Two of the world’s greatest character actors once worked together as private investigators

In its purest form, acting is a wonderful game invented. If you’re good enough to do this for a living, you show up to work every day and get under someone’s skin. You can be someone as harmless as a loving father or as vicious as a cold-blooded killer. The job requires you to be a master of empathy; you may not like the person you play, but you must understand him well enough to make his desires believable, if not relatable, to your audience. It’s a fun, scary violent act, and the deeper you get into it, the harder it can be to break out of character.

This of course depends on how you approach the craft. If you are an actor with methodical training like Robert De Niroyou become your character. If, however, you’re a seasoned storyteller who prefers to play the short game, you can dip into and out of character with little mental effort. This is where acting becomes indistinguishable from lying. This approach still requires that essential sense of acting that all actors possess, but it can be disconcerting to outsiders because there is no emotional support. One moment you’re effortlessly swaying your married man into adultery, and an hour later you’re losing your temper and going home for the day.

Sounds like a private investigator, right? Would it surprise you to know that two of the most talented characters of the past 30 years once worked part-time in this profession? Maybe not, but you’ll be blown away to find out which actors have made it big in the industry.

two weeks ago comic book writer Ryan Estrada went viral on Bluesky by telling his followers that Wayne Knight and Margot Martindale once supplemented their acting income by working for the same detective agency. yes Newman from Seinfeld and Magazines from Justified used their acting talents to potentially catch people in a lie.

According to Knight, he took the gig as a side hustle so he wouldn’t have to rely on unemployment. How did he get into this line of work? As Knight told Vice in 2015:

“(I) was an officer like everybody else when I first started. And I had a friend who said, “Well, I have a job that might interest you.” I go, “Yeah? What is this? And he says, “I’m a private investigator.” I’m like, ‘What? You have no police experience. Were you taught that?” “No.” “How did you get hired?” He says, “Well, they like to hire actors. Because they are usually smart, talkative, can play different roles and have no scruples.”

Knight’s penchant for fallibility allowed him to hop on the phone and bust unfaithful spouses and, more ambitiously, corporate executives and high-ranking military men looking to cash in on the world of venture capitalism. He used the pseudonym “Bill Monty” to keep the ruse going as long as necessary, and was so successful that he tried to turn the experience into a sitcom or movie over the past few decades.

As for Martindale, she was much less enamored with the gig. As she told Backstory in 2020“They hired a lot of actors. I didn’t have very interesting jobs, but everything involved extracting information from unsuspecting people for bounty hunters, for husbands who were jealous, for wives who looked at their husbands out of spite.” She added that while the men occasionally went out into the fields, the women were stuck working on the phones. If this raunchy story is to be made into a movie or TV series, I’d like it to be told from Martindale’s point of view.