Picardo Relies on ‘Wonder Years’

At a time when 85% of Screen Actors Guild members are unemployed, Robert Picardo at least has something better than a day job to fall back on. ABC this week put “China Beach” on hiatus--that’s networkese for “all but canceled”--so Picardo’s Vietnam Army surgeon Dick Richard is now on semi-permanent R&R.;

But Picardo is still working in prime time as gym coach Ed Cutlip on “The Wonder Years.” And this summer he racked up credits in two hit films, providing the voice and likeness for the robotic cab driver in “Total Recall” and appearing in the flesh in “Gremlins 2: The New Batch.”

Not bad for someone who initially aspired to be a doctor--until Leonard Bernstein, whom Picardo met while appearing in a Yale student production of the composer’s “Mass,” provided some influential career counseling.

“I’d always done acting strictly for fun,” Picardo, 36, says. “Bernstein encouraged me to go into performing, which gave me the courage to give up my pre-med career.” He went on to leading Broadway roles in “Gemini” and “Tribute,” television work including a recurring role on “Alice,” and appearances in such films as “The Howling” and “Innerspace.”

The Philadelphia native’s current TV bonanza came about when Coach Cutlip, a guest shot he did before being cast in “China Beach,” proved popular enough to become a recurring role, an opportunity he accepted with the blessings of “China Beach’s” executive producers.

Having sometimes gone from the set of the sweetly nostalgic “Wonder Years” to the intensely dramatic “China Beach” in the same day, the actor says that the hardest aspect of switching roles is that “it taxes your listening. The coach doesn’t listen to anyone, whereas on ‘China Beach,’ the camera often focuses not on who’s talking, but on who’s hearing.”

“The season before last, I was simultaneously shooting a ‘Wonder Years’ episode where I was hit on the head by a basketball, (for which he was Emmy-nominated) and the heaviest ‘China Beach’ episode, where my character’s wife sent him notice she’s divorcing him. I’d work on the ‘China Beach’ script in a little room, spilling my guts, and then have to go walking around with 12-year-olds bouncing basketballs off my head. I was struck by the absurdity of it.”