In its pure state, playing is a wonderful game to pretend. If you’re good enough to make a living at it, you show up to work every day and slip under the skin of someone who’s a stranger to you. You could be someone as harmless as a loving parent or as malicious as a cold-blooded killer. The job requires you to be a master of empathy; you may not like the person you’re playing, but you need to understand them well enough to make their desires believable, even identifiable, to your audience. It’s a fun and scary act, and the deeper you get into it, the harder it can be to fight your way out of character.
Of course, it depends on how you approach the profession. If you are an actor trained in the method like Robert DeNiroyou become your character. However, if you are an experienced fabulist who prefers to play the short game, you can move in and out of your character with little psychic effort. This is where acting becomes indistinguishable from lying. This approach still requires that essential sense of play that all actors possess, but it can be destabilizing for the outsider to the extent that there is no emotional buy-in. One moment you effortlessly entice a married person to commit adultery, an hour later you lose character and go home for the day.
Sounds a bit like being a private detective, right? Would you be surprised to learn that two of the most talented actors of the last 30 years have done this job under the table? Maybe not, but you’ll be blown away when you find out which players have thrived in this industry.
Where is our Wayne Knight and Margo Martindale detective series?
Two weeks ago, comic book writer Ryan Estrada went viral on Bluesky informing his followers that Wayne Knight and Margo Martindale already supplemented their acting income by working for the same detective agency. Yes, Newman from “Seinfeld” And Mags of “Justified” used their acting skills to potentially catch people lying.
According to Knight, he took the job as a side hustle to avoid relying on unemployment. How did he get into this profession? As Knight told Vice in 2015:
“[I] I was a waiter like everyone else when I started. And I had a friend who said, “Well, I have a job that might interest you.” I say, “Yeah? What is it?” And he answers: “I’m a private detective.” I say, “What? You have no police training. Have you been trained for this? ‘No.’ “How did you get hired?” He says, “Well, they like to hire actors because they’re usually smart, competent, they can play different roles and they have no qualms.”
Knight’s facility for mistakes allowed him to phone in and arrest unfaithful spouses and, more ambitiously, business executives and high-ranking military personnel seeking to make a living in the world of venture capital. He used the nickname “Bill Monty” to keep the ruse going as long as necessary and was successful enough to try to turn these experiments into a sitcom or movie in later decades.
As for Martindale, she was much less enamored with the concert. As she told Backstory in 2020“They hired a lot of actors. I didn’t have anything very interesting to do, but it was just extorting information from unsuspecting people for headhunters, for jealous husbands, for women who watched their husbands gallop.” She added that while men could occasionally go into the field, women were forced to work the phones. If there is a movie or series to be made from this shady story, I would prefer to see it told from Martindale’s point of view.
