Winning an Emmy award never gets old — nor does hearing that you’ve been nominated.
And it’s still “all shocking” says “Veep” co-star Tony Hale, who’s already won two statuettes (2013, 2015) as Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series for playing Selina Meyers’ (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) nebbishy assistant, Gary Walsh. “I think, ‘Somebody made a mistake, that I’m not supposed to be on this list,’ ” he says.
This year, Hale received his fifth nomination for “Veep” and he’s in very good, if familiar, company, He’s up against previous winners Louie Anderson (for “Baskets”), Alec Baldwin (for “Saturday Night Live”) and Ty Burrell (for “Modern Family”) — as well as his “Veep” co-star Matt Walsh and Tituss Burgess of “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” both previous nominees. Given the clubby nature of the Emmys, which sees the same performers nominated year after year, Hale, 46, says the actual awards ceremony feels like old home week.
“Ty is such a great guy,” he says. “You kind of become friends. We don’t work together, but we can catch up at these events. I think I might have met Alec Baldwin. You see people you’re fans of. One year, Carol Burnett and Bob Newhart were there and I was too nervous to go up to them. They’re comic idols.”
All nominees are required to submit an episode of their best work to a review committee. Hale selected this season’s eighth episode, in which Selina turns Gary’s birthday party into a publicity stunt. “Then he gets excited so he’s up and down,” he says. “It informed me a lot about Gary.”
After working so closely for years with perpetual winner Dreyfus, Hale can still believably gush about the woman who is number-one on the call sheet. “She constantly judges me for ‘breaking’ [laughing] on set, which I do all the time,” he says. “She’s just a normal person who knows the power of an ensemble and creates a kind environment.”
Should Hale prevail on Sept. 17, his latest statuette will be displayed in the kitchen in his Pasadena home. That’s where the actor and his wife, makeup artist Martel Thompson, keep their awards. In fact, Thompson won her Daytime Emmy nearly a decade before “Veep” premiered, in 2003 for “All My Children.”
“My wife has this little desk with shelves,” he says. “I haven’t graduated to the top.”
With “Veep” renewed for another season, Hale has some time off until filming resumes in October. He has been filming the Clint Eastwood film “The 15:17 to Paris,” about the two American soldiers who foiled a planned bombing on a train traveling from Amsterdam. He is also expected to return to “Arrested Development” as panic-stricken mama’s boy Buster Bluth when the Netflix series resumes production for a slate of 17 episodes scheduled to be released next year.
“The plot’s centered around the murder mystery of who killed Lucille Austero, Liza Minnelli’s character,” he says. “Our last season was Season 4 and it’s been [four] years.” Even so, the actor says “when I get back on set I can hear Lucille (Jessica Walter). It’s very Pavlovian. I can go back to being degraded.”