‘The First Time’ With Actor Rob Huebel
Rob Huebel may be an actor-comedian, but his role on HBO’s I Know This Much Is True — in which he plays Mark Ruffalo’s best friend Leo — is pretty serious. “It’s not funny at all,” he notes in the latest installment of “The First Time.” “It is so awesome and layered and complexed. It’s Mark Ruffalo. It’s all Mark Ruffalo.”
In the clip above, Huebel kicks off with discussing one of his first auditions — a Cheerios commercial — when a six-year-old child started crying, and then abruptly reprimanded himself. Huebel imitates the tearful kid: “‘I don’t want to be here! I don’t want to be here! No! You will NOT do this!’ I was like, “Wow, this kid is fucked.'”
He traces the evolution of Children’s Hospital, which began as a dark comedy web series in 2008, was picked up by Adult Swim in 2010 and resulted in the Netflix spin-off Medical Police in 2020. “That was the joy of my life,” he says of the latest incarnation. “It’s so weird, because Medical Police parallels what we’re living through right now,” he says. “But [Rob Corddry] wrote it a year before any of this happened.”
Elsewhere in the video, Huebel describes recently watching I Know This Much Is True with his wife. “She goes, ‘That’s just you, you’re just doing you,” he says. “I don’t get to do a ton of drama, I love doing it, but for my wife to say, ‘you’re not even doing anything,’ that hurt my feelings.”
The finale of I Know This Much Is True airs on HBO this Sunday night, June 14th, at 9 p.m.