Cheryl Hines is the one who listens while everyone else talks. She makes reasonableness funny, which almost nobody can do, and her best work comes when a script leaves her standing still beside someone who will not stop talking.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Cheryl Hines in Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000) while Larry David explains why he was right. She does not roll her eyes or wind up for a line of her own. She listens, and the longer she listens the more unreasonable he sounds, until the laugh arrives without anyone having asked for it. Cheryl David is the measuring stick of that show: we know how far Larry has gone by how far she has had to lean back. The quarrels can wear, as we said in our review, but Hines is one of the reasons the embarrassment stays plausible instead of tipping into sketch.
The habit was taught. She learned to improvise at The Groundlings in Los Angeles, where Lisa Kudrow was her first teacher, and Curb was cast as an improvised show, which is how she got in the door. "The truth with improv is you have to really listen to the other actor because you can only listen and respond. There are no written lines," she has said. That is the whole method, and she kept to it across twelve seasons beside Jeff Garlin, Susie Essman and JB Smoove, all of whom play louder than she does. Around the series she took supporting parts in films: the exasperated one opposite Robin Williams in RV (2006), Becky in Adrienne Shelly's Waitress (2007), an anchorwoman in The Ugly Truth (2009). She directed Shelly's script Serious Moonlight the same year, and an episode of Curb in 2020.
Suburgatory (2011) gave her the lead and let her be the noisy one for once. Dallas Royce is the queen of the cul-de-sac, a woman so hospitable that it takes half a season to notice how lonely she is, and Hines can make a single greeting carry three meanings. Opposite Carly Chaikin's entirely blank Dalia, she is all warmth and no stillness, the reverse of her Curb setting. We did not expect to mind about Dallas, and by the middle of the first season we did, because Hines kept the brightness one notch too high throughout, and the gap between the voice and the woman was where the loneliness lived.
The films have been less generous. The Ugly Truth is a poor picture, and she and John Michael Higgins are the best thing in it, turning a handover to the weather into a divorce hearing. We laughed hardest at the pair of them and then watched the script drop them once the ratings plot had moved on. That is the pattern: film comedies cast her as the sensible one, use her to steady a star, and give her nothing to build. Her one feature as director was reported to have plain shot choices and slow dialogue scenes, an odd note on an actor whose entire gift is pace.
What Hines needs is a talker, a long take and permission to wait. Television has given her that twice. Somebody should write her a third part with nothing written in it.
Biography
Cheryl Hines is an American actress and comedian. She is best known for playing Cheryl David, the wife of Larry David, in the HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000–2024). She also directed the episode "Artificial Fruit" from the tenth season in 2020.
Hines trained with the Los Angeles improv group The Groundlings. Before her breakthrough role she worked as a personal assistant to director Rob Reiner. Her feature directorial debut was the 2009 comedy Serious Moonlight.
She has appeared in films including Along Came Polly (2004), RV (2006), The Ugly Truth (2009) and A Bad Moms Christmas (2017), and in television series such as The Middle (2009) and Hannah Montana (2006).
