The handsome and talented David Groh.
In today's Sci-Fi Blast From The Past, the late actor David Groh talks about his guest-starring role in The X-Files.
Throughout the ages the Jewish people have often found themselves fighting against seemingly insurmountable forces. In The X-Files episode Kaddish Jacob Weiss is confronted with the ultimate evil after his son-in-law-to-be is murdered in a senseless act of violence. So distraught is the man’s daughter Ariel over her fiancé’s murder that she fashions a figure of him out of the very soil in which he is buried. From this she conjures up a spirit, or golum to avenge his death. It is Jacob’s responsibility to help his daughter see the error of her ways and to protect her from this demon she has brought to life. It was veteran stage, film and television actor David Groh who stepped in at the last minute to become Chris Carter’s golumbuster.
“My agent knows the show’s casting director Rick Millikan, who told him there was an emergency and that they needed someone for the part of Jacob Weiss,” explains Groh. “My agent called Rick and told him, ‘Don’t do anything. I’m going to bring David’s tape over personally to you at Fox.’ So he hand-delivered my tape, which I think is much better than an audition in that the tape has on it four or five different things I’ve done recently. In my opinion, it’s the final result that counts. Who cares about an audition that, for example, Jack Nicholson has done? I want to see what he did in the final product.
“So my tape was given to Rick Millikan, who I guess liked it because he showed it to two of the show’s producers who were in town. The next thing I knew I got a call from my agent who told me, ‘David, they want you for The X-Files and you have to do it.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but I have this film that I’m committed to.’ He said, ‘I’ll get you out of that.’ He made some frantic calls to the people in charge of the film and they had no problem releasing me because filming hadn’t as yet begun. In fact, my agent was able to get another actor to replace me. They said, ‘Sure, if he’s willing to do the film, and make sure to tell David, good luck.’ So that was very nice of them and I owe them one. Here is an example of people working together in concert and you pray that will happen all the time but it doesn’t. I’m very grateful that it all worked out for the best.”
FBI Special Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully are called to New York when the young men who murdered Isaac Luria are themselves mysteriously killed one-by-one. When all the evidence begins to point towards Luria’s fiancee Ariel, the woman’s father, Jacob Weiss, attempts to protect his daughter by trying to persuade the agents that he is the killer.
“Jacob is a very caring father from what I call the old school,” says Groh when describing Weiss. “He’s originally from Poland and is Jewish as well as a member of the Hasidic sect, which is very strict, with tight control over what you can and cannot do. He’s suddenly confronted with this extraordinary set of circumstances in that his future son-in-law is brutally murdered and the FBI suspects his daughter of killing the young men who murdered him. He has an inkling of what is going on and tries to take the emphasis away from her by making it look as if he’s the guilty one. He’s a self-sacrificing man who has been facing the enemy his whole life, from the Nazis to the Palestinians. Jacob is a man from another time and place. He’s extremely cautious and doesn’t trust anyone, especially the police and the FBI.
“They changed the script several times,” continues the actor. “At one point they made him much more of an heroic sort in that you see him calling out to challenge this debic or golum that his daughter has created. The creature is based on folklore and myths as well as on Jewish mysticism, which was very strong around the turn of the century and into the 1920s, particularly in Russia and Poland. There is a play called The Debic which deals with the conjuring up of spirits. Jacob is familiar with the golum and knows that it is something you don’t fool around with. There are certain things that should be left alone and yet his daughter is so bereft she tries to bring the boy back and brings him back as this thing that’s not of this world.
“Jacob says to her, ‘What you’ve brought back is a monstrosity. It doesn’t belong here. You must destroy it.’ In the original script he doesn’t even consult with his daughter about the golum. He knows where it is - up in the attic above the synagogue - and he goes up there and calls out to it, ‘I know you’re up here and I’m here to face you.’ He is willing to sacrifice his life to get rid of this thing. It is rather heroic but at the same time sort of stupid because the creature will just kill him and keep on going,” he chuckles.
“He’s a very interesting character,” proclaims Groh. “I would have liked to have done more with him. Sometimes you play characters that are just so-so, but with someone like Jacob Weiss there’s no telling where it could go. There was room for a lot of play as well as a lot of leeway. As I said, they were constantly changing things to make it better. That’s what makes the show so good. When you do a sitcom you usually work in front of two audiences. You figure out where your laughs are with the first group and then change things around for the second group to, hopefully, get some additional laughs. Generally, once you start filming a drama they quit rewriting things unless something is a real problem. On The X-Files they just kept throwing us new pages of dialogue. That was really exciting for me as an actor because, truthfully, it kept getting better and better. It was a terrific experience. I don’t talk this highly about that many shows, but The X-Files was the best television experience I’ve had in years.”
Besides the content of the script Groh was also impressed with the amount of time the production crew takes to film a single installment of the series. He likened the whole process to working on the set of a feature film and was particularly inspired by the way director Kim Manners handled the shoot. “He’s a fabulous director,” says Groh. “For instance, it took us all day to film the funeral at the beginning of the episode, yet it’s only on the screen for three or four minutes. It had been raining every single day and Kim wanted it to be overcast for the shot. I remember that he came up to me and said, ‘We really need a whole day of light to do this right. I hear it’s going to clear by Monday. Could you stay the weekend?’ I was supposed to go home that Friday but he promised we would wrap things up on Monday, so I stayed.
“Sure enough, he got his wish and it stopped raining,” continues Groh. “We worked on that scene from eight-thirty in the morning to around four in the afternoon. Although the funeral is shown at the beginning of the story it was actually the last thing we filmed. David Duchovny (Mulder) and Gillian Anderson (Scully) do not appear at the funeral because they were off filming the next episode, so we became what is called the second unit. Obviously, Kim stayed with us, but this second crew took over the filming and the first crew began filming the next show. It’s like a factory. They have to come up with interesting dialogue for twenty-six scripts and grind them out one after the other in the time allotted. Think about it. That’s a lot of stuff you have to do as well as make it entertaining and different and that’s where The X-Files excels.
“They want the show to be as good as it can be and you have to admire them for that. Gillian and David are lovely people who are just so giving and very complimentary. ‘Good work,’ they kept saying to me and Justine Miceli [Ariel], with whom I was also lucky to work. There was such a welcoming feeling on the set. On the one hand you’re thrown in with a company of professionals who have been working together for the past four years. However, while you may be the new kid on the block they make you feel so at home and part of the process that it automatically helps you to do a better job."
Groh’s involvement in The X-Files did not end once the cameras stopped rolling. Shortly after the episode was broadcast he received a call from the show’s creator Chris Carter, who told him that he was going to put his name forward for a slot in the Emmy Awards for best male performance in a television guest-star role. “I have to emphasize that this doesn’t mean I’m going to be nominated,” he cautions. “What it does mean is that they liked my work in the episode enough to promote me and that’s a very rare thing. Something like this has happened to me only once before with an episode of Law and Order that I did about four or five years ago. I got a nomination for that one. They put whatever they had behind me and were very helpful, but for whatever reasons it just did not work out. So I’m very grateful to have another shot for my part on The X-Files.”
Steve Eramo
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