People: Still scaring up work with King
Steven Weber says he’s been “a horror genre junkie” since he was a kid watching scary stuff on television between his fingers.
So being cast in “Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King” was a dream job that marks yet another appearance of his in a King project.
The four-week anthology series, based on eight stories by the prolific writer, premieres Wednesday at 9 p.m. on TNT with an episode titled “Battleground,” starring William Hurt as a professional hit man battling toys. A second episode follows at 10.
Weber’s episode is the final one, “You Know They Got a Hell of a Band,” airing Aug 2 at 10 p.m. He co-stars with Kim Delaney as a couple on a road trip who find themselves in a small town called Rock ‘n Roll Heaven where the denizens look and sound eerily familiar.
“I think this particular story has to do with pop culture and people’s addiction to it, and how underneath there is something nefarious and something unhealthy about people ingesting pop culture to such a point … but on the surface it’s just another great Stephen King horror ditty,” says Weber.
He has worked on three previous King projects. Weber starred in two miniseries – “The Shining” in 1997 and “Desperation” in May – and adapted, directed and acted in a King short story, “Revelations of Becka Paulson,” for “The Outer Limits” in 1997.
Never inclined to speak seriously about anything for too long, the 45-year-old Weber says he likes the “fun and unexpected” aspect of King’s work, the ultimate expression of a kind of storytelling he was drawn to as a child.
He recalls his father giving him a book, “Bad Guys,” full of stills of early horror movies that excited his interest in actors such as Lon Chaney Sr., Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.
He used an old professional greasepaint kit to “try to be the ‘Werewolf of London’ … and I’d use my mother’s cold cream to flatten down my hair and make a widow’s peak, and I fashioned fangs out of toothpicks. So I was pretty obsessed with that stuff.”
Born to showbiz parents, Weber was raised in New York and started acting in commercials as a kid. He now lives in Los Angeles with wife Juliette, an interior designer, and their two sons Jack, 5, and Alfie, 3.
He became known as the irreverent, indolent pilot Brian Hackett in the 1990s sitcom “Wings” and later starred in two short-lived series, the sitcom “Cursed” (renamed “The Weber Show”) and the drama “The D.A.”
Weber next will portray a TV network chairman in “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” a new fall NBC series (created by Aaron Sorkin of “The West Wing”) that exposes the behind-the-scenes drama of a fictional TV variety show.
“During a scene in the pilot I had to walk though a lot of background actors and they were either directed to be afraid of me, or they just were. Because it was like the seas parted and they were flinching.
“It was really empowering,” he adds with a laugh.
The birthday bunch
“Mr. Wizard” Don Herbert is 89. Actor Ron Glass (“Barney Miller”) is 61. Singer Arlo Guthrie is 59. Banjo player Bela Fleck is 48. Singer Gary LeVox (Rascal Flatts) is 36. Actor Adrian Grenier (“Entourage”) is 30. Singer Jessica Simpson is 26.