The New Yorker Radio Hour - Connor Ratliff Talks with Sarah Larson, Plus Chef Bryant Terry

Episode Date: March 29, 2022

An aspiring actor named Connor Ratliff thought he had it made when he got a small part on the 2001 miniseries “Band of Brothers,” in an episode directed by Hollywood legend Tom Hanks. The day before shooting his scene, Ratliff was unceremoniously fired by Hanks, who said the rookie had “dead eyes.” It was a life-altering disappointment for Ratliff. He told Sarah Larson how he came to launch the podcast “Dead Eyes,” which explores failure as a universal part of life—in show business and beyond. When Ratliff was able to land Tom Hanks as a guest on the show, fans thought their interview would bring “Dead Eyes” to a close. But Ratliff has other ideas. Plus, Helen Rosner talks with the cookbook author and food-justice activist Bryant Terry about uplifting diverse traditions in Black cooking and reclaiming veganism from white hipsters. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Failure is just a part of life, an experience to learn from, as we're told constantly by everyone from school teachers to management consultants. We have our disappointments and embarrassments, and most of us try to learn from them and put them behind us somehow. But some of us, some of us make podcasts. out of them. And failure, one particular failure, is what Connor Ratliff's dead eyes is all about. Staff writer Sarah Larson writes about podcasts for The New Yorker, and she spoke with Conner Ratliff last week. Connor Ratliff is a brilliant and funny comedic performer and actor who's beloved in the improv world and among

his fellow performers. Like, a lot of the funniest people we've enjoyed on TV and in movies in the last few years think Conner's one of the funniest people they know. So if he's so great and beloved, why doesn't everybody know who he is? There was one point I was approached by an agent or a manager. I don't even remember which they were. He said, what's your story? Why? How come you don't have representation?

And I said, well, because I have no interest in working in show business. I don't like it. What could make someone who loves performing and who's so good at it stop performing? It all begins with Tom Hanks. I'm a huge Tom Hanks fan and always have been. I was the kid in high school that when people would talk about, you know, this Tom Hanks movie or that Tom Hanks movie, I'd be like, but do you remember his episodes on family ties? Like, those are really good.

So you can imagine how excited Connor was when not long after he got out of acting school, he was cast in a small role in the 2001 HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, created by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. And then the news got even better because I found out that Tom Hanks is going to be directing episode five, which is the episode that I was supposed to be in. So it just kept getting better and better. I was thinking this is such a great start. Things are going to start working out for me now because I'm in this Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, HBO, prestige production. And then the day before I was supposed to film my scene, I had already had my haircut, my costume fitting. Everything was ready to go.

I get a frantic call from someone in my agent's office. and they delivered me this message. Tom Hanks has looked at your audition tape, and he's having second thoughts. He thinks you have dead eyes. And so I got on a train, and the whole time thinking, what do I do? How do I, I'm going to have to re-audition in person for Tom Hanks,

and knowing that he thinks I have dead eyes. And there's very little I can do about it. I get to have a few light of bass. I wait. I hear Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks arrived. And I read the scene for him, and then it was over. And he was very nice, but then a few minutes later they said, we've decided to go another

way. It's one thing to get fired. Lots of people get fired. We've all had our disappointments. It's another thing to get fired by the Oscar-winning American treasure, Tom Hanks. And to hear that he thinks you have dead eyes. What does that even mean? It sounds terrible.

It's like hearing you have a dead soul. did not take it well. I wouldn't have either. He started to doubt whether he had what it took to make it as an actor. And you're sort of like, this is, this is not what I want my life to be. So Connor's doing great now, but his path to where he is was circuitous. It involved quitting acting, 10 years working at Barnes & Noble and Union Square, doing improv at UCB, the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, and playing a dollar bill in a White Castle commercial. Today I stand in this $3 bill for value, for variety, for freedom. Introducing White Castle's $3.3 freedom to choose.

Throughout it all, he was still haunted by the fact that Tom Hanks had fired him for having dead eyes. So he did what any comedian would do. He started a podcast. This is Dead Eyes. a podcast about one actor's quest to find out why Tom Hanks fired him from a small role in the 2001 HBO miniseries Band of Brothers. So what was the pitch that you were giving to podcast companies at the time? I mean, the pitch was like, we'll treat it like a true crime podcast.

We'll act like, we'll just take it really seriously. And comedically, it will be the most narcissistic podcast in the world, you know, an actor trying to find out like, why did this thing happen to me? But we'll use that as a way of like pivoting to other people's stories. So we use sort of like commuting narcissism, but then genuine like empathy. And I could also talk to anybody famous that I knew who might be interesting because I knew I would get to their stories of failure and disappointment. You're kind of like, am I doing anything right? I'm 48 years old.

Like I've been doing this more than I haven't in my life. at this point. But when you're younger and something like this happens, I had it happen to me 15 times with pilots to the point where Les Moonvis at CBS had told my agents to stop sending me in because, and I quote, John Hamm will never be a television star. Wow. What did you feel like when you heard that? Not great. And then you started to what did I do in the room? I mean, one of the great strengths of the show, I think, is obviously the breadth and depth of people you talk to and hearing the stories of all these little moments of triumph and failure in various

people's careers and things they tried to do that didn't work out or a dream they had that didn't come to pass. And it humanizes everyone. And it reminds you that there are all these stories behind, you know, the TV and movies that you love that are just stories of creative misfires and, you know, all the things that we all go through that we all go through that we we just don't hear about. Did you, how did you know about your potential guests, um, professional disappointments that they may have had? Did you just assume everyone had them? I assume that everyone had them. We've, we've all heard people complaining about how they didn't, things didn't go their way. And I think the fact that my approach to it is not that I'm saying

it's no big deal, but I'm saying like, it's funny and we should put it in perspective. Yeah. It's a universal enough thing. The number of emails that I've gotten from people who have no connection to show business who are like, this is just like what it's like to work in my office. Like, I'm not being listened to. Or they're making a decision that makes no sense, you know? Or this thing happened and it's bad for me, but it's good for the store or something, you know? Well, everybody has vulnerability and everybody has professional, you know, things that you hope for, try for, are disappointed by, aren't good

You know, all that stuff. Yeah. And I think that for non-actors, like me and many other listeners, the idea of your body coming into it in such a direct way, what you happen to look like, you know, what you do with what you happen to look like, that being part of whether you get work or not, and the kind of work you get is just horrifying. Yeah. So it's heightened, I think, for a lot of listeners. And maybe we feel some relief and satisfaction that we are not on TV or trying to be an actor. You know, there's something that's... Yeah.

Oh, my God, I just remembered this moment from the Freaks and Geeks Guys episode where Judd Apatow is telling that story about auditioning for Jim Henson. I auditioned and I got a call where they said, Jim Henson doesn't want you, but he would like to buy your ideas. Jim Henson said that he thought you lacked warmth. And it knocked me out to this day. The most devastating thing you can imagine. And also, he doesn't lack warmth. I mean, we all know this. Anyone who's ever seen Jed Appetown knows that that's what's great about his work,

is his warmth and his generosity. But to hear that as a young struggling. If Jim Henson had lived to the year 2015, he would have had an experience with Judd Apatow. They probably would have worked together. Judat Appetal probably would have produced a Muppet movie, you know? Like they would have been able to hash it out. But because it happened and then Jim Henson is tragically taken from us,

he never gets anything close to closure. He just has to live with that note, you know. So I assume that kind of closure was what you were hoping to get from Tom Hanks. I mean, there were a lot of things. I think, of course, the premise sounds like the most entitled thing in the world. It's just like this, I was wronged and I must have a personal public sit down, which I think anyone who's listened to even one episode of it knows that like I never felt like, well, I deserve and am therefore entitled to a sit down with Tom Hanks. Right. One of the goals of the podcast, it wasn't just I wanted to harangue him into being on it.

I wanted to make a podcast that was good enough that it would make sense that he might want to come on it. And that he might have a good time being on it. So from the very first episode of Dead Eyes, Conner's been hoping to get Tom Hanks on the show. We got to get Hanks on this. I cannot wait for you guys to bury the hatchet and become old friends. What I would like to do, ideally, is to get a chance to re-audition for him. Or even just have him look at my reel. Maybe that would be less nerve-wracking for me if I could just show him my reel and be like, look, this is...

You think these are dead eyes, but... A handful of shows, you know. Getting Tom Hanks' attention is not as easy as you might imagine. I sent a typewritten letter to his production offices. Because he's a huge fan of old typewriters, and he has a huge collection, yeah. He loves typewriters. I don't know this for certain, but I think, I'm pretty sure Colin vouched for it as like, this is a good podcast. Yeah.

So you have friends in common with Colin Hanks. Yeah. He's done a lot of, you know, comedy podcasts with people that I'm friends with. And so. It seemed like the path was two of his, of Tom Hanks' kids, Colin and. Elizabeth. Yeah. Listen to the, learned of your podcast, listened to it on their own and liked it.

Yeah. And told him about. it and he was initially skeptical. They're like, no, it's good. And then... Yeah. So I got this email. This is what the email said.

Connor, not sure how to volunteer my services to you, but joining you on your podcast would be a pleasure. Tom. And then below that it says, T. Hanks. And then I'm like, is this the email or is this someone pranking me? Like, it was really hard to know. So we verified it. So then I emailed Tom back the next morning.

And then we're just emailing back and forth figuring out, like, when do we want to? I was like, would you be comfortable meeting in person? So you should listen to the whole episode. It's beautiful. And I won't spoil it for you. But suffice to say, the Dead Eyes incident was not as memorable to Tom as it was to Connor. Does any of this ring a bell? Not a single moment of this rings.

A bell. Two moments in that episode that really stick out. One is when I talk about him being a two-time Academy Award winner, and he says, well, those days were long over by the time. That was crazy. Yeah. But he's talking about the 80s. But just the idea that by that point, he was no longer, yeah, that he was no longer winning

Oscars every year. Right. And that it was a slight source of even whimsical insecurity was very interesting. Because I'm like, oh, everybody has that feeling of like, well, I'm. Have I peaked or is there something different or are people not, you know? Yeah. The other moment that I didn't even notice until we were listening to the tapes and editing through them and it was pointed out the moment where I talk about how it was, how excited

I was that I was going to be directed by one of my favorite actors. And then Tom Hager's response is he goes, bang. He makes the noise, the Boeing noise. He goes, boing. I asked them, I said, can you isolate that sound and send it to me? Hold on. I have it here. Hold on.

I'm going to play it. This is, like, if I take nothing else from this experience, I take this noise. Boing. It is, that is so funny to me. Boing. I'll spend the rest of my life unpacking that. Boing. Season four, the Boeing.

What did it mean? So this leads me to another question, the obvious question, which is, is this the end? You know, are you thinking about a fourth season? Well, for people who are thinking this is the perfect ending, it is an ending. And for anyone who wants it to be like the forever end and I disappear forever, you can just not pay attention if I ever do anything else. Like, it's certainly the end of it as an investigative pot. Like, my band of brother's story doesn't have any, like I don't have any other investigating to do.

But I think there will be other versions of this that will have more freedom to do the thing that always felt a little bit like we were cheating or being tricky when we'd be like, this episode's going to be about this other thing. Because a lot of people are like, I'm so sad that it's over. And we haven't announced that it's over.

Like it's like the number of people who have announced that the podcast is over without me saying that it's over. has been very funny to me. Everyone's firing you now. Connor Ratliff's podcast, Dead Eyes, just wrapped up its third season, and you can read more from Sarah Larson

at New Yorker.com. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Helen Rosner is a food expert for the New Yorker, and one of her favorite things to do is to get together with another pro,

a writer or a chef, and find something new to cook. Fennel and citrus. And during the pandemic, before it was really safe to go into other people's homes or kitchens, Helen got pretty creative. I'm Helen Rosner. I'm a staff writer at The New Yorker,

and I am standing in my Brooklyn kitchen right now in front of a cutting board with a pile of fennel, parsley, vinegar, a couple of bags of plantain chips. There's a lot of really, cool, interesting stuff here in front of me. And the most important thing in front of me is my phone, which is currently in the middle of a FaceTime call with the chef, Bryant, Terry. Hey, Helen. Hey, Helen. Hey, Helen. The author of the cookbook, Vegetable Kingdom, which is one of my favorite books of the year. Helen Rosner talked with Brian Terry in 2020. And we're going to

make a recipe for, in the book, it's citrus and garlic herb-raised fennel. And Bryant is in his kitchen, in Oakland, California. Hey, Bryant. Hey, Helen. I'm here in my backyard in Oakland, ready to cook. I don't know. Tell me what goes into this recipe. It looks like there's a couple of different parts here.

Yeah, so the cornerstone of the recipe is actually the moho, which is a kind of citrus and garlic condiment or marinade that's using Cuban cooking, oftentimes a marinade meat. And I thought that it would be fun to take. fennel bulbs and give them a nice sear to give them some color and a little crisp on the outside and then base them in this moho in a similar way that one might baste a turkey. Cool. So we should do that part first, right? We should make the sauce. So yeah, the sauce should be made first because you want to let it rest for an hour so that the flavors can concentrate and marry and that's going to set you up. And I bet that really makes the garlic just get super garlicy too, right? Right. Just like a garlic explosion.

You had a garlic explosion. I'm going to just start measuring out the orange juice and the lime juice and stuff while you talk to me about the recipe, okay? Okay. Okay, cool. So you've been doing this stuff for a long time. Have you always known that you were going to be a cookbook author? How did you come to this? You know, I didn't. I thought I was going to be a professor. and when I was a grad student at NYU, I started doing more research on the Black Panther Party

and their survival programs. And I think they were so cutting edge in their analysis and understanding this intersection of poverty, malnutrition, and institutional racism back in the late 60s. So their grocery giveaways and their free breakfast for children program

really excited me to do my part in creating a more healthy and sustainable food system. So you mind if I'm not, give you some cooking tips as you're cooking. Okay. When you're working with citrus, a lot of people don't realize that you can actually get a lot more juice from your orange, lime, lemon. If you actually take the fruit and then roll it with the palm of your hand back and forth for about 15 to 20 seconds because that starts to break down the constitution of it. And so you'll get more,

it'll yield more juice. And a thing that I learned the hard way early in my cooking life, is that if you're going to zest something and juice something, you always need to zest it first. Yes, that's a great point. You definitely want to zest it first. You know, Brian, while you were talking just now, I was using your rolling out the citrus technique on some of the limes that I was about to juice.

Hold on, I'm going to try this again. It was amazing. It was like Niagara Falls coming out of this lime. Yes, that's crazy. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. changed the game for me. This is amazing. It works well. All right, let's do the fennel. So we talked a little bit about fennel, but I was so struck by one of the phrases that you use to describe your

approach to fennel, you talk about blackifying it and that you want to bring to food, like this sense of your blackness and the blackness of the context of your culture and use this like very beautiful phrase, your blood and spiritual ancestors, which I think is such a movement. way of talking about like the communities that we arise from. Has it always been kind of a conscious choice for you to to blackify food? I feel like more than blackifying it, my approach has been about uplifting black food. And, you know, that started when I was in culinary school. And I was just really, I won't say put off, but it was disappointing. that there was such an emphasis on classical French and classical Italian techniques.

And one of the things I feel like I've been fighting since I started this work is pushing back against the kind of reductive ways in which people imagine, think about, talk about black food. And I think so often when people think about black food, what they're thinking about are two different things. And sometimes they're kind of playing with each other. But one is antebellum survival food. I can tell you how many times I've heard people kind of like vilify African American cuisine and kind of reducing it to what they call slave food. You know, whatever the plantation owners didn't want, the scraps, the remnants of, you know, the vegetables or the animal visceral, whatever it is.

Like that's the stuff that was discarded and we just had to like eat it and make do. Why will we want to eat that? So there is that line of thinking. And then the other one is people reduce. African American cuisine to soul food, which in my mind are the kind of big flavored meats and, you know, fatty desserts and overcooked vegetables that you might find at, you know, soul food restaurants. But in terms of like the kind of core, the traditional staples of African American cuisine, we're talking about things like black eyed peas, sugar snap peas, pole beans,

lima beans, you know, dark leafy greens like collards, mousards, turnips, kale, dandelion, And so one of my major projects has been kind of helping people reimagine black food in all its diversity and complexity. And how does this connect to the fact that your recipes are vegan and that the cooking that you're doing is plant-based? Does that come from a similar politics? Yeah. Well, you know, in terms of the way that most people imagine veganism, they're either thinking

about like upper middle class white suburbanites or kind of. of like young white hipsters who are living in, you know, urban centers, right? Like veganism is like an aesthetic rather than a politic. It's an aesthetic. It's something that white people own. And I think it's important that people understand that there's a history of black food and health-led activism throughout the 20th century. And my first contact with the idea of vegetarianism came from black seven-day Adventist.

And then after I read Malcolm X and was obsessed with the nation of Islam, I learned about the Honorable Elijah Muhammad in his health ministry, wrote two books, How to Eat to Live, which was his way of helping black folks think about eating more healthfully. You know, I think about Dick Gregory, the comedian and social justice activists and his emphasis on food. I mean, the thing that politicized me was a hip-hop song about factory farming called Beef by the rapper KRS One from the group Boogie Down production. Beef, what a relief.

When will this poison this product cease. This is another. public service announcement. You can believe it or you can doubt it. Let us begin now with the cow. The way it gets to your plate and how. And so, you know, black people are suffering from the highest rates of preventable diet-related illnesses.

Heart disease, hypertension, type two diabetes. I would argue that we needn't look any further than our own cultural cuisine in order to find better health. I love that. So you have all your vinegars, your citrus in there? Yep. All my citrus is in there. I think it's garlic time.

could I use like a microplane or graded or something like that? You know, you could. I've never... You're allowed to say no, you know? I think that was a tone of voice that implied to me that you think it's a bad idea. No, I just hadn't thought about it, but... And we're going to let that intensify while everything else happens. I love, I love fennel.

I'm like super obsessed with fennel, and I don't really love black licorish. I just want to take a bite out of it. You know what? Let me do that too. I don't even know if I've ever even attempted to take like a full-on this is kind of like an apple bite. I'm going to do this in Berkeley and they're going to think I'm a god. I'm going to start me a cult, the cult of eating fennel raw.

So in Vegetable Kingdom, you assign a track to each recipe. Each recipe has a song and you've got this gorgeous playlist at the beginning of the book that puts them all together. And the song that goes with this recipe is AfroQ, parentheses, Bembe, by Mongo Santa Maria, from the album, What Do You Mean? So what is it about this song that you particularly like? Just the African rhythms. If I close my eyes, I just feel like I'm being transported back to New Orleans to Havana, to

Lagos. It's all about the African rhythms. What a pan should I use for this? It would be good to go. That cassarine skillet is exactly where you want to be. So I'm gonna... Oh yeah. You hear that sizzle? Okay, so I've warmed the sauce and skillet. I have nestled beautifully in my golden pieces of fennel.

And now we're gonna let them braze. This is where the magic happens, right? All right. Let's take it right. Oh my god. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I'm obviously over here thinking that this is the bomb.

What do you think? This is the bomb. This is totally the bomb. That is the technical term, I think, for the stuff. Brian Terry's most recent book is Black Food, and he spoke with the New Yorkers, Helen Rosner. Now, full disclosure, we skipped a few steps as they were making that dish, and I guess you may have suspected as much.

And if you want to try the brazed fennel-in-citrous mojo, you can find every single one of the steps at New York. Thank you, nukerradio.org. Helen Rosner will be back on the show in a couple of weeks after spending some time in the kitchen with Andy Baragani of Bon Appetit. I'm David Remnick. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Ave Carrillo, Brita Green, Callalia, David Krasnow,

Gophane and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Harrison Keithline, and Meng Faye Chen, and guidance from Emily Boutin. Original music in this week's show was composed by Alex Barron. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.