TVLINE | How did you find your new Dewey with Caleb Ellsworth-Clark?
BOOMER | Did you see him? It’s flawless.
KATSKY BOOMER | The reason that so much of what he does is on a screen is because we were hoping up until the last minute that Eric [Per Sullivan] would change his mind. Part of the way that Linwood wrote it was, “We’ll have you all on screen, so you can do the entire run in half a day.”
BOOMER | We’ll just set up a camera. We’ll green-screen a bunch of different backgrounds on it. Half a day is all you would need to do. I was saying, “I’ll make it really easy,” and he finally said to me, “Do you wanna be an actor again?” I was like, “No.” [Laughs] “OK, well get off my back.”
KATSKY BOOMER | But we saw Caleb. He was just on an audition tape the first time we saw him. And he came on and he looked more like a grown-up Dewey than Eric Per Sullivan did. We showed him into the audition room. We were doing chemistry reads with Frankie for his daughter and his girlfriend, and we showed Frankie the tape like, “Look at this guy that we found to play Dewey.” He was like, “I wouldn’t have known that wasn’t Eric!”
BOOMER | He had the same ethereal quality to him that Eric had. It was such a slam dunk for everybody. His first audition, it was like, “Sold! You’re the guy.”
TVLINE | What was your favorite or most rewarding aspect of this revival overall?
BOOMER | For me, it was having everybody back together. The sad thing was we had to shoot it in Canada, so we were only able to bring very few members of the original crew. People are struggling here in LA. They’re struggling a little bit in Canada, too, but the number, it was 30% or 35% less expensive to do it in Canada. We tried to make the argument to shoot it here, and with that kind of money, we couldn’t win the argument.
KATSKY BOOMER | We also had a great experience in Vancouver. We loved it. We loved the crew that we had. That was really fun. I was very worried about working with my husband who I hadn’t worked with in 20-something years. I was like, “This could be a marriage ender!” [Laughs] I even thought that maybe I shouldn’t do it.
BOOMER | I wasn’t going to do it unless Tracy was doing it with me.
KATSKY BOOMER | I was like, “I can just sort of hang around and do all these things without having it be my job,” and he was like, “No, you gotta really do it.”
BOOMER | I’m too old to do all the stuff that I was able to do when I was a younger man. I needed to offload it onto someone whose creative instincts I trusted. After I retired, Tracy stepped into a showrunner/producing role, and I’ve seen her work, so I knew she was good at it.
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