Kirk Fox, a comedian and actor on “Parks and Recreation,” “Jury Duty” and “Reservation Dogs,” as well as a novelist with “Palmdale,” released in June, credits his Hollywood success to an unlikely source.
Tennis.
“Tennis was the agent for my first 10 movies,” Fox proudly told the California Post in an interview for the “California Roots” series.
When pried for his best Hollywood tennis story, he replied: “I was teaching tennis to Lawrence Kasdan. And when he was doing ‘Wyatt Earp,’ he asked me if I could ride a horse, and I told him, ‘Like the wind.’ And on that first day, he realized immediately that I couldn’t ride a horse, so he put me on a very small horse so that his tennis pro wouldn’t get hurt.”
Fox, who hails from San Diego, where he played tennis at UCSD, also found a very different sort of side hustle from tennis.
“Everyone I was teaching tennis to wanted me to look into something, so you can call it whatever you want,” Fox explained. “I think at the end of the day, we’re all private investigators. I don’t know anyone that’s not investigating something.”
Years later, Fox channeled his amateur P.I. work into his debut novel, “Palmdale.”
“It’s about a private investigator who’s teamed up with his daughter that he hasn’t seen in a long time,” Fox said. “And they’re investigating a body that was found in Palmdale, and we traced it back to Bel Air. It’s very noir. It’s a lot of Humphrey Bogart, Mickey Spillane. It’s gritty, it’s dusty.”
Fox wrote some of what ended up in “Palmdale” decades ago, and is now writing a sequel set in San Diego.
“Every day I write, I just never finished anything,” Fox said. “So I’m still scratching that itch. And I write all my stand up.”
That’s right. Along with acting (Fox will next appear in Sterlin Harjo’s “Reservation Dogs” follow-up “The Lowdown” on FX), he took up stand-up comedy and has now “gone up more than 6,000 times.”
“My first show was November 10, 2002 at the Comedy Store,” Fox recalled. “I was deep in my 30s and I needed something to do at night.”
That gig bombed. “I will say it was the last time I talked about religion,” Fox said.
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[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
