‘School for Scandal’ Star Says He Likes Playing ‘Scum-of-the-Earth’ Roles

Most people would take offense at being called a slime bag. When it happens to Joe Spano, he considers it a high compliment. It means he is doing his job.

“Dangerous, ugly, horrible things within us need expression,” said the actor, who is starring in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s “The School for Scandal” on the Mainstage at South Coast Repertory. His role is Joseph Surface, an arch-hypocrite and distasteful character whom several “Hill Street” regulars might well have called a slime bag had he been part of that show.

If nothing else, Spano relishes how far Sheridan’s 18th-Century comedy of manners has taken him from the role he played for seven years on “Hill Street Blues” as Lt. Henry Goldblume, the quintessential bleeding heart of TV cops.

Preparing lunch recently in the kitchen of his Spanish bungalow on a tree-lined street in Venice, the 41-year-old San Francisco native resembled neither his Goldblume nor Surface character, except for their shared physical traits: the slight build, the puckish face, the brush-cut hair.

“I don’t like playing a good guy,” said Spano, who turned in his badge one year ago Thursday with the rest of the “Hill Street” crew when the show ended its seven-season run. “I’d much rather play the scum of the earth. I didn’t get into acting to be myself. I got into acting to be somebody else.”

Moreover, he was trained for the stage and never had an expectation of working in a TV series. The only reason he landed on “Hill Street Blues,” he said, was because a producer associated with the show’s co-creator, Steven Bochco, used to see his work at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre.

Before Spano played Goldblume, he portrayed coroner Milt LaVelle, a recurring character on another Bochco cop show called “Paris,” which starred James Earl Jones and had a short-lived season in 1979 just before “Hill Street Blues” made its debut.

As for TV success, Spano said: “It sucks the life out of you. I like to learn from a role. Television doesn’t have time for that. When they’re spending $20 million, they want to know only two things (about an actor): Can he do it? And can he do it right now?”

Spano finished peeling a couple of red and green peppers, pureed them and began sauteeing some scallops with cloves of garlic.

“Television buys and sells neuroses,” he said, then began mimicking the voice of an agent: “ ‘You want a crazy person? I can find a crazy person. How do you want him to look? How do you want him to sound? I’ll get him for you.’

“That’s how it works. ‘You need somebody to throw a psychotic fit? Get Bruce Dern.’ It’s been like that for years.”

That said, Spano turned his attention back to food. He served up the scallops on a bed of lettuce with fresh basil and tarragon plucked from his kitchen garden and sat down to eat in his dining room.

Over lunch, Spano recounted that a day doesn’t go by when he doesn’t think of “Hill Street Blues.” Being in the public eye season after season was “a powerful experience,” after all, to say nothing of his Emmy nomination in 1983. But he doesn’t miss the long hours of mental fatigue that comes with shooting a weekly series.

“They don’t pay you to act, they pay you to stand around and wait,” he said.

By comparison, the physical drain of doing eight shows a week at South Coast Rep is bliss, he maintained. And while the pay is considerably less attractive than in TV, theater fulfills other needs.

“I guess I have this crazy thing in me that says I’m supposed to be an artist,” Spano offered, “even though I don’t have a romantic picture of myself as a self-destroying person, the kind of person we thought in college was an artist, a Kafka, for instance. I’m not Kafka.

“But I never looked to acting for a future. There was no future. I was in this thing because it felt like family to me. Theater was home.”

Spano never really lacked for a family. He grew up in the Bay Area with five brothers and sisters. After graduation from UC Berkeley in 1967, where he majored in drama, Spano helped found Berkeley Rep a year later in a storefront. There, he met the woman he would marry, Joan Zerrien, who ran the box office and is now a potter. They have been together for 15 years.

“A potter and an actor,” he said. “We didn’t exactly pick financially secure professions. This is the house that ‘Hill Street’ bought. But I think you can tell our life style is not opulent.”

Opulent, no. But the Spanos’ living room--with its immaculate hardwood flooring and Oriental rugs, its half-dozen watercolors and Zerrien’s own pottery--testifies to an enviable warmth and a taste both spare and homey.

The closest he gets to opulence is when he goes to Beverly Hills, for weekly play readings with the likes of Ed Asner, Richard Dreyfuss, Stacey Keach and Marsha Mason as a member of L.A. Classic Theatre Works, an ensemble that records for radio.

“We get together on Thursday nights and read scripts,” said Spano, who recently played Richard Nixon and Elia Kazan in a Theatre Works recording of Eric Bentley’s “Are You Now, Or Have You Ever Been?” for the BBC.

“We don’t talk about status. We talk about theater. It’s a relatively low-risk way to be part of an ensemble.”

Spano is also on the board of trustees of the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival and likes to hang around the Powerhouse Theater not far from his house. For now, South Coast Rep has become his home away from home.

The movie and TV industries take little notice of SCR, he said. Producers don’t go there to see actors work, and actors don’t go there to be seen by producers.

“So you’re free to serve the play and the director and the audience,” he said.

Spano said that because “L.A. is not a theater town and never will be,” he sometimes wonders whether he shouldn’t have moved to New York when he left Berkeley years ago. “In New York,” he reflected, “you’re freer to be an actor.”

What will Spano do when “Scandal” ends its run?

Grinning boyishly, he said, “I’ll be an unemployed actor.”

“The School For Scandal” continues through May 29 at South Coast Repertory’s Mainstage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Performances Tuesday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 7:30 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2:30. Tickets: $18 to $25. Information: (714) 957-4033.