Joe Mantegna On Criminal Minds, The Simpsons, And More - Exclusive Interview

So, first things first, let's talk about Criminal Minds. It came to an end earlier this year. What's your perspective on it coming to a close after so long?

Well, it was bittersweet. There were a lot of different changes all during the course of the 13 years I was doing the show. But ultimately, it was just a wonderful experience, and I think everybody would agree to that, and especially the final eight of us, as it wound up being. The chemistry seemed really great — not that it wasn't before, but people do come and go and it changes things. But everybody was pretty much on the same page in the end, in the sense that there was not one of us that felt like "Okay, this is good, we're glad it's over, time to move onto something else." In a heartbeat, I think every one of us would have said, "Let's do season 16. Let's do it again."

So that's nice. And to this day, we stay in touch. We text almost daily. And it's always just the complete confluence of personalities that really worked. But I think on the other hand too, I think we were very grateful to have had the experience we did, because it's pretty rare to do 325 episodes of a show. That puts us in kind of a unique category.

So on one hand, you feel some regret, but on the other hand, you feel fortunate to have had the experiences as long as one did.

This might be hard given the length of time that you were actually on the show, but were there any particular moments that stick out to you as favorites that you're going to carry forward from the set of Criminal Minds?

Well, there were a few. I would say the two major ones would have been the opportunity to work with my daughter, my real daughter in real life, right in my very first season on the show, which was season 3. She had been an actress already and been working. The producers came to me and said, "We know who your daughter is, we've seen some of her work. There's this role that we think she'd be really good for if you don't mind her playing it." She was only 17 at the time, and it was to play a daughter of a hitman. And it was a kind of dark episode, and her character is somewhat dark.

I said, "Hey, no look, I'm very open about all that. If she wants to do it, if you approach her and you like her for the role, go for it." So she did it, and it was great to work with her on the show like that. Then what kind of completed that circle was that 10 years later, they came to me and said, "Okay, we've got this idea." That really was a wonderful episode, I felt it was one of our better episodes, because first of all the ending was very unlike many of the endings on these kind of shows. I don't know if you're familiar with the episode, but at the very end of the episode, she basically tells her father who was a hitman to kill the unsub, to kill the guy who kidnapped her. And she's going, "Kill him daddy, kill him, kill him." So it was very dark, and the guy winds up doing it. The network even gave us initially some heat about making an ending like that, where a guy basically murders somebody in front of us.

But it all made sense. It's what really would have happened in that situation. You don't kidnap the daughter of a hitman and expect to get away with it. So anyway, they thought, wouldn't it be interesting to see what happens to a character like that 10 years later? So they brought her character back and did a whole arc with her, and you see that she has obviously been influenced by her father's lifestyle, and the father has actually cleaned up his act, but she's kind of taken the reins. So to be able to do that in my occupation — cross over to part of my real life that way — is great.

And the other incident would have been the fact there was a whole arc of shows, three shows actually, that dealt with the character who was my sergeant in Vietnam, played by Meshach Taylor, who in real life was one of my dearest and closest friends from 1969 on. He's the guy that first told me about Criminal Minds. When the first show first went on the air, its first season, he said, "Man, Joe, you got to catch this new show. I really think it's great." He was really into it. I'm not a real big TV watcher. I said, "Oh, that's great Shach, I'm glad you like the show." But I didn't watch it, I didn't watch anything. I just don't watch a lot of television.

But then when I got on the show I thought, wow, wouldn't it be great, because he's such a wonderful actor, and most of his past career was done in comedy mostly, and nobody knew the serious acting jobs he had. I thought, let me see if I can come up with a scenario where he can do an episode of the show, because he loves the show so much. Well, it turned out it worked out that way. My assistant actually was one of the co-writers, and I created an episode based on the fact that he was my former commanding officer in Vietnam, and I find him homeless on the streets of L.A. so it opens up that whole ball of wax about homeless veterans, and I run into the guy who saved my life in Vietnam.

So we did that episode, and it was wonderful. It was so wonderful to be able to do that, but the following year, he contracted cancer. And we thought it would be good to do a follow-up episode, so we did. And he was getting treatment all during the time we shot that second episode, and I directed that episode, one of my episodes I directed, that second episode with Meshach. A lot of scenes from that episode parallel him and I in life. There are scenes in which we're walking arm-in-arm, I've got my arm around his shoulders and stuff as if he was my officer friend from Vietnam, with people not knowing he's also one of my closest friends in life, and godfather to my kids, I'm godfather to his kids.

And then, at the end of that year, shortly thereafter, he passed away. I was fortunate enough to have Criminal Minds allow me to finish that saga, so we did a third episode, and I also directed that one, and it dealt with the death of that character. That episode actually opens with me getting the news that my sergeant has passed away, and then we do a whole Marine funeral. I flew two real Marine generals in from Washington DC to be part of the funeral. I used real Vietnam veterans as if it was our squad from Vietnam, and they attended the funeral. So there was a lot of life imitating art and art imitating life going on in that episode. Also, CBS allowed me to put a thing up at the end in memory of Meshach Taylor. One of the very last moments in the episode, you see the casket and we shot it at the veteran's cemetery in Westwood, and you see there's a little photo on the casket of our squad from Vietnam.

We had these young actors play us as young men in the flashbacks so they're in the photo, but you see my hand putting my hand on top of that photo on the casket. Whenever I see that episode I run across it, that's so meaningful for me, because I'm not saying goodbye just to that character, I'm saying goodbye to one of my closest friends in the world.

So those two things, the fact that working with my daughter on that one arc, and to be able to do the one with Meshach in that other arc out of the 325 episodes of Criminal Minds, those instances will of course resonate very strongly with me forever.

You mentioned having visited the people who actually do this job in your life, can you talk a bit more about the research that went into playing this role and playing someone who does that type of job?

Yeah, for me it was very important that there was as much research as possible, because it's one thing as an actor when you're playing roles that are... I mean, there are different gradations of that. In other words, let's say you're doing a role like I played in one of the first movies I did, a thing called Compromising Positions. I played a dentist, so obviously it was important for me to find out as much as I can of what it was like to be a dentist, because there were scenes where I'm actually doing stuff, and I didn't want to have every dentist in the world look at me and say, "What the hell? That's not the way you clean a tooth." So you do that kind of research.

But beyond that, the personality of character is all on me. Research doesn't come in there. Then, you go to another extreme when I had to play Dean Martin in the movie The Rat Pack — that was much more daunting, because this is a character, it's not just a dentist. This is Dean Martin, a character many human beings on the planet think they know who he is, what he looks like, what he sounds like, all that. So my research was so much more in-depth on something like that, because it's not that you want to totally impersonate this person, but you want to leave them with a semblance when they see it that okay, for the next 90 minutes or whatever, I buy that you are that guy.

In terms of David Rossi, it's somewhere in between that. In other words, much of it was me, but that was intentional. I requested that we make him an Italian-American. I learned this lesson from Don Bellisario, who was a producer on the first series I did, which was called First Monday and was about the Supreme Court, years ago. Don suggested to me when I played that character, he said pick a name and character and personality not too far from yourself, because the difference between doing a movie and a TV series is this thing goes on and on and on. You may live with it, as it turned out I lived with it for 13 years.

So I think that was good advice, so I purposely made him an Italian-American, and gave him qualities that I appreciate, whether it was food and music and just my personality in general of always being the wiseass at times. So that was important, but then the occupational aspect of it, again was very important, because it's the real deal, these people really exist. So for me, it was paramount that I go to Quantico, and luckily we had the opportunity to do that, because one of our staff writers from day one was — at the time — still active with the FBI and actually retired during the run of the show.

And so he arranged for that to happen, so I was able to go there and spend time, and really... first of all, I was impressed at how close we were to the real deal in what we're doing. And they appreciate it, and I will say that was very important to me. In other words, I think they understood that it's still a TV show, we have to create this drama, but at the end of the day we tried to honor them and be true to what they have to do. Of course, it's condensed, concise and we have 44 minutes of excitement, while they have things that may last over months and years. But I got from them that they really appreciated about our show that we took it seriously and we tried to represent in a pretty honest way what they really do. I remember meeting some of the women who did the kind of job Kirsten did on the show playing a technical analyst, and a lot of them would say, "Ever since watching the show, we dress a little more casual. A little more extravagant." Because they realized, why do I have to be always so buttoned up because we're behind a computer all day? So I thought that was kind of fun.

So anyway, bottom line is, research was very important to me, because you never want to feel that you're just faking it. It's one thing if you're doing a movie about playing a supernatural hero and just inventing s***, but it's something else when you're portraying somebody who could be watching the TV and saying, "Wait a minute, that's crazy, I do that job and that would never happen." So you try to avoid as much of that as possible.

There's obviously the technical side of the job that you had to learn about, but was there anything you learned about the type of people, when we talk about personality, that get into this line of work, that you used in the show?

Yeah, that's a good question, and that's a difficult question because to tell you the truth, I'm not so sure about that. I think there must be one kind of thing that must run through them all in the sense of, it's the same thing almost as being in the military. You have to have that one kind of grain of not ambition, but desire to perform service. In other words, I want to be in the service industry. I want to in essence wear a uniform, even if it's not a uniform. What defines me as a person is doing service to those others, whether you're a soldier, a policeman, a fireman, a doctor, or an FBI agent, that's in your DNA almost in a way.

In a way, I'm surprised at how diverse the people are who all share that same thing. That's kind of what makes it interesting: You can actually meet the eight of us, you put us all in a room, we're different types, we look differently, we're different ages, we're different nationalities, we're different everything. But yet there's that one common thread of trying to do what you think is the right thing, trying to be one of the good guys in a world of bad guys.

When the show first started, the analogy that Ed Bernero, who was our initial showrunner, made, and which was why they chose to round table... because in the real Quantico, they do have a room like that. That's pretty close to the real deal, but their table is a very long rectangular one, because they have to accommodate a lot more agents at any given time. Ours is a little round table, and for Ed, he wanted to make the analogy that it was like King Arthur knights of the round table. We are the knights, and the unsubs are the dragons. And thank God we have knights in the world to confront the dragons. Too bad we have dragons, but that's life.

Just to wrap up on this show, you guys obviously have, as you said, a dedicated fanbase, but what's something that fans might not know about making Criminal Minds that you think they should?

First of all, I was always amazed by how big our fanbase was in terms of women. Females make up a big part of our fanbase, and a lot of the fan mail and the interest. More than once, I've had people contact me because their daughters wanted to go into this line of work, and in a couple instances — I know definitely two where literally I spoke to them when they were kids out of high school and today they're FBI agents. I used to think about that. What is it about, especially the women that are so taken by this show? Because a lot of people would think it's so graphic and it's so this and so that, and scary. And I've always defended that aspect of the show. I know others have felt like, "You're going too far, it's too creepy." And my attitude is no, we really can't go too far, because the real people go that far and beyond. For us to cut corners, and for us to sugarcoat it, is a disservice to what these men and women really do.

We put it in your face, but the point being this really happens, and this is what they have to deal with, and that could be shocking. You don't have to look at it, and it maybe freaks you out, but that's why when people say to me, "Hey, does it bother you when you do those scenes," I go, "Hell no." When they say cut, that person there laying with the arrow in his eye gets up and pulls it out and gets a sandwich. Ask the real agent if that bothers him.

But to get back to your question about that thing, especially with the women, I think part of it is, it's about the psyche of these people. And I think women for the most part, and understandably so, find that very interesting and fascinating because it's something they want to be on top of, be aware of. So it's got a defensive principle — like these are people out there in the world, and what can I do to educate and protect myself?

And what I kind of in retrospect also felt is that major aspects of our show were very educational. I always point to one example, and that was in an episode in which the unsub was a car park, he was one of those guys that parks your car. Matthew Gubler, his character would often be the guy that put two and two together quicker than the rest of us. There was a scene in the episode in which he goes, "Oh wait a minute; I think I know what happened." And then they were showing flashbacks of each thing he said. He says, "It's the valet. What happened is, she gave him the car, he took the car, he punched the button for home on her navigation system, all of a sudden he knows where she lives."

She's got a garage door opener on her visor. He takes it, he's got a device he can copy her garage door opener. So now he knows where she lives, and he has a way to open her garage. And he goes, and he says, "Most people who have a home, with a garage attached to the house, they don't lock the door between the house and the garage, because they know the garage door is closed." So in that one-minute speech, I know watching it myself I thought to myself, "Well, f***, I'm not going to label home for my home on my navigation system, I'm not going to leave the thing on the visor, and I'm always going to lock that door." I've gotten letters from people who literally have said, "I want to thank you all because watching your show ultimately saved my life because of dot, dot, dot, dot." And they'll go into detail, even the episode that taught them something.

So that maybe is not something that comes first to people's minds as to why they like Criminal Minds or why it was so successful, but I think that's kind of an offshoot of it, and in a way a beneficial offshoot of it. Some people say it's dark, it's grim, I have to look away. And a lot of the women would tape it and not watch it in primetime at night, but they'll watch it, they're real huge fans, and will watch it in the daylight. I get it.

You mentioned your daughter and Meshach Taylor as people who you liked working with. Is there anyone else over the course of your career who you particularly enjoyed bouncing off of as a scene partner, acting-wise?

There have been many. One in particular is Peter Falk. And we're talking about, that goes into my theater background. The thing that really changed my career was in 1984 when I did the play Glengarry Glen Ross on Broadway, the original production. I was fortunate enough to win a Tony Award, the show won a Pulitzer Prize, so those next few years certainly changed my career and my life as well. I had been banging around as an actor for about 15 years prior to that, but that was the big, definitive move. I did a year on Broadway with the play, and then we toured for six months, and Peter Falk did the entire tour with me for six months, playing this Shelley Levene character to my Ricky Roma character.

And so during that six-month tour, he and I got to be very, very close. And that friendship stayed that way right up until his death. I'd go to his house, hang out with him, my wife and I were close to him and his wife, and he was just — first of all he's just a brilliant actor. What I loved about him is, a lot of actors when they had a character, like him with Columbo that they had done a role that was identifiable, they kind of almost resented it. I know Carroll O'Connor was always bugged by the fact that everybody thought he was Archie Bunker. And I get it, because his politics were the exact opposite. So people would say, "Hey Archie!" He'd be like, "Ooh." I get it. Whereas Peter, he had that personality where we would do the play, and people would wait at the stage door, and they'd see him, and there'd be these old ladies going, "Oh Lieutenant, Lieutenant." But Peter got it. In other words, his attitude was, he embraced it, he realized that's what their point of reference is to me as Columbo, and it's okay. At least they came, they saw the play, and hopefully they liked that too.

And he did such other brilliant work at so many other things. So I considered that a real gift that we had the friendship we did, which ultimately culminated when he passed. He never got a star in the walk of fame. I mean they offered it to him back in the early '70s, but Peter was one of those guys. He almost was a lot like Columbo. He never did what you're supposed to. You have to follow through. You have to pick a day, have to say okay, I'll do it. He never did it. So when he passed away, I took it upon myself to get him his star on the walk of fame. His wife said, "He never wanted that." I said, "Shera, it doesn't matter he didn't want it. The public needs to have it. He deserves that." So I was able to kind of make that happen, so posthumously he got that star, and I requested him be allowed it, since there was an empty space next to mine.

And so that was kind of that relationship that he and I had, and the fact that now forever our stars are next to each other in Hollywood, I'm glad that was able to happen. I just feel good about that, because he was such a dear friend and such a great person. Just a huge talent.

But I can go on with different people. I mean, we'd be here for another hour. Saying oh yeah there's so and so and so and so. I've been blessed, I worked with a lot of great people. David Mamet has been like a guru to me over the years. It's a pretty long list of wonderful people that I've worked with, and people that have had an impact on my life.