Tag Archives: Dave Foley

Spun Out lands high card with Jennifer Tilly

It takes a lot to get Jennifer Tilly away from the poker table. A love for the game turned into a full-on obsession after meeting her boyfriend—professional poker player Phil Laak—and tournaments fill her calendar, leaving little time to act.

Unless an old friend like Dave Foley comes calling.

“I have a lot of things going on in my life and my agents asked about this, assuming I’d say no, and I went, ‘Dave Foley! I want to see him again!'” Tilly appears in Tuesday’s new episode of Spun Out—”The Secret of My Ex-Wife’s Success”—as Maggie Felgate, one of Dave Lyons’ exes. As Tilly tells it, Maggie and Dave are still carrying a bit of a torch for each other … until Maggie poaches one of Dave’s clients to start her own PR firm.

Tilly says the allure of reuniting with Foley and the chance to visit her sister, Meg, in Toronto were both big reasons for her to agree to the role, as well as the writing. At this point in her career, she reveals, a role has to be interesting, fun, creatively fulfilling or all three to grab her attention.

“If someone had told me back when I was obsessed with acting that I’d be obsessed with poker, I have thought they were crazy,” she says with a laugh. Tilly has made a career out of signing on to interesting projects, whether it be voice work on Family Guy and The Simpsons, crime thriller Bound, cop drama Hill Street Blues or playing the girlfriend to a murderous doll in Bride of Chucky. But the malevolent child’s toy is no match for the truly scary stuff Tilly sees in Hollywood.

“A lot of Hollywood people are trying to play younger and get all shot up with Botox and have this and that done,” she says with a twinge of sadness. “I don’t want to be one of those people with the huge Botox vein.”

“I was watching a movie recently and this woman looked like she hadn’t aged in 20 years. And she started to cry. I could tell she was crying because the tears were rolling down her face, but her hairline was just twitching a little bit. It was the most horrifying thing I ever saw.”

Spun Out airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on CTV.

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Interview: Spun Out’s Dave Foley angles for Orphan Black role

Orphan Black is a critical darling with die-hard fans who love every twist, turn and clone the writers throw onto the small screen. Why am I mentioning this in a story about Dave Foley and Season 2 of Spun Out? Because Foley is a major fan of OB … so much so he busted onto the set to meet its leading lady.

“I love Orphan Black. I think it’s fantastic,” Foley told TV, eh? during a set visit last year. “I’d love to be a guest star. I went over there and barged into their set to say hi to Tatiana Maslany. I hoped that if I stood around long enough that somebody would say, ‘Hey, you’d be pretty good. We already killed Frewer, we’ve got room for another old comedian.'”

The veteran member of The Kids in the Hall—who continue their reunion tour later this year—had plenty to say about the difficulties of making comedy for the small screen, upcoming guest star Jennifer Tilly (who’s been a friend of Foley’s since The Wrong Guy) and his love of Doctor Who.

How involved have you been in the writing on Spun Out in Season 2?
Dave Foley: I have been involved off and on as I’ve been needed as an extra hand. It’s part of what I’ve been doing for 30 years, so it’s a skill that I can bring to the show and help out whenever I can.

Jennifer Tilly is guest-starring in an episode as your ex-wife. What can you tell me about her character?
Jennifer plays an ex-wife that I’m still very fond of and she’s decided to start a rival PR company and I give her advice on how to do that. And she immediately turns around and poaches a huge client from DLPR. Dave has to go out and assert his dominance as a professional.

You’ve known Jennifer for a long time. You co-starred in The Wrong Guy in 1997.
It feels like only yesterday. I really like that movie and I was really proud of it. It was a lot of fun working with Jen on it and we’ve been friends ever since. People still come up to me and quote me lines from it. I know it was a bit of a cult movie with comedy writers in L.A. even before we made it because the script was travelling around town.

That was the first movie I ever saw Colm Feore in.
Really? His best work, really. He hadn’t done anything before and has gone back to doing nothing since then. [Laughs.]

Did you come to the table with any creative ideas for Season 2 of Spun Out?
No, God no. I let them do that. I don’t like to think too far ahead on character or anything like that. Give me some situations and some things to play with. Everyone on this show is so good, I don’t need to tell them anything. I’d rather sit back and listen.

Many people have said that making comedy is difficult. Where do you stand on that?
I don’t know if it’s more difficult. I think it’s just easier to see it when it’s bad. You really know when you’re watching bad comedy because you’re not laughing. When you’re watching bad drama, you can think ‘Maybe it’s my fault. Maybe I’m not getting it.’ You have to reflect on whether it was bad or not. In comedy, you know it in your gut as soon as you hear it.

Do you watch a lot of TV?
I watch a lot of hockey and a lot of science programming and science fiction.

What science fiction do you watch?
I love Orphan Black. I think it’s fantastic. I’d love to be a guest star. I went over there and barged into their set to say hi to Tatiana Maslany. I hoped that if I stood around long enough that somebody would say, ‘Hey, you’d be pretty good. We already killed Frewer, we’ve got room for another old comedian.’

I love Doctor Who, The Strain.

What do you think of Peter Capaldi as The Doctor?
I love him. For me, he’s a bit of a return to the older show … Tom Baker, Jon Pertwee … where it wasn’t being sexy and quirky. I love the sexy and quirky Doctors and thought they brought a youthful energy, but the Doctor is supposed to be anything, so it’s good to have a Doctor that’s a little bit older. Maybe the next Doctor will be one of colour or a woman. That’s the magic of the character.

Spun Out airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET on CTV.

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Review: Russell Peters highlights Spun Out’s return

Better late than never. Five months after Spun Out was supposed to debut on CTV immediately following the Super Bowl, Dave Foley’s Canadian sitcom returned to the air. There’s been a lot written about the reason for the delay—co-star J.P. Manoux’s arrest—and the resulting burn-off of the sophomore sitcom over the summer months that was announced just two days ago.

Manoux grabbed a lot of headlines, but changes occurred on the show too. The first season was filmed in front of a live audience, but this second go-round jettisoned that. With a new way of filming and high-profile guest star Russell Peters dropping by, how did Episode 1 of Season 2 of Spun Out fare?

Written by Fraser Young and Nick Beaton and directed by Dave Foley, Peters brought great energy to “My Brother’s Speaker,” playing Ray, Nelson’s (Al Mukadam) DJ brother.

It didn’t take long to discern there was no love lost between Ray and Beckett (Paul Campbell) thanks to an arm bar and a chirp about living in your parents’ basement (“Remember your parents basement from this morning because you just left there because you still live there?”). But rather than fall back on an easy back-and-forth, episode long feud between Ray and Beckett, it was Nelson who ended up angry with Ray after he’d arranged for a DJ showcase and Ray didn’t bother to show up. The reason? Not because Ray was a jerk, but because he had a day job he was ashamed of.

Holly Deveaux—who I really enjoyed in Season 1—was given a lot more to do as Abby on Tuesday night, fully involved in a storyline where she and Stephanie (Rebecca Dalton) thought they were being hustled at poker by Bryce (Manoux) and Gordon (Darcy Michael). Stephanie was a portrayed as a vacuous blonde in Season 1 and it looks like the writers have backed off on that a bit, which is a welcome change. (Michael continues to be a bright spot too; his out-there comments as Gordon always make me laugh, though I wonder what skills he has to stay employed at DLPR.)

My biggest pet peeve about this new season of Spun Out is going to be the canned laugh track. Rather than just letting the jokes stand on their own merit, punchlines are juiced in post, something I hate because it assumes the audience doesn’t know when to laugh. Spun Out certainly isn’t the first show to do this, but I don’t think it’s needed.

What did you guys think? Comment below or via @tv_eh.

Spun Out airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on CTV.

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