Jason Alexander, best known for playing George Constanza on the iconic sitcom Seinfeld, has revealed that he initially auditioned for the character with a Woody Allen impression.
Most die-hard fans of Seinfeld know that the beloved character George Constanza, played by Jason Alexander, is loosely based on the show’s head writer and showrunner, Larry David. But Alexander himself had no idea until around the end of Season 1/the beginning of Season 2.
An old clip of Alexander on The Howard Stern Show has recently resurfaced online and Alexander recalls how he leant that Geroge was actually a fictionalised version of David.
“Well, we ran into an early episode where nothing made sense to me; the situation seemed ludicrous… I wish I could remember the episode because it was in the first eight, nine, ten of them but I remember we did the table read and I went to Larry [David] and said, ‘Larry, please help me. This would never happen to anybody. But if it did, no one on the planet would react like this’.”
Jason Alexander
“And he said, ‘Oh, what are you talking about? This happened to me, that’s exactly what I did!’ And I went, ‘Oh!’ and then the bells went off. I’m like, ‘Oh, oh, okay’ and then I just started really observing him and trying to pull as much of him into me as I could.”
WATCH: Jason Alexander talks about ‘Seinfeld’ and how he auditioned for George…
As Alexander didn’t know George was essentially David, when he first auditioned for the Seinfeld character, rather than impersonating David, he decided to mimic someone else entirely: Woody Allen.
“All I had was a couple of pages of the script, which read like a Woody Allen film. I had no context for it, so hence, I did the glasses and I did, you know, a blatant, as blatant a Woody Allen as I could do.”
Jason Alexander
Alexander also talked about with Howard Stern how various other actors were considered for, and even offered, the role of George before he was. For instance, Larry Miller, Brad Hall, David Allen Greer, Nathan Lane, Steve Buscemi, Paul Shaffer, Danny DeVito and Chris Rock were reportedly all considered for George.
Thankfully, David, Jerry Seinfeld and NBC obviously liked the Woody Allen impression as Alexander was cast as George – and it’s seriously unimaginable to think of anyone other than Alexander playing good ol’ Biff, T-Bone, KoKo AKA George Constanza: Lord of the Idiots.
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