grew up in.”

When he did make his way to LA, one performance at a time, he found an interesting niche in the LA’s television scene, playing a series of similar roles he affectionately called “pricks in suits.” 

“I was playing a lot of like smarmy yuppy lawyers and bent politicians and, you know, just a lot, a lot of guys in suits and ties that were sort of morally questionable. I kind of had become the go-to guy. I’m playing those guys on television at least, and making a comfortable living, but I wasn’t feeling particularly challenged. I think I’d sort of settled into this comfortable couch of ‘Oh I know if I get the call to go in and read for Law and Order and the DA is self-serving and smarmy, I’ll probably get it.’ I played a lot of those guys.”

Things changed once he auditioned for the movie Public Enemies, which saw a radical change of pace for him thanks to some advice by the casting director. 

“Michael Mann, one of my favorite directors and somebody that I really admire, had a character that was an ex-boxer, kind of a thug like in Chicago, something that I wasn’t really used to playing. All I wanted to do was play characters and be a character actor, so I got this audition and I went to the casting director, Bonnie Timmerman, and I mean, she’s done a hundred movies and is very well-respected. I went to Bonnie and I asked to read for the FBI guy? She said, ‘Spencer, I’ve been following you for a long time. And I know you’re good at playing those guys in suits. I don’t want to see you do that anymore. I think you’re better than that.That’s why I brought you in to read for this character of Tommy Carroll. Come back tomorrow and bring me this guy.’ And I came back the next day. She gave me the agency to work on it some more. She gave me a gift. I came in and I nailed the audition.”

Spencer also followed up on that experience with some personal insight into one of his favorite parts of the craft: playing evil people. While soft-spoken and easygoing in person, his characters have more frequently than not been the exact opposite.

“I love bad guys. I’ve played so many of them and I think, after I was finished playing Tommy Carroll in Public Enemies, who was a different kind of bad guy, a murderous killer, which is something I’d never done before. There’s just something delicious about it! I mean, Iago is probably one of the great characters from Othello, right? Every Shakespearian villain—those are the roles that actors sink their teeth into.“

Spencer’s upcoming series about the Lakers is an especially exciting part of our conversation. Set to play real-life commentator and Lakers announcer Chick Hearn, the role represents another shift for the actor. There’s an interesting balance he must strike, finding on a personal level how to bring life to someone who’s written in a script and the historical person who actually existed outside of it:

“I played a lot of real-life characters, but a lot of times you don’t have the luxury of being able to do the research and rehearse and all of that. In this case, I had an entire year because of COVID to immerse myself….watching old film of Chick Hearn and watching the Lakers, listening to his voice, doing all that kind of homework.”

As we prepare to wrap up, Spencer smiles and muses on what it means to play an icon whose impact can still be felt today, and about the opportunity to infuse them with new life on screen.  

“To a certain extent, I’m trying to recreate Chick Hearn. I’ve studied his mannerisms, and I studied his vocal patterns, so there’s a part of me that feels obligated to honor this guy by playing him as him the best I can. And at the same time, the way he’s written is already very much as Chick Hearn would’ve spoken and acted, so I get to put my own little spin on the ball as well. I’m not doing an impersonation, I’m doing a simulation! I want to be able to make him mine as much as possible.”