The actor thought he was done with Dan Fielding. But more than 30 years later, Larroquette is back to see if he can make his most famous character funny again.
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By Alexis Soloski
In 1985, John Larroquette won the Emmy for best supporting actor for his work in “Night Court.” Larroquette, a New Orleans native with a double bass voice and a 6-foot-4 frame, played Dan Fielding, the smarmy prosecutor assigned to the graveyard shift at a Manhattan municipal court. (Here is Entertainment Weekly’s appreciation: “Rarely has horny smugness been so convincingly portrayed.”)
Larroquette won again in 1986. And in 1987 and 1988. Then he declined to be considered for further awards.
“I didn’t want to outstay my welcome,” he said on a recent video call, from the study of his home in Portland, Ore., a black-and-white diptych of the playwright Samuel Beckett behind him. (Larroquette collects rare books, particularly Beckett first editions.) He had taken the character, he felt, to the limits of what the network would allow. The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences should give someone else a chance.
“It was a high-class problem, my God,” he said.
“Night Court,” an affable workplace comedy with a rich vein of absurdism, ran from 1984 to 1992 as part of NBC’s vaunted Thursday night bloc. Enjoying the stability and the camaraderie, Larroquette put in the hours until the end. But when the network offered him a spin off, he declined. His nine seasons as Dan had defined his professional life; he wanted to try other people on for size.
“I thought, I’ve done this for a long time,” he said. “If I let him die his natural death, maybe I can do another character elsewhere.”
But Dan Fielding didn’t die. On Tuesday on NBC, he approaches the “Night Court” bench once more. In the show’s reboot, a multicamera passion project for Melissa Rauch (“The Big Bang Theory”), Larroquette reprises his role — bearded, grayer, less able to leap a courtroom’s railing in a single bound.
“I wanted to see if I could make him funny again, truly,” Larroquette said. Then, smiling his signature smile that reduces his eyes to slits — half grimace, half goof — he landed the punchline. “Also, let’s be honest, it was a lot of money.”
Larroquette, 75, doesn’t see his career, before “Night Court” or after, as having a deliberate arc. He understands it instead as a flashy pinball game that has bounced him from bumper to bumper and sometimes into the gutter, artistically anyway. (Pressed, he’ll mention a “Fawlty Towers” remake.)
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