David Krumholtz has been around the acting block for a long time now, from playing Bernard in first two The Santa Clause movies and the follow-up series The Santa Clauses, to his time as Charlie Eppes on Numb3rs, to most recently portraying physicist Isidor Isaac Rabbi in Oppenheimer. So naturally he’s been to a lot of auditions during his career, but one takes the cake when it comes to the worst. Krumholtz detailed what went wrong when he auditioned for a movie more than a decade ago, and it involved Josh Gad and someone he described as a “70 year old Super Mario look-alike.”
Krumholtz detailed his “worst audition experience ever” in an X thread, sharing that trying out for the Kevin Smith-directed movie Cop Out was a “nightmare” and “unreal,” and that Josh Gad was there too. Per The Deuce alum, he and Gad were the last two actors to audition, having waited two hours to perform two scenes. By the time the casting director came out, there was “no time left,” so Krumholtz and Gad could “only do one of the scenes, once. No notes. No 2nd take.” That was fine enough for Krumholtz, but when he walked into the room where Smith greeted him, he noticed this Mario look-alike who didn’t introduce himself, which then led to the following:
I begin. 3 lines into the scene, Old Mario’s cellphone rings. LOUD. Very LOUD. I stop. I can’t concentrate. Kevin Smith & the casting director tell me to keep going. The phone is still ringing and old Mario is desperately fumbling it, has no idea how to turn it off. “Keep going.” I kept going. Incredibly distracted. Old Mario finally turns off his phone around the final line of the scene. I thought they’d give me one more run at it, out of kindness. “Thanks, David. Good seeing you”. I walked out, waited for Josh, and drove him home. We laughed about it.
Aside from how hilarious it is that this man lives on in David Krumholtz’s mind identified only as “Old Mario,” I don’t blame him for considering this his worst audition experience ever. Even ignoring the fact that he and Josh Gad didn’t get to perform as much material as they’d prepared for, this mustachioed man’s cell phone going off was more than enough of a distraction to throw Krumholtz off his game. That’s not to say that Krumholtz was guaranteed to get this role even if the audition went well, because because that phone wasn’t turned off, it killed his chances of at least making it to the next stage.
Still, considering how negatively Cop Out was received when it played in theaters (although it did get some love on Netflix back in 2020), perhaps it’s for the best that this movie wasn’t added to Krumholtz’s resume. Kevin Smith even admitted he experienced “true darkness” when working with Bruce Willis on Cop Out, although he later apologized for these complaints after Willis retired from acting due to aphasia (he was later diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia). Cop Out also starred Tracy Morgan, Adam Brody and Kevin Pollak, among others.
Looking back at David Krumholtz, you can revisit his performance in Oppenheimer when it arrives on streaming later this month, assuming you don’t already own a physical or digital copy of the movie. He’ll next be seen in an episode of Law & Order: SVU, and is also reprising Kareem Abdul Lavash in the TV series Sausage Party: Foodtopia, which will be streamed exclusively to Amazon Prime Video subscribers sometime later in 2024.
