Stay Tuned to Their Careers

Predicting stardom is a dangerous game, best left to agents, network executives and madmen. But every fall, when new shows start hitting the airwaves and the hype is so heavy it sticks to your shoes, it’s tempting to play along, to wonder which of the unfamiliar faces that have suddenly popped up on your television screen will be the next Bruce Willis, Roseanne Arnold or Luke Perry.

We can’t rely on the amount of pre-show publicity, either. Remember when Jimmy Brogan, playing a bumbling angel on a show called “Out of the Blue,” was being touted all over the place as the next Robin Williams? Of course, you don’t. The show didn’t last until Christmas and Brogan (who’s now a comedy scout for Jay Leno) went back to a low-profile, stand-up comedy career.

But there are always a few new faces worth watching. We’ve picked five of them, relative unknowns who deserve, at least, a closer look. There’s no way to know whether they’ll eventually emerge as stars or if their shows will even survive. But they’ve certainly got a shot. Remember, if David Hasselhoff can do it, anyone can.

MARK CURRY

Just last year, Mark Curry was still holding on to his job as manager of the Pay-N-Save drugstore in his Oakland hometown, the same place he started as a bag boy six years earlier, trying to decide whether to take his comedy act full-time to Los Angeles or keep lying to his boss about why he was missing so many days on the job.

“I knew I’d have to quit eventually cause there were so many bookings coming in,” Curry is saying, stretched out on a sofa on the set of his new ABC sitcom, “Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper” (premiering Tuesday night at 8:30). “I was calling in sick all the time. The first time I did ‘Showtime at the Apollo’ I told them my grandmother died. The second time I did it, I told them my other grandmother died. So I didn’t have many excuses left.”

The truth is, Curry probably could have quit his day job several years before. He’d already won a number of Bay Area comedy competitions and had made enough trips to Los Angeles to know that he was at least as funny as most of the stand-ups who were getting stage time at The Improv and The Comedy Store. Everybody kept telling Curry, who started doing stand-up in 1987, that it was time to make his move. But he held back, waiting for the moment when he could take the town by storm.

“I didn’t want to come down here and have people say, ‘Well, he’s going to be good.’ I wanted them to say, ‘Damn! Who is that?” So when I got here, I had an act that was boomin’. I was a complete package, dressed nice, 6-foot-6, and solid. I used to go into clubs, rock ‘em and then just leave. I wanted to leave ‘em talking. I wanted to create a mystique.”

The strategy worked. Within four months of moving to L.A., Curry (who’s in his late 20s) had an agent, an opening slot on Damon Wayans’ tour, an HBO “One-Night Stand” special and an offer from ABC to star in his own comedy series.

“I never really thought about acting until they made the offer,” he says, grinning his Branford Marsalis baby-face bad-boy grin. “I’m just here for the ride.”

So now he’s playing an Oakland substitute teacher who moves in with two beautiful female roommates and spends most of his time making faces and cracking jokes.

“I went to a couple of acting classes, but it was too ridiculous for me,” he says. “They were too emotional about everything. If the scene was somebody getting shot, they’d discuss it for hours, like, ‘How big was the gun?’ or ‘Why did they shoot me?’ I don’t know why they made it so hard. I just fell down like I was shot. And then I went home.”

MIRIAM MARGOLYES

Miriam Margolyes--who used to be a distinguished British actress before she moved to Santa Monica and started wearing blue-and-white-striped T-shirts, beach shorts and canvas shoes with little embroidered anchors on them--takes all her important meetings in delicatessens.

Delis, she says, are what she loves most about Southern California, quintessentially American places with high-piled sandwiches and cheesecakes, with booths and counters and pies under glass. When producers Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner (“Cosby” and “Roseanne”) wanted to meet Margolyes and discuss creating a new sitcom for her, she asked that they meet in a deli--Art’s in Studio City.

She’s in a deli now, Zucky’s in Santa Monica, just a few blocks from her condo, talking about the show that resulted, CBS’ “Frannie’s Turn” (Saturdays at 8 p.m.), in which she plays a 51-year-old Staten Island working mother, trying to take control of her life. At least that’s what she’s supposed to be talking about, but Margolyes has other things on her mind.

“May I have scrambled eggs with to-mah-to,” she is saying, all prim and proper and oh-so- very English. “And toast? Yes, toast would be heaven. Do you have little packets of marmalade to go with that? And, oh yes, a long tomato juice, please. No ice.”

You should understand that Margolyes doesn’t sound the least bit like this when she plays Frannie. She sounds, in fact, exactly like a 51-year-old Irish-Italian woman from Staten Island. This is a woman who studied English literature at Cambridge, who appeared in the Footlight Reviews, years of classical plays and BBC productions and a much-lauded one-woman show called “Dickens’ Women.” But over here, her accent can disappear in an instant, as if she’d never been east of New York.

“I’m gifted in that department,” she says of her ability to take on any accent she chooses. “I guess I have a good ear.”

And she puts it to good use. When a CBS promotions person recently displeased her, she phoned him up as Harry Margolis. In a gruff male American voice, she chewed him out demanding, among other things, “Why don’t you get off your butt and get on the phone?”

“I find it easier to express anger in another persona,” she says, her breakfast in front of her. “And I don’t think he would have taken it from a woman. Men can be aggressive and it’s OK.”

“I didn’t mean to be unkind,” she adds, sounding suddenly very British again. “But I was quite cross with him.”

Miriam Margolyes takes a drink of her to-mah-to juice. “And besides, it was fun.”

SAM McMURRAY

Sam McMurray isn’t sure why it happened. Maybe it’s the jutting jaw, the bulky shoulders or the fact that, when he was younger, “it took me a while to grow into my nose.” For whatever reason, it took a long time for casting directors, particularly television casting directors, to think of him as anything but a jerk.

“Most of the television stuff I’ve gotten to do, it’s like I should get special billing,” he says, smiling, “ ... And Featuring Sam McMurray as The Ass.”

“In New York I did soaps and in soaps, I killed everybody. I killed the entire cast of ‘The Doctors’ actually. They used to see me coming down the hall and run for cover ‘cause they knew if I was working that meant somebody was getting the ax.”

McMurray, probably best known for his role (as a jerk) in the feature film “Raising Arizona” and an assortment of characters (many of them jerks) on “The Tracey Ullman Show,” has brought this up because, at last, he has landed a leading role, the part of a hard-bitten gumshoe on what is probably the first-ever crime-solving comedy that started out as a game show, Fox’s “Likely Suspects” (Fridays at 9:30 p.m.).

The gimmick is that McMurray, as Det. Marshak, plays to the camera as if it were his new rookie partner. So the audience, through the camera’s point of view, has to help solve each week’s mystery. The producers initially envisioned this as a find-the-murderer game show, but now it’s evolved into something even weirder, a cross between “Columbo” and “It’s Gary Shandling’s Show.”

“I’m sure there will be times when we get tired of using the rookie-cam,” says McMurray, who admits it’s a little strange playing most of his scenes talking straight into the lens of a hand-held 16mm camera. “Maybe the rookie-cam will get sick for a week or something and spend the whole show in bed.”

McMurray, who also does the voice of Roy on ABC’s “Dinosaurs,” says his friends who have seen the pilot already have drawn conclusions about what the rookie looks like. “One friend said, ‘I’m sure your partner’s a woman,’ and another one said, ‘Your partner’s black, right?’ I do have a very particular image. But I’m not confessing.”

Both of McMurray’s parents were actors and he spent years doing theater in New York before moving full-time to Los Angeles in 1987.

“You have to constantly re-invent the reasons you become an actor,” he says. “You don’t want to be 35 going, “How was I tonight?’ Although I met Henry Fonda toward the end of his life, during the last play he did. I went backstage to meet him and said, ‘You were just wonderful,’ and you know what he said? He said, ‘Did you really like it?’ so, I guess it never stops.”

CYNTHIA STEVENSON

When Cynthia Stevenson moved to Los Angeles in 1985, her first job was working as a page at CBS, where it turned out one of her co-workers, and eventually one of her best friends, was Bob Newhart’s son, Rob.

“Our job was to go to the Farmer’s Market and accost people, trying to get them to go over to CBS and watch pilots,” says Stevenson, who is telling this story because, as fate would have it, her first network television role will be playing Bob Newhart’s daughter on his new CBS sitcom called, oddly enough, “Bob” (Fridays at 9:30 p.m.).

“We each had walkie-talkies and we would sit over there and eat food all day, destroying people’s vacations and talking to each other on the walkie-talkies. We kept in touch over the years. So when I got the part I called him up and said, ‘Rob, guess what? You’re my brother.’ ”

Stevenson is giggling and wrinkling her nose all through this. She is terminally perky, although not in a Mary Hart kind of way. It’s just that she seems so earnest, so sincere, so ...

“I know,” she says, trying to frown but not succeeding. “The girl next door.”

Not that she’s complaining. There’s also a real vulnerability about Stevenson, a big reason Robert Altman picked her to play Bonnie, Tim Robbins’ broken-shoed girlfriend in “The Player.” “I love that character,” she says. “For me it’s very easy to play the underdog.

“I can just see that more clearly than I can the superwoman. Playing the Kathleen Turner glamour woman doesn’t resonate with me at all. And, actually, I’m relieved not to be in the goddess woman category. It’s so exhausting. I would hate to spend $1,000 on my looks every month.”

After a short stint on an improv series called “Off the Wall,” Stevenson got her first big break as star of the syndicated series “My Talk Show” and had some memorable guest roles on “Cheers” as a woman obsessively in love with Norm.

That led to “The Player” and the promise of more film roles, which she walked away from to take the part on “Bob.” “My friends all think I’m nuts,” she says, “because everybody I know wants to be in films. But what I’ve always wanted was to do a TV show. I was a total TV head when I was growing up. I was influenced heavily by Mary Tyler Moore, and “That Girl” is what I always wanted to be.”

BEN STILLER

It has been two years--two solid years--since Ben Stiller started developing his own show for Fox Broadcasting. So why, you might well ask, is “The Ben Stiller Show” one of the very few network fall offerings that hasn’t yet completed a pilot episode, with nothing to show critics, advertisers or affiliates other than some of the short parody films that will make up the heart of the show.

Here’s a clue: It is Wednesday afternoon, barely three weeks before the show is supposed to go on the air and executive producer Judd Apatow has just walked into Stiller’s office with some loose sheets of paper.

“How’s this for a format?” Apatow asks, showing Stiller a mock-up script. “Can you work with this?”

“What can I tell you,” Stiller, 26, says, turning to his visitor after Apatow leaves, his shrug an acknowledgment that it might be just a little late to be deciding what kind of scripts to use. “We’re still evolving. But I hope it doesn’t come off that we’re disorganized. It’s just that we’ve made some changes.”

There was a time--long about a week before, actually--when Stiller’s series was going to be about a guy who does a talk show from his apartment, where all his friends keep wandering in and out and he shows these funny little film parodies, like what if Eddie Munster were the psycho in “Cape Fear” or “Cops” went back to the days of the Salem Witch Hunts or Tom Cruise put together a one-man Broadway show?

“The films have stayed,” he says, “but the apartment just got demolished.” Now, Stiller will talk to the camera from a studio backlot, introduce the films and pretty much get out of the way, which is what he had in mind when this whole thing started two years ago.

With a background as a serious stage actor, Stiller looks beyond the television show toward the day when he can write and direct his own films. He’s already got two scripts in development at major studios. But first he has to survive the perils of getting his show on the air. It hasn’t been easy.

“I had to sit in a focus group room for four hours behind a two-way mirror and watch people talk about my show and me, which is the weirdest thing you could ever experience,” he says. “I found all my childhood insecurities starting to come back.”

If his name sounds familiar, it’s because Ben is the son of comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, lineage he neither dwells on nor avoids. “Our styles are so different and we deal in such different territory,” he says, asked if their fame has ever been a burden. “It’s not like I’m starting a stand-up comedy team with my wife.