A television comic of the anxious, hyperkinetic school, Scolari spent the 1980s playing men who talked too fast and wanted too much, and his late work on Girls showed how much he had been holding back. On film he is mostly a footnote.
Fi1m perspective
The Scolari character cannot sit still. On Newhart (1984–1990) he was Michael Harris, a television producer with a great deal of ambition and not much sense, and he played him at speed, all nerves and hurry, which is the thing he did better than most: the quicker he went, the funnier Bob Newhart's stillness became, and Newhart was the stillest lead on American television. The speed came from the New York stage, where he taught himself juggling and mime, and he never entirely put it down.
Before that there was Bosom Buddies (1980–1982), two young men in dresses, with Tom Hanks in the other frock. The drag was the premise and it was also the problem, a joke the show had to tell every week whether or not anything else was happening. "The gimmick killed us," he said later, and we think he was right. After Newhart came the long middle of a working actor's life: a series lead in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: The TV Show (1997–2000), guest parts, voices for Batman: The Animated Series, Broadway, and film roles when Hanks called, in That Thing You Do (1996) and The Polar Express (2004).
The Polar Express is the only one of those we have reviewed, and our review did not mention him, which is a fair measure of what the process did to the actors inside it. He played Billy, the lonely boy, under Robert Zemeckis's motion capture, and we found the digital children awkward company and Billy no exception. We were unmoved by a boy built to move us, and the reason is simple: whatever Scolari did on the stage that day, the face on screen was not his and did not behave like one.
The late turn is Girls (2012–2017), where he played Tad Horvath, father to Lena Dunham's Hannah, across several seasons. The part changes in ways we will not describe, and it asked him for something the sitcoms never had: quiet, and a man finding out about himself rather than announcing it. Recurring dramatic work on Gotham (2015) and Evil (2019) followed. The comparison with Hanks trailed him for forty years and it was always the wrong measure; a man who is funny opposite Bob Newhart and serious opposite Lena Dunham has done the job twice over.
Watch Newhart for the speed, and Girls to see what he had been keeping in reserve.
Biography
Peter Thomas Scolari was an American actor. He began his career in theatre before gaining attention for his role as Henry Desmond in the sitcom Bosom Buddies (1980–1982).
Scolari was a regular cast member on Newhart (1984–1990) as Michael Harris, earning three Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. He later appeared in voice roles including in The Polar Express (2004) and had recurring parts in series such as Gotham and Evil.
He received the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series in 2016 for his recurring role as Tad Horvath, the father of the central character, in the HBO series Girls (2012–2017).
