Cheryl Hines contrasts her warm reception in conservative circles with the aggressive questioning she faced on "The View" regarding her husband, Bobby Kennedy Jr., whom she deems unqualified for HHS. Drawing on her improv training from Larry David's scriptless 1999 mockumentary "Curb Your Enthusiasm," she navigates chaotic production styles and recounts their divorce sparked by a Vivica A. Fox scene. Despite the show's controversial jokes and David's refusal of emotional beats, Hines maintains her career while balancing her role as Kennedy's wife, adhering to his strict protocols on seed oils despite admitting her own lack of discipline. Ultimately, her experience highlights the shifting dynamics of media scrutiny and personal resilience in an increasingly polarized cultural landscape. [Automatically generated summary]
is your relationship with him now knowing that you know he is kind of a from where i sit he's a crazy lefty um i'm dave rubin This is the Rubin Report.
And I am thrilled to be kind of, sort of, hopefully not doing too much politics today because joining me is award-winning actress and author of the new book Unscripted, Cheryl Hines.
As I said here for the 10 seconds before we started recording, I'm thrilled to be talking to you because I actually am a fan.
We have our worlds have sort of collided over time, sort of through Bobby, also through comedy and a bunch of stuff.
So I thought it would be interesting because I've played a bunch of the clips from your book tour on the show.
And it's sort of interesting because the book obviously is mostly about Curb and your career and everything else.
And of course, you talk about the Bobby stuff in politics too.
But I thought it's been interesting watching you do media now where you're thought of as political because of your husband, even though that's not A, it's not really what the book is, but it's not really what you are.
And I just sort of wonder now that you're a few weeks into the tour, the book tour, and doing all these interviews, how do you feel about that in and of itself?
Well, it is a different world because I've been married to Bobby for over 10 years and it hasn't really been the lead off to interviews before, but now it is.
And it's, you know, I just have to be ready, I have to be ready for whatever comes at me, you know, regarding him.
So it's a different way to do interviews, I guess.
And I, you know, I saw you sitting down with our mutual friend Bill Maher and you said something that I thought was super interesting was that, you know, as you guys got welcome, you know, you're a Hollywood person.
So now suddenly you're kind of welcomed in these right-wing circles and that it was surprising for you to find that these people were kind of nice and kind.
And I went through a version of that myself 10 years ago when I was kind of evolving.
And are you still kind of surprised by it that these conservatives are usually pretty kind of nice and open-minded and tolerant and decent and all that stuff?
I mean, that being said, I don't know what I was expecting.
I guess I was expecting, you know, The flip side of what I'm experiencing with maybe the left, because the left, some people are very emotional and upset.
And then my experience with the right has been, they have been accepting and warm.
And sometimes they'll even say, I know that, you know, we don't agree on politics or some things, but they seem more willing to find common ground and just accept you as you are.
I have to tell you, you know, and then I promise I started this by saying we're not going to talk politics.
So we're just going to get it out.
We're just getting all this nonsense out of the way.
And then we'll get into comedy and all the other stuff.
I don't know if you were there, but before the election, there was the Restore the Rally event in DC that Bobby headlined.
And I spoke there and a bunch of other people spoke.
And it was right after the Maha and MAGA thing kind of came together.
And I kid you not, that was the day I really thought something special was happening here because to see all of these kind of like old hippies that loved Bobby, suddenly with the MAGA people with the Red Hat, I was like, man, this thing actually is unstoppable.
So it's just, to me, it's just very cool adventure that you guys have been on.
I mean, that's what I have liked about Bobby connecting with people is that he, that the ideas that he's talking about, about being healthier, really hits with everybody and it crosses party lines, which is nice.
No, I know, I know, but I could talk Curb with you for like 17 hours.
So I just want to get this stuff out.
You know, because also I watched you on the view and I was thinking, boy, you know, if Cheryl was on the view five years ago, you know, Curb's on the air and you just went on five years ago to talk about Curb and Larry and comedy and all that, they would have been fawning all over you and Joy would have been sitting in your lap and all the rest of it.
And then I watched you on there and it's like, I'm not a huge fan of Sonny Host and everyone knows that.
It's just like the need to go after you because of your husband.
So now watch how I can then turn this towards career stuff.
While you're sitting there on some of these shows in that, in a slightly combative or whatever you want, you know, having to answer for your husband or whatever it is, which I thought on the view, you did a great job at one point when they were like, you know, his extremist views and you were like, well, which extremist views?
And then they all get quiet at the same time.
But, so watch how we'll shift this.
Were you consciously like kind of using some of the skills that you learned through Curb and working with Larry and all those guys, where it was just like, you have to play through.
So I titled my book Unscripted because Curb Your Enthusiasm was unscripted.
It was all improvised.
And it is a very helpful tool, especially when you're being interviewed, when you're talking to people, because you have to listen because there's no script.
You can't be thinking about what you're going to say ahead of time because you don't know what the question is going to be or what someone's going to say to you.
So I think those improv skills do help me stay present and stay focused on the person that's talking to me.
So you shoot that hour show, which at that point they didn't know was going to turn into the sitcom.
And I remember watching that, even though I knew Larry through Seinfeld, really, not through, you know, there wasn't a ton of him on camera before that.
But I remember watching that, not fully getting whether it was real or not.
And that's, you know, all credited to Larry because, you know, he wanted it to seem real.
And there were real people on the show.
Richard Lewis, Jerry Seinfeld was on that one-hour special.
And so you had real people.
And when they cast me, I had heard that they were looking for an unknown actress.
So that worked in my favor.
But somebody that they, you know, could blur the line with that, you know, if somebody famous came on the screen, they'd say, oh, that's the actress from, you know, whatever.
And, but, but because it was me and nobody had really seen me unless, unless you saw Swamp Thing.
Everything you need to know about your performance is in the script.
Every, every, you know, comma, everything that other characters say about you, all the answers are there.
And then once you learn to disconnect from all of that, and then you start, you learn that all the answers are in the person that you're doing the scene with.
So to that point, I've seen Larry talk about this on a couple interviews, but basically he would just give you like, he'd be like, okay, we're in the bedroom and you would sort of just know where it kind of has to end.
And then you were pretty much like playing around the whole time.
And then sometimes we'd be doing a scene and in the middle of the scene, he'd say to Larry, well, remember when Cheryl and I went away together for a week?
And Larry's like, what are you doing?
What are you talking about?
And he's like, no good.
Larry's like, how does it, how would that fit into what's going on here?
Like, well, how did you feel in the like sort of season and a half when you were in it, you know, towards the end where you were in it much less because of the divorce and everything?
Because I thought even though I'm blanking on her name, the black actress that was his wife at that point, Viveka Fox, thank you.
Even though they were great together, they really were.
Like the obvious thing was the love between you guys and the good cop, bad cop thing.
And when that was gone, I do think it shifted the show a little bit.
Well, I did get a call from him saying, well, I've got, you know, I got to tell you something that you're probably not, it's not going to, you're not going to love it.
I said, okay.
And he said, we're going to do another season, but you're not going to be in it.
I said, okay.
He's, and he said, I, I want to date on the show.
I feel like I have some, some funny stuff to do.
And so I'm going to, they did a season in New York.
And he's a great actor anyway, because he does really listen.
But the thing that he does so well is he knows what will bother Larry.
So when we were shooting the seeds, he knows exactly what would bother Larry, you know, if we, if Ted and I were in a scene and we're sitting on the couch, you know, and Larry's in mid-sentence, Ted might reach over and hold my hand and rub my leg or something.
Just little tiny things that he knows will bother Larry, but he's so great at that.
And he always knew what his role was on the show.
His role was just to drive Larry crazy.
I mean, I love one of the episodes I loved was the anonymous.
And then, and then he's getting beat up by those guys at the end and he can't get in because he's anonymous, but they don't believe.
It was just so, it was so brilliant.
I mean, did were there episodes that you guys would be doing and somehow, for whatever reason, he would change the end, or was the end just kind of always basically there?
I'm pretty sure anyone watching my show has seen it, or I've, or I've referenced every episode, you know, a hundred times or whatever.
But how much do you think the fact that, and I thought the ending of Seinfeld was great.
And I know Larry, I think, liked it more than it was received, I guess.
But do you think that was really like ringing in his head that people sort of turned on it at the end of Seinfeld, that then he had to do the ending a little bit differently?
Because when you, because when you guys all got on the plane at the end, I actually thought they were just going to recreate it again and that the plane was going to start crashing or something like that.
I think by that time in Larry's career, he did not give a flying fuckerball, what anybody thought.
But that being said, you know, we did do a season with a Seinfeld reunion.
And that was part of the joke in the storyline was people kept saying how bad the ending of Seinfeld was, which is, you know, was, of course, insulting to Larry.
And he's, he's standing right there and he's, he's like, it wasn't that bad.
Yeah, it was bad.
It was bad.
Let's do this better.
So we did, you know, but that, but that's, you know, Larry's gift because he can laugh at himself.
Because if I could just tell you for one second, truly one of the best moments of my career was I interviewed Richard Lewis when we still lived in LA and he came to my house.
And I loved, obviously, you can see how much I love the show.
And I've loved him since I saw him on Young Comics on HBO in like 1982 or something.
And at the end of the interview, we had such a great time together.
And, you know, obviously he was a germaphobe, sort of.
Larry's got a lot of that.
And I'm sure he didn't, probably didn't touch you that often.
But when he walked in, he gave me the fist bump, kind of the Larry-David fist bump.
But at the end, as he was walking out of my house, he goes, he goes, Dave, I want you to know, you know, you're a really great interviewer.
And he put his hand on my face like this.
And it was just like this bizarrely nice moment.
I was like, I can't believe it.
He doesn't touch anyone.
And he put any like this.
And I was like, I'm always going to remember that.
So now I'm going to, I'm really going, I'm going to do my catalog of who else was on the show over the years.
And this actress you did not have a scene with, and she was only in once, but I'm hoping that maybe you met her because my three favorite shows of all time are Curb, Seinfeld, and Golden Girls.
Did you get to meet B. Arthur when she played Larry's mom in that heaven scene?
Dustin Hoffman were his, you know, spiritual guides in heaven.
I was, it was killing me watching it again.
But I write about it in the book because just being on Curb and, you know, once again, being a trained actress, but there's no script.
When Larry dies in that episode, we're all standing around his hospital bed and I'm holding his hand and I watch him take his last breath and he closes his eyes and I got so teary.
And after the take, Larry said, what are you doing?
I mean, is your goal right now, like for the rest of your career, is it that you want to keep sort of diving in and out of acting and doing some of this activist stuff and kind of be in there with Bobby?
Or is there, like, is one, have you enjoyed being on the book tour and dealing with some of the nonsense that we kind of started with and all the rest of it?
We were just in North Carolina and we were at, you know, some great restaurant where it's southern cooking and he had a bite of something.
I forget what it was, but it was not on his usual, maybe it was a, I want to say fried okra, but that's probably not true because what was it fried in?
But it was something along the lines.
You know, it was not typical.
And he doesn't eat a whole plate of it, but he might pick and choose.
Listen, I could do, as you can tell, I could do curb literally all day long, but I know you're talking to people all day long.
So I will, I will end with this because I think you'll find this interesting and it feels sort of full circle to me that when Bobby announced he did my show about when he was running as a Democrat, he did my show about two weeks later.
We had never met.
We did it on Zoom like this.
And I said to him about 20 minutes in, I said, I said, Bobby, I don't know if you are going to be a Republican at the end of this thing, but I know you will not be a Democrat.
And his eyes, I can send you the clip.
His eyes went like this.
And I've told him this a couple of times that he says he repeats it every now and again now because it was so obvious to me what was going to happen with that party and where his evolution was going to be.
But it's so incredible what you guys have done.
And I mean that for both of you because the health thing, like it has nothing to do with politics.
And I'm healthier now.
It's like a thing in my studio after Bobby came here.
And even when he switched from Democrat to Independent, when somebody think it was Dennis Kucinich, who said, this is what you should do because you have no path forward as a Democrat.
You know, the first time we heard that, we both thought, I don't think that's, I don't think that will ever happen.
And I also just watched that not too long ago because the show was on so for so many years.
I really had to go back through and watch it.
But I forgot that that episode, this is also awful.
Larry had a pubic hair stuck in his throat.
So when I watched that episode, because I didn't remember that part, you know, but he's now getting in a fist fight with Joseph, played by Dave Pickner.
And, you know, he's like, and Dave says, what's going on?
He goes, I got, I have a pubic hair stuck in my throat.
You know how it is.
You know, and he's dressed as Joseph.
And then it's one point.
And then at some point, the hair comes loose.
It's just, you know, a definite curb moment.
But uh, one thing that I want to say is um, I know that the we've been calling, or i'll say, you have been talking about Bob Einstein as Dave Osborne.
Yeah um, but Bob would one of the things that he'd do, that was so crazy.
We, you know, we'd be doing a scene where we're in the living room and it's right after a funeral and everybody's quiet.
And you know some of the um extras, that the atmosphere actors, you know they might, someone might be wearing I don't know too much makeup or this weird tie or something that's just a little bit different.
And in between scenes, Bob would yell to Larry, this is, this is your aunt, look at, look at your aunt right now.