COMEDY is hard, and quitting cigarettes makes it harder. Hamish Linklater, who plays Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s brother, Matthew, on the CBS show “The New Adventures of Old Christine,” learned this last year.
He gave up smoking when his wife, Jessica Goldberg, a playwright and screenwriter, became pregnant. Good news for his baby, Lucinda Rose, who was born in April, but bad news for his career: it improved his voice.
“I now have a more plaintive, sensitive, vulnerable register, which is apparently very annoying,” Mr. Linklater, 31, said. “I lack mystery now. I’m so available now. I have to find more restraints for Matthew.”
Matthew is already so restrained he sometimes seems to be talking in his sleep. He was conceived as a surfer (“but I couldn’t pull off the ambition to be a surfer,” Mr. Linklater said), a stoner (but CBS dislikes marijuana references “unless they’re very clever or very veiled”) and a slacker. Instead, after a short stint in medical school (his cadaver turned out to be an old neighbor), Matthew is training to be a psychotherapist. He spends a lot of time microwaving tea and soup. (“I have one bit of business as Matthew: I hydrate”). Mostly Mr. Linklater is a still point in a busy world.
While Ms. Louis-Dreyfus whirls around like a tiny tornado, the laconic, 6-foot-3 Mr. Linklater reacts. The humor is in his expressionless face, his loose-limbed awkwardness and his rhythm, which owes more to Jack Benny than to, say, “The King of Queens.”
Though most of the reviews have focused on Ms. Louis-Dreyfus, several critics have noted Mr. Linklater’s dry take. Karla Peterson of The San Diego Union-Tribune wrote that in tandem with Clark Gregg (as Christine’s ex-husband), Mr. Linklater added “a low-key bemusement that throws the standard-issue sitcom rhythms nicely out of whack.”
Kari Lizer, creator and executive producer of “Christine,” said, “There’s just a vibe about him that you don’t see on standard network sitcoms,” but “he was a hard sell” to network executives.
Ms. Lizer had tried to sell Mr. Linklater before, opposite Anne Heche in a pilot called “True.” “I brought him in, and I was crazy for him, and they couldn’t get their heads around him.” It was different with “Christine,” which started in 2006. “Julia said instantly, ‘That’s the guy.’ ”
Starting his first sitcom Mr. Linklater was nervous. He had recently had a role as a doctor on the short-lived drama “Gideon’s Crossing,” but that was easy. “For hourlong acting all you need to do is brood and get your makeup right.”
Ms. Lizer remembered: “He was afraid he was going to have to come out and land jokes. Then he realized he could be himself.”
As Mr. Linklater put it, “I kind of figured that if I talked very slowly and emphasized a lot of words, I’d eventually emphasize the words the writers wanted me to.”
Sharing scenes with Ms. Louis-Dreyfus and the comedian Wanda Sykes, who plays Christine’s droll best friend, is great, he added, but “I wish they would hire someone unfunny for me to work with.” What Ms. Louis-Dreyfus does “is unspeakably difficult, but she makes it look easy,” he explained. “Here comes a fastball, and you’re required to hit it out of the park.” A pause. “You can see why people are very depressive and tormented who are funny.”
Mr. Linklater’s background, like his comic cadence, is unusual. His mother, Kristin Linklater, is a drama professor at Columbia University and a noted vocal coach who has worked with Patrick Stewart and Sigourney Weaver, among others. Ms. Linklater raised her son alone and partly in the Berkshires, where she was a founder of the troupe Shakespeare & Company. Mr. Linklater was 8 when he began doing small Shakespearean roles.
His technique has become more sophisticated since then. “I like putting constraints on characters,” he said. “Working from the outside to in. The tighter the restraints, the more gymnastics you can do.”
When Mr. Linklater says “gymnastics” he is not speaking literally. His is a physicality of isolated movements: a hand waves, the head turns. Sometimes even that seems like too much.
“In one episode I discovered that a really funny way to react to Julia being crazy was to look at the ceiling. And I was delighted with myself for finding this new reaction take, and I watched the tape and saw that I was looking at the ceiling any time she said anything.”
In future shows Mr. Linklater’s character will go into therapy but remain essentially unchanged. And Mr. Linklater will continue, in the finest comic tradition, to fret.
To wit: “I think I got fired about halfway through this conversation.”
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