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september
/ october 2005:
Stacked
for success
With Pamela Anderson as
his co-star and a studio that provides him with daily
kosher meals, Elon Gold has every reason to be happy.
By Curt Schleier
t’s not exactly the bosom of Abraham
that Elon Gold will be near every Wednesday at 8:30
this fall. But the yeshiva boy turned actor will take
what he can get. The fact is that never in the history
of television have the people of the book(store) had
it so good.
Gold is the star of Stacked, the new Fox comedy about two brothers who own a book store. The series co-star is a newcomer to the world of sitcoms, a young woman by the name of Pamela Anderson.
The show had a six-episode run last spring, and did well enough to get renewed. No surprise. In fact, the way Gold’s luck has been going, Stacked’s success was beshert.
Another actor, Tom Everett Scott, was cast in the part, but was let go just days before filming began. (In fact, his name was inadvertently left on promotional material the network mailed to critics.) Gold was called in on Purim (which coincided this year with Good Friday) to audition for the show’s creator, Steve Levitan.
Because Gold, who is observant, wouldn’t meet with Fox the next day, Shabbat, Levitan taped him and showed the video to the network execs. “I was actually sitting in shul with my manager when he leaned over and said, ‘they’re watching your screen test at Fox right now’.”
He adds: “It was my little Purim miracle.”
For the record, Gold read Playboy for the articles and, as for Baywatch, well he never saw the show. “I was one of the people who missed the whole Baywatch phenomenon. I was busy, learning Talmud.” (Seriously. More on that later.)
But of course he knew of Anderson. Anderson, he says, is unlike her public image. “She’s very sweet and bright,” he admits. “She knows what she wants and has a great understanding of people and what they want from her and out of her life. I hear her on the phone, and one minute she’s talking to Steven Tyler asking him to appear on the show and the next she’s talking to her children. She’s a great mother who wakes them every morning and she’s a good person.”
Gold’s wife also knew who Anderson is and wasn’t the least concerned. “My wife wasn’t threatened at all, because her theory is that Pam is so beautiful I don’t have a chance. Her theory is that the more beautiful the actress, the less chance I have.”
For the moment, there’s no romance between the two on the show. “I’m glad of that,” Gold says, for a couple of reasons. For one, “I don’t have to hear from my relatives about why I’m into shiksas.” For another, he feels it “too soon” in the developing relationship between the two characters.
“We come from such different worlds [on the show]. She’s not my type and clearly the opposite is true, too. She goes for rockers and tough bad boys,” not Jewish bookstore owners.
Is his character Jewish? He has not yet been identified that way, “but I can’t not be Jewish. My name is Miller. I think it will eventually be explored.”
Our phone conversation is interrupted when Chris, who handles food service for the show, comes in to take Elon’s order. The network and production company go out of their way to accommodate Gold’s religious needs. Chris makes a run every day to one of the kosher restaurants near the studio.
The studio has rearranged tapings from the sitcom traditional Friday nights to Tuesdays and Thursdays. There was one that couldn’t be switched, and Gold worked until Shabbat, his wife lit candles in his dressing room and the two (accompanied by his manager) walked the roughly two-and-a-half miles to the Golds’ home.
Gold wears his Jewishness on his sleeve, and is outspoken about his disappointment in other celebrities who don’t. For example, he admires “Jerry Seinfeld and Adam Sandler, who is really proud of his Judaism. He wrote the Chanukah song and [Seinfeld] had episodes” that marked him as Jewish.
On the other hand, he was disappointed in Paul Reiser, who starred in Mad About You. “It was as if he was almost shamefully hiding it. It did bother me that Reiser never discussed his Jewishness. At the same time, you never know what he went through in his childhood or as an adult, the parts he may have lost.”
Gold’s childhood was spent in the Bronx, along Pelham Parkway. His parents were teachers, and he attended a Jewish day school in Westchester and Yeshiva University High School in Washington Heights (years he could have spent watching Baywatch).
He started doing standup comedy while still in high school, and “by 20, I bought a Lexus from my tour earnings.” Still, he attended Boston University “just to keep [my parents] calm.” He majored in economics and graduated cum laude.
That he chose showbiz over numbers was no surprise to his parents, particularly his father. Dad dabbled in the business himself after he retired, managing young actors and investing in several Broadway shows. “There was one show he didn’t put his money into, because he thought it was a little too Jewish. That was Fiddler, which is why we lived in the Bronx all our lives.”
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