Winning over a “standoffish” Jason Alexander on the “Seinfeld” set was something of a challenge for Keith Hernandez.
Recalling his guest appearance on the iconic NBC sitcom in the early 1990s to Vulture, the Mets legend-turned-broadcaster — who has a memorable cameo on the season three episode “The Boyfriend” — spoke about his experience working with the cast.
“Larry [David] was very friendly and welcoming. Jerry [Seinfeld] was a little sheepish but welcoming. Julia Louis-Dreyfus was about three months pregnant with her first child, I believe. She probably wasn’t feeling that great, but she was wonderful to work with. Jason Alexander was a little standoffish most of the week,” Hernandez said.
“Michael Richards was very inquisitive about baseball. He knew nothing about it and questioned me throughout the week. He was interested in the lifestyle and what my profession contained. It was wonderful. He was very sweet, a nice man.”
However, Hernandez thinks he might have made an impression on Alexander — who starred as George Costanza — by demonstrating passable acting chops.
“He probably had to work his way through bit roles, and here I come as a guest star, and who am I? A retired baseball player? I’m just speculating. But it all changed when we had to do the complete run-through in chronological order in front of the NBC executives on Friday night,” Hernandez said.
“I had to pass their litmus test and censors, and I didn’t make any mistakes. Jason came up to me with a big smile and shook my hand and said, ‘Nice going.’ From that point on, he was wonderful. I guess I had to prove myself. I realized I couldn’t hold them up and be terrible and not memorize lines. I had a lot of lines. It was a very, very stressful week.”
Hernandez’s episode is chock full of memorable moments, including a failed conquest with Elaine (Louis-Dreyfus) and a Zapruder-like analysis of an infamous spitting incident.
Elsewhere in the interview, Hernandez confirmed he did not watch “Seinfeld” prior to appearing on the show, nor did he keep up with it in the later seasons.
As Hernandez explained, once he retired from baseball, he wanted to enjoy all the trappings of Manhattan, such as having dinner with “regular people” at 8 p.m. and attending Broadway shows, rather than hole up at his home watching evening television.
Nevertheless, he recognized the show helped him transcend the sports bubble amongst the city’s cultural elite.
“It gave me legs. It kept me out there, and people knew who I was. I was living in Manhattan and at Elaine’s [bar] all the time. That crowd was writers, actors, and people in the movie and Broadway industries,” Hernandez said.
“‘Seinfeld’ threw me right in with them. I had such a wonderful experience in my retirement up at Elaine’s with various people I was able to rub elbows with. I’m just a little kid from a beach town in Northern California, and here I am, having dinner with Sophia Loren one night, Clint Eastwood across the table, and chatting up Elia Kazan. Like, are you kidding?
“That show is one of the greatest experiences of my life.”