DALLAS — Since the swan song of Seinfeld, the NBC sitcom, its eponymous star has been bombarded with proposals for acting projects - film and television roles in which his character's name would not be Jerry, his costume would not consist of bluejeans, sneakers and a dangling shirttail and his shtick would not be observational comedy about manners and other minutiae. The comedian turned them all down.
"I don't really disappear into acharacter," Jerry Seinfeld says, speaking very much as himself despite the surreality of having just walked a black-and-yellow striped carpet spread for his arrival at a movie theater here.
"I'm not really one of those actors who does that," he says of thespian-style disappearing acts. "People know me just as who I am."
So it comes as an arch irony - that old Seinfeldian trope - that in his new, four-years-inthe-making film, the performer does just that: He disappears completely.
But the obscurity isn't the result of a strenuous elasticization of his acting muscles, or even a prosthetic nose. In his new role as Barry B. Benson in Dream-Works' new animated feature Bee Movie, opening Friday, Seinfeld "appears" only as the voice of a cartoon bee, with his countenance hidden from view behind a lush computer-generated curtain, as the movie's visuals buzz back and forth between the golden, buttery hues of a working hive to a thrilling animated version of Manhattan, where Barry attempts to woo a (human) florist performed by Renee Zellweger.
"Well, the expression is my expression, I think," Seinfeld counters regarding Barry's likeness, disputing the idea that his physicality is completely untraceable in Bee Movie.
Which goes to show that you can take the constantly amused, occasionally peckish comedian out of the flesh, but you can't conceal his sensibility. It was on full display in Dallas, one stop on a multicity, late-summer tourin which Seinfeld showed about a third of the unfinished film to select audiences, then discussed its production with members of the media.
Hence the black-and-yellow carpet - a stunt stand-in for red - and the white leather club chair the comedian settled into after the viewing. When a woman in the front row asked whether his performance in the movie as an insect easily overlooked by humans allowed him to indulge any fantasies of flyon-the-wall-style interloping, he homed in on the comedic potential of the setup like a wolf spying a rabbit.
"A fly? No, it's a bee," he says, choosing to exploit the reporter's mixed metaphor rather than genuinely engage her question. The woman limped forwardwith a slight rephrasing, but, to her misfortune, it still included the word "fly."
"But you know it's a bee, right?" Seinfeld persists. "So, I'm sorry, what was the question?" By this point, the woman looked as if - to borrow a bit of Seinfeld's pop-culture residue - she wished for a pair of manhands to cover her reddening face.
The occasional unwitting sparring partner aside, Seinfeld's inability to cloak his comedic id, even in reacting to the smallest absurdity, is to the audience's benefit in Bee Movie, in which the comedian's characteristics emerge as a tool as valuable as - well, whatever modern-day animators use in creating their painstaking, painterly frames.
On the most easily accessiblelevel, there's the patented Seinfeldisms running through the script, hinting at a writer's-room process in which the comedian tasked himself with imagining what a bee would riff about, if a bee did stand-up. Returning to the hive after a sojourn to the kitchen of his new florist friend, Barry produces a cake crumb he pocketed to bring back to the hive: "And that's not even what they eat!" Barry exclaims in Seinfeld's nasally whine of incredulity. "That just falls off of what they eat!"
Beyond Seinfeld's signature observations, his fingerprints are slightly less obvious but no less absorbable in the film's production design. He retained the services of the Porsche car makers - whose specimens he avidly collects - to conceive thekinds of cars bees would drive around their hives. And Barry, who falls into post-collegiate ennui, inspiring a few animated quotations of iconic scenes from The Graduate, dresses in the same man-child manner as the one Seinfeld played on TV, always casual, slightly rumpled dress that signaled a kind of Superman-obsessed arrested development. (In Barry's case, it's a hipsterish black-and-yellow cardigan sweater and Converse-style sneakers.)
But at the least transparent level is the work ethic that Seinfeld brought to the film. In another irony, his degree of commitment - he has worked on little else in the past four years - was wildly out of step with the movie's genesis as an offhand non sequitur offered over dinner with Steven Spielberg one night in the Hamptons. (Although it's hard to feel sorry for anyone who can string together an anecdote combining the elements "Spielberg," "dinner" and"Hamptons.")
To fill a lull in the conversation, Seinfeld mused that it'd be funny to mount a pun on the old industry tag for schlocky, throwaway films - B-movies - by making something called Bee Movie, about actual bees. In an arrangement that could have been lifted from a sitcom plot, Seinfeld thought his work - the self-satisfied bit of wordplay - was done. Instead, Spielberg pressed him to develop the idea and nurture it every step of the way.
The result drew Seinfeld into an uncommon level of investment in the creative process for an animated film's lead performer. Most voice actors record their lines alone, with a nonperformer reading the oppositeparts. But Seinfeld insisted on being present for every reading, while other actors would drift in and out according to their availability. Zellweger often reported to the sound booth sporting a different hair color than from her previous appearance, as she scheduled her recordings in between different live-action movie projects.
"I get the record for most recording sessions for an animated movie," he boasts. (Improvisation, especially opposite fellow stand-ups like Chris Rock, who plays a mosquito, meant the film's script transcriptionist went through 200 drafts.)
"I wasn't doing anything else," Seinfeld says, in straightforward defiance of the conventional Hollywood wisdom that busy-ness, or at least the appearance of it, equals power. "And I like when people talk over each other. It's more realistic. You can't really do that when peoplerecord a year apart."
Inevitably, Seinfeld came up against the question - as do all A-list actors who find themselves the voice of a cartoon character - did he do this because he's now the father of young children? As if swatting at a buzzing fly - or, if you must, bee - he dismissed the idea that anything but creative appeal to him was necessary to draw his interest.
"I just love the look of these kinds of movies. And I thought, that look and my kind of comedy - that'd be a fresh feeling for the audience.
"The simple thing is everything's gotta be fun," he concludes. "I just think: 'What would be fun for me?' If you make everything fun, you don't have to target it to an audience."
Style, Pages 61, 64 on 10/28/2007