Jason Alexander and Tony Shalhoub trade roots onstage

On Friday, June 12 at Surflight Theatre, Jason Alexander introduced Tony Shalhoub with a list of awards and a promise of an unusually long conversation. What followed was a wide-ranging onstage repartee about family—Shalhoub said he’s one of 10 children—starti

When Jason Alexander walked out to introduce Tony Shalhoub at Surflight Theatre on Friday afternoon, June 12, he didn’t just welcome him—he warned the room they were about to be entertained.

“This is a treat for me,” Alexander said. “I’ve known this gentleman for a very long time, but this will probably be the longest conversation we’ve ever had where I get to ask him all kinds of things that I would be embarrassed to ask him otherwise.”

Alexander then leaned into the kind of flattery that turns into fact: Shalhoub’s career. Alexander said. spans 40 years across “every medium we could name. including voiceover and recordings and all that.” He ticked off the decorations as if counting down to the punchline—“five Emmy Awards. ” “six Screen Actor Guild Awards. ” “a Tony Award. ” and “a Golden Globe Award. ” plus a Grammy nomination. “I don’t know who beat him out,” Alexander joked, adding, “maybe, you know, Whitney Houston.”.

He finished the introduction with a contrast that sounded almost impossible until the conversation began: Alexander described Shalhoub as “the most unassuming guy. ” “just a sweet. lovely family guy. ” someone who “doesn’t make no big hoopla. ” even though his résumé is anything but modest. “So I think you’re in for a treat,” Alexander told the audience. “Let’s bring him out and have a conversation.”.

Shalhoub entered to a huge round of applause.

Alexander’s first question landed on family and the shape of a life before fame. “I’m interested in people’s journey’s and how they kind of got to where they are,” he said. “So, you’re one of nine siblings, is that correct?”

Shalhoub answered it cleanly: “I’m one of 10 children.”

Alexander followed with the early geography—“So, you have nine siblings and grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin”—and the conversation opened into the quieter forces that push a person toward the stage.

Shalhoub said a sister got into theater before he did, going off to the Pittsburgh Playhouse at the age of 18. Alexander also relayed what the sister had been doing. including “Stranger Things” for a number of years and theater work that continues now. Then Shalhoub returned the focus to how upbringing, not opportunity alone, can steer the timing.

“By the time I came along – I’m the second youngest of 10 – so by the time I was coming up, my parents were so tired of child rearing, they said, ‘Do whatever you want; get a job; cook for yourself.’”

The first acting spark, Shalhoub said, didn’t arrive with a grand revelation. It arrived through a rehearsal that went wrong.

Alexander asked when Shalhoub had his first experience with acting. Shalhoub described the same sister—10 years older—who had been in a production of “The King and I” in high school and needed little kids. Shalhoub was 6 at the time, and she recruited him.

“This probably started my long and crazy journey,” Shalhoub said. “It’s the dress rehearsal of ‘The King and I.’ There’s a musical number that ends the first act; all the children are onstage in a circle around Miss Anna or whatever. So the song ends. the act ends. the curtain comes down and I’m in the farthest downstage position – that’s the one that’s closest to the audience – and the curtain comes down and I’m the only one on the outside.”.

Then he reached the moment that drew real attention from a room full of adults: “Of course. I burst into tears. I couldn’t find the slit in the curtain. I’m 6 years old. but somewhere in the back. in the deepest recesses of my brain – ‘I got laughter.’ Maybe the hook was set; it’s been one humiliation after another.”.

By high school, Shalhoub was in theater productions, and he said he began to enjoy being seen—“I’m over here.” In a huge family, he explained, getting noticed can be its own work.

He told the audience he had been a middling student in high school. When he graduated, his father gave a straightforward choice: “You can go to work or you can go to college.”

“So I went to college because I didn’t want to get a job,” Shalhoub said.

He took acting classes—“It’s an easy A”—and appeared in plays. but he couldn’t yet imagine acting as a profession. Alexander described that missing “moment” as a defining difference between people who simply love theater and those who feel a door swing open. Alexander compared it to seeing “Pippin” on Broadway as a young teen. watching Ben Vereen get on stage—“From that moment on my fantasy was a life as an actor.”.

Shalhoub said he had something like a “that-moment lite” later, during his freshman year in Green Bay. A professional troupe came into town—Shalhoub said he couldn’t remember whether it was from the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis or the Milwaukee Rep. It wasn’t kids acting; it was trained adults, devoted and “all in.”.

“I was just knocked out,” he said.

Still, he didn’t declare a theater major until his junior year, after he transferred to the University of Southern Maine.

After that, the path tightened but didn’t simplify. In his senior year. Shalhoub said he “didn’t have a clue as to what he would do next.” A young woman who had graduated the year before had been accepted at Yale Drama School and loved it there. She told her boyfriend—who was a classmate of Shalhoub—that she thought it would be perfect for him too. Shalhoub said the boyfriend kept pushing and pushing until he applied.

“It was indeed a long story,” Shalhoub said, as the audience urged him forward. “But there was a long story, but he did audition and got accepted at Yale, and that made all the difference.”

He spent significant time talking about Yale.

Robert Brustein, Shalhoub said, had been dean of the Yale School of Drama when he was there. Brustein later moved to Harvard and launched the American Repertory Theater, which still exists today. Shalhoub was hired for the company and spent four years there.

Alexander framed it as a jump—from watching professionals to becoming one. “It was the jump from student to ‘I’m a working professional,’” Alexander said.

Shalhoub called it a “huge gift.” He explained that some classmates had gone directly to New York. but he couldn’t. He said he had “no money. ” and he was in debt from school—he clarified that it wasn’t “like today’s debt (which leaves graduates struggling for years). ” but “it was a lot. undergrad and graduate school debt.”.

He added that he was offered a 10-month job in regional theater by the man who had brought him up. Shalhoub described it as a continuation of the program: he was working with designers and directors and playwrights. with actors he was already familiar with. “And now instead of paying to do it, I get a small paycheck,” he said.

He specified the start: “It was 1980, so I started at 300 bucks a week, and I was like yes! I fainted.”

Agents, he said, started showing up. “The New York Times came out to view the things,” Shalhoub said, and New York actors were brought in to work with the company. “So that meant that agents were coming up to see their plays, which meant they were seeing me.”

Eventually, Shalhoub moved into films and TV, and he and Alexander said they broke out around the same time—enough to tease each other. Shalhoub joked with Alexander about losing auditions to him.

“Jason got that, oh great, I’m so happy for him,” Shalhoub said sarcastically, to Alexander’s delight.

Alexander’s film and TV breakthrough, he said, came when a role in “Pretty Woman” fell into his lap. He then turned the question back toward Shalhoub: what made Shalhoub realize he had a solid entree into cameras?

Shalhoub answered with a sequence of films and turning points. “I would have to say that was ‘Barton Fink,’” he said. He wasn’t claiming it was an instant commercial win—he said. “I don’t really know those numbers (it wasn’t; it lost money)”—but he pointed to its larger momentum: it went to Cannes and won the Palme d’Or.

He described how he knew the Coen Brothers before that. “A couple years before I had seen ‘Blood Simple. ’ and I said. ‘Oh my God. these guys are really changing the landscape. and I would love to get in there.’” He said he knew when he was doing “that movie” that the filmmakers were poised “to become rock stars.”.

But he said the deeper shift came from “Big Night,” screened at Surflight immediately before their conversation. “Before ‘Big Night,’ I auditioned,” he said. “After ‘Big Night,’ filmmakers came to him.”

The talk was scheduled for an hour, so Shalhoub couldn’t cover every success in depth. Still, one exchange became the afternoon’s loudest controversy—delivered without theatrics, but with a firm point.

Alexander raised a question about ethnic roles. “So Tony’s of Lebanese-American heritage,” he said. “In ‘Big Night’ he played an Italian; in ‘Wings’ he played an Italian, he played a Jew. You’ve crossed ethnicities; your wonderful face allows you to really convey a lot of ethnicities.”

Alexander prefaced his concern by saying he personally didn’t have an issue. then zeroed in on a debate he described as growing inside the industry. “But there is a thing now in our industry where actors can’t play anything they’re not,” he said. “So what is your response to it, your feeling about it?”.

Shalhoub’s answer arrived as a critique of how ideas get stretched. “It’s just like everything with political correctness,” he said. “You know it starts out with the germ of a good idea, but then it is just taken to the extreme.”

He offered an example he said he understood on one level and rejected on another: “I’ll give you the broadest possible example: Mickey Rooney doing the Asian in ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s.’”

Then he described what he sees as the outcome. “I get it. In the past it was stereotypes, it was mockery… but now you’re slicing the damn ham real thin.”

He said he understands certain boundaries. “I get it; I don’t want to see someone playing ‘the lazy Mexican’ – that I can’t have.”

But he returned to his own training and how it shaped his career. “But I was trained to do characters,” Shalhoub said. “I would have had no career. I’d have to play a Lebanese kid from Green Bay, Wisconsin.”

The moment landed—Shalhoub said it plainly, and the room reacted with laughter that followed the logic of the story.

By the time the conversation moved back toward other memories. the evening’s real through-line was already clear: the famous face. the awards. the applause—none of it replaced the smaller details that built the person behind the roles. From a child weeping over a curtain slit to a college acceptance at Yale. the path to stage and screen didn’t sound like inevitability.

It sounded like persistence, shaped by family that told him to “do whatever you want,” and by the humiliations that, in Shalhoub’s telling, eventually turned into craft.

Surflight Theatre Jason Alexander Tony Shalhoub Green Bay Wisconsin Yale Drama School American Repertory Theater Big Night Pretty Woman Wings Barton Fink Big Night debate political correctness ethnic roles