Blame it on Conrad Bain

Would you believe that Alec Baldwin nearly turned down the part in 30 Rock... because of Conrad Bain...?

Baldwin was wary. It was a sitcom, and he had played Macbeth and Stanley Kowalski on the New York stage. His mind turned to the example of Conrad Bain, the actor with a fine theatrical background who came to be Philip Drummond, the white father of two adopted African-American boys, on “Diff’rent Strokes.” Embroidering on this thought, Baldwin imagined an actor who signs up for the quick money of a sitcom pilot quite confident that the show will never be commissioned: “The agent’s saying, ‘Don’t worry, it’s the biggest piece of shit in the history of show business.’ Cut to six years later: you’re in your dressing room, you’re in season five, and on the wall are posters of you from the New York Shakespeare Festival—these achingly beautiful posters on the wall. By that point, you’re making a hundred and seventy-five thousand a week, you’ve got a house in East Hampton, you’re getting laid constantly, you’ve got closets of beautiful Italian suits, and you’ve got three cars in the garage and you’re paying alimony to your ex-wife who’s living down in Florida. And you’re doing the same jokes, again and again and again.”

As with most New Yorker articles, this Alec Baldwin profile boasts an absurdly excessive word-count. (9 pages? Really??) But it's still an interesting read.

I'm reeling from the Wikipedia revelation that Conrad Bain has an identical twin brother named Bonar Bain. Just when you think you know everything there is to know about Conrad Bain, man... EL BLAMMO...