Interview with Paul Dooley
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Paul Dooley
Actor, comedian and writer from West Virginia, known for Breaking Away, Sixteen Candles, Popeye, five films with Robert Altman and the Christopher Guest comedies.
Source: SAG-AFTRA Foundation on YouTube
These answers are taken from Paul Dooley Career Retrospective | Conversations at the SAG-AFTRA Foundation on SAG-AFTRA Foundation's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What was your very first experience with acting?
I never thought I was going to be an actor. The first thing I thought I might do was draw cartoons, and I did cartoons in my high school newspaper, my college newspaper and magazines. But I never looked that far ahead.
I did study drama in high school and in college, and I began to think at that time that maybe I will be an actor. I had a professor who said, "Don't tell any of the other actors this, but you're the best actor in our class. It's not nice if we let them know that, but you're the one. Go to New York and try to find your fortune, because I think you have the talent for it." And that's probably what caused me, when I finished with college, to go to New York in 1952.
When did you start acting?
I went to New York in 1952. I got a room at the YMCA, and someone told me there was a place I could go to sort mail. A dictionary company was having some kind of a contest. At a certain point the boss came in and said, "You're fired. I don't know what you're doing over there, but it's not what we need." What I was actually doing was, if I saw a return address that was funny, an unusual name or an unusual town, Rabbit Run Road was one of them, I stopped and made a list. I still have that list at home.
At first I couldn't get arrested. My professor told me I'm the best one in the class. You go to New York and every guy you meet there is the best one in his class. I wasn't able to get into Equity, so I started doing children's theater, and eventually I started writing short plays for children. I went to college with Don Knotts, and Don Knotts got me my first job, on an afternoon children's show. I got a salary and I found it to be fun.
What attracted you to begin a career as an actor?
My first interest was listening to radio, because there was no television when I was 12 or 13. I used to listen to Red Skelton, Jimmy Durante and Jack Benny. I was only interested in the jokes they were doing. I never thought, I'm going to be an actor, I'm going to be a comedian. But it intrigued me. I used to say to myself as a 12, 13 year old, "What are jokes? Where do they come from? Who thinks them up?" They were mysterious to me. The idea of making up funny things to say. I liked the idea of it, but I was still too young to think, well, I'll be an actor.
I always had a great time with language and names and words. I guess you'd call me a wordsmith.
What do you enjoy most about acting?
Robert Altman loved improvisation. He wouldn't call it improvisation, but he was very free and open, and if actors wanted to put in a line, they could. If he loved it, he kept it. He said, "Don't be shy. Say what you want. You may come up with the gem. I may use it, I may not. You may end up on the cutting room floor. So what?" He loved his actors, and they loved him.
On Perfect Couple, the first one where I had the lead in a movie, I was in every scene every day. My agent kept saying somebody wants to see me for another movie, and I said, "I don't want to think about that now. I love what I'm doing. We shoot 12-hour days and I'm in every scene." It was so thrilling.
And I'm still working, as long as they put up with me. They say he's 98, he probably can't remember lines. But I can remember lines every day of the week. I'm very sharp. I'm not 98 in every part of me. That's just a number.
What was a great moment for you as an actor?
They were getting ready to do The Odd Couple with Walter Matthau and Art Carney. The poker players' lines are so separated, a line here, the next page a line, that it's not easy to audition for, so they said I'd audition to be the understudy for Art Carney. I'm on the stage reading the lines, and the stage manager is feeding me lines from offstage. For some reason, on some impulse, I took my three or four pages and threw them high in the air. That's going to get a laugh, but I had a little plan. I continued the scene, but I got down on my knees and started picking up the papers I'd thrown away. And who better to do that than Felix? I became him, the guy I was auditioning to be the understudy for.
Mike Nichols was in the audience. He was directing. I went out the stage door and walked up the alley to the street, and a guy ran after me and said, "You got the job." That never happens. You usually go home and wait for your agent to call. I realized I'd done the best thing possible. I became Felix.
How did your acting career unfold?
Robert Altman became a mentor of mine. I did five films with him. His wife knew he was looking for a guy to be Carol Burnett's husband in A Wedding, and she said, "You should see this guy." He was watching Jules Feiffer's evening of one acts based on his comic strips. There was a moment where two characters, both married somewhere else, are having their first one night stand, standing across from a bed, and neither one is sure what the first move is. My character crossed the stage and did a gesture meant to show that I'm a cool guy. It wasn't in the script, and Bob knew I'd made it up. He turned to his wife and said, "That's the guy."
When Breaking Away opened, about nine critics suggested I get a nomination for best supporting actor. Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel, the New York Times. That helped me a great deal.
There's a time in an actor's life where he stops having to audition and begins to be called because his work is known. Instead of auditioning you, they say, "Let's get him."
What advice do you have for new actors?
The only advice I can really think of is there's no such thing as don't take the part because it's one line. Everybody has to start somewhere. Don't turn down a part because it's half a day. It doesn't really matter, if you're good at what you do. They'll probably call you back for something. Every day is a new day. Every day is a chance to make a mark or impress somebody with your acting. And so all you have to do is be consistent.
And if you don't know your lines, you study them. When people ask me how I remember my lines, I say, "How do you think the doctor remembers all the pills?" That's his job. So if you're an actor, you must know about lines.
What has been your greatest accomplishment as an actor?
I think it had to be Breaking Away. A great deal of it was about the boys who were racing their bicycles, but wherever I appear, the character I played scored very well with the audience, because he was this dry kind of guy, a lot like my dad.
I got to the reading and there were about 20 guys in suits from the studio and a full cast. They said, "Just read it cold." So I started reading the lines, and in about five minutes I was getting a laugh on everything. I said to myself, how are they not going to hire me for this? I come in to the dinner table and say, "It's not squash. It's Italian food. I don't want any Italian food in this house. I want American food, damn it. I want French fries." That's typical of the kind of guy I played. That was really written beautifully. The writer won the Oscar for the script.
I couldn't do much better than that.
Think about a demanding director, professor or cast mate. What made him or her difficult? How did you successfully interact with this person?
On Sixteen Candles, the script had my character give his daughter a pat on the behind and say, "Where the hell are your panties?" I said to myself, that's not a line in a movie. It's really awful. I said I didn't want to say it that way, and they said, "On the day we shoot, we'll figure out what to say." They often say that kind of thing. So it kept hanging over it. I had lunch with Molly's mother once and she said, "I don't like those lines."
So I rewrote the scene. John said, "Well, let's do one my way and one your way." I thought it was crude and not in good taste, and that my thing would work better and nobody's hurt by it. So my last line in the scene was, "Sweetheart, when you meet your Mr. Right, just let him know that you wear the pants in the family." Now this is an innocent remark, but it took us where we wanted to be. Even though I had no permission to do so, I wrote it the way I thought it should be, and he didn't stop me. He said, "All right, okay, that's fine."
Have you progressed in your acting career as you have expected?
At some point I stopped having to audition. In the first movies I ever did, it wasn't true. But when you get to the point where, instead of auditioning you, they say, "Let's get him," it's because they saw you.
If you play a Brooklyn cab driver really well, you're probably going to play a lot of cab drivers. The industry likes to type you. Actors like to be versatile and do different things. But the minute you do something that clicks with an audience, suddenly that's the only way they want to see you. I guess at some point I became a character actor whose comedy was very dry, but they liked him. The guy I played in Breaking Away was the typical dad.
Of all the roles you have played in the past, which is your favorite?
In Waiting for Guffman I only did two and a half minutes, but they were two great two and a half minutes about being probed by aliens. Chris Guest said to me, "I want a guy from real life, who doesn't know how to talk in front of a camera. Just mumble your way through it." So I hemmed and hawed through the thing, but I kept returning to being probed. Talking about being probed once may be funny, but I managed to make it sound like a pretty big, continual thing. And he wanted me to sound like a real guy, so I used my old West Virginia accent: "Different ones of them would probe me, not all at once, but individually, but sometimes in a group." Then I had a line that said, "Looking back, I don't remember it as an unpleasant experience." The whole thing is only about two and a half minutes, but I loved it, because I was trying so hard to be a real guy.
On A Mighty Wind we went on tour to about nine cities, and it was really like touring with a group of musicians. Chris is a genius.
Describe your acting style.
I'm an oddball in that sense, because I was never nervous. I had a lot of faith in my abilities to make things funny, or to help them be funnier. I was always sure of myself. I had a lot of confidence, and I don't know where it came from. If there's a part that has funny stuff in it, I'm sure I can do that. I never had stage fright.
I think almost every guy I played, I used to try to play my father. He was the kind of guy who never smiled, never laughed, never hugged, never said I love you. Not a bad person. That's just the way he was. I'd play grumpy characters from time to time based on him, not for laughs. My comedy was kind of deadpan, so the character was friendly while looking unfriendly. But I can also turn on the charm and play nice guys, pretending I'm a nice guy.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your resume.
I had been doing a lot of humorous commercials, and they called in six or seven guys to select a writing team for The Electric Company. There was a reading expert talking to us, using language like "when the child learns to encode." So I turned to the guy next to me and said, "Whatever happened to Fargo North, Decoder?" He told the producers, and they said, "That's a great character." Morgan Freeman was in the cast, and I called him Easy Reader, based on Easy Rider, because we're all about reading. I just leaned on the jokes and the puns, and that's how it happened.
Before I ever did any movies or television shows, I was a commercial actor, very successful at it. Hundreds and hundreds of radio commercials. Someone said, "What's the name of your company?" I didn't have a corporation, so I called it All Over Creation. We offered an all over creative package: the acting, the writing, all of it.
And I had eight semesters of Italian in college. We studied Dante's Inferno in Italian, and I fell in love with the whole language.
Paul Dooley's Full Biography
Dooley was a keen cartoonist as a youth and drew a strip for a local paper in Parkersburg, West Virginia. He joined the Navy before discovering acting while at college. Moving to New York, he soon found success as a regular on the stage. Also having an interest in comedy, Dooley was a stand-up comedian for five years, as well as having brief stints as a magician and as a clown. Unafraid of trying different areas of entertainment, he was also a writer. After appearing in many movies, including most notably Popeye (1980), Dooley has appeared as recurrent characters on various shows, including My So-Called Life (1994), Dream On (1990), Grace Under Fire (1993), and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993).