At its purest, acting is a wondrous game of make-believe. If you’re good enough to make a living at it, you show up to work every day and crawl under the skin of someone foreign from yourself. You could be someone as innocuous as a loving parent or as malicious as a cold-blooded killer. The job requires you to be a master of empathy; you may not like the person you’re playing, but you have to understand them well enough to make their desires believable, if not relatable, to your audience. It’s a fun, frightening high-wire act, and the deeper you get into it the harder it can be to claw your way out of the character.
This, of course, depends on how you approach the craft. If you’re a method-trained actor like Robert DeNiro, you become your character. If, however, you’re a practiced fabulist who prefers to play the short game, you can dip in and out of character with little psychic effort. This is where acting becomes indistinguishable from lying. This approach still requires that essential sense of play that all actors possess, but it can be unsettling to the outsider in that there’s no emotional buy-in. One moment you’re effortlessly enticing a married person into committing adultery, an hour later you’re clocking out of character and heading home for the day.
This sounds a bit like being a private investigator, right? Would it surprise you to learn that two of the most talented character actors of the last 30 years once moonlighted in this profession? Maybe not, but you’re going to be knocked sideways when you find out which actors thrived in this industry.
Where is our Wayne Knight and Margo Martindale detective series?
Two weeks ago, comic book author Ryan Estrada went viral on Bluesky by informing his followers that Wayne Knight and Margo Martindale once supplemented their acting income by working for the same detective agency. Yes, Newman from “Seinfeld” and Mags from “Justified” used their acting talents to potentially catch people being untruthful.
According to Knight, he took the gig as a side hustle to keep from relying on unemployment. How did he fall into this line of work? As Knight told Vice in 2015:
“[I] was waiting tables like everybody else when I first started. And I had a friend who said, ‘Well, I’ve got a job that you might be interested in.” I go, ‘Yeah? What’s that?’ And he goes, ‘I’m a private investigator.’ I go, ‘What? You don’t have any police background. Were you trained for this?’ ‘No.’ ‘How did you get hired?’ He says, ‘Well, they like hiring actors. Because they’re usually intelligent, conversant, they can play different parts, and they have no scruples.'”
Knight’s facility for fallaciousness allowed him to hop on the phone and bust unfaithful spouses, and, more ambitiously, heads of corporations and high-ranking military folk looking to make hay in the world of venture capitalism. He would use the moniker “Bill Monty” to keep the ruse going as long as necessary and was successful enough that he’s been trying to turn these experiences into a sitcom or movie over the last few decades.
As for Martindale, she was far less enamored of the gig. As she told Backstory in 2020, “They hired a lot of actors. I didn’t have very interesting things to do, but it was all about prying information out of unsuspecting people for headhunters, for husbands who were jealous, for wives looking at their husbands out gallivanting.” She added that while the men occasionally got to go out into the field, the women were stuck working the phones. If there’s a movie or series to be made out of this sleazy story, I’d prefer to see it told from Martindale’s perspective.