Playing with the big guys

Sean HAYES has barely had a chance to sit down in the comfy lounge area of the Four Seasons Hotel when a man nervously approaches him.

“Can I have your autograph?” he shyly asks the 37-year-old actor.

When Hayes good-naturedly tells him yes, the man quickly grabs a piece of paper from a nearby table, dashes to the front desk for a pen and puts both on the table in front of Hayes.

“What’s your name?” Hayes asks.

“Barry,” he tells Hayes. “I’m so nervous.”

Barry, a real estate agent from Arizona, has been a fan of Hayes since even before his Emmy-winning turn as the flamboyantly self-absorbed yet sweet Jack McFarland on “Will & Grace.” He first saw him in the acclaimed 1998 gay comedy “Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss.”

“It’s completely nice,” says Hayes about being approached by fans. “I always equate it with people hanging out backstage after you do a play. That’s what it feels like to me.”

“Sean’s a terrific guy,” says Rob Reiner, who directed Hayes in the new comedy-drama “The Bucket List,” in which Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman portray two men dying of cancer who meet when sharing a hospital room. The two men decide to write a list of things they want to do in their final days.

Hayes plays Matthew, the efficient assistant to Nicholson’s uber-rich Edward. The two have a mutual respect but also are quick with the barbs (Edward dismissively refers to Matthew as “Thomas” throughout the film, as if he can’t remember his real name). At one point, Matthew tells Edward he’s proud of him. Edward’s response? “No one cares what you think!”

Hayes and Nicholson, says Reiner, hit it off from Day One. “In the first reading of the script around the table, at one point, Sean was talking and Jack said, ‘No one cares what you think.’ It was so funny, we just threw it in at that point. They were both free to say what they wanted.”

“Once I saw Jack [ad-libbing], I went up to Rob first and then we went up to Jack and we all worked together,” says Hayes. “Everything in life is about approach.”

Of course, working with Nicholson and Freeman was a bit intimidating initially for Hayes. “It’s always weird the first day you show up at work and you don’t know anybody,” he says. “In this particular business you don’t have time to get to know people before you jump in and start working.

“Our ‘hello’ was ‘action.’ There was no chitchat, which I completely admire and love. It should only be about the work.”

Hayes pauses and then rephrases his answer. “I love chitchatting and getting to know people. I have to be careful with you people.”

Though Hayes is friendly, his comment does make him seem a bit gun-shy around journalists.

During one point in the production, Reiner recalls, there was a piano on the set. And while everybody was waiting for the lighting to be finished for the scene, Hayes, a classically trained pianist, sat down and started playing.

“He had his back to the whole crew and didn’t realize anybody was listening,” says Reiner. “But by the end of it, the whole place was just mesmerized by how great the playing was.” And, Reiner says, he brings that quality to his acting. “He has perfect pitch. He is like a studio musician who comes in and looks at the notes that you have to play. He hit the perfect tone when he came in for his reading. He didn’t undercut the seriousness of the subject, but he also understood there had to be humor.”

Hayes says his years of training on the piano have helped him with his acting. The two disciplines, he points out, “have been compared many times -- the art and creativity of music and the creativity of acting -- because there are beats and pauses, especially in comedy. The tone of your voice is musical.”

He compares Freeman to Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.” “You can be as simple and sustainable as that piece in your vocal tone when you are acting. He doesn’t need anything but to use his voice to act. But then you can be a Rossini overture, like Robin Williams, which is just all over the place. Jack is definitely Mahler. He is both comedy and melodic. He is one of the few who can do both.”

And whom does Hayes compare himself to?

“What am I? I don’t know. Any answer is going to sound pretentious, so I’ll leave it at that.”

susan.king@latimes.com