“It was rough”: the one and only regret of Billy Crystal’s career
A lot of the characters and storylines we see in movies and on TV, we take for granted, forgetting that back in the day, mindsets weren’t always as accepting, and there had to be people who were willing to do it first.
An example of that is Billy Crystal, who, in the 1970s, which was a very, very different time in America, played one of the first openly gay characters on a network television show.
Crystal had been a stand-up comic in his native New York and had managed to get involved in the very first season of Saturday Night Live in 1975, although his onscreen appearances were limited to just one small role in one episode. Nevertheless, he was then cast in a sitcom called Soap, which was a parody of the usual daytime soap operas but with far-fetched, sometimes controversial plotlines, including student-teacher relationships and alien abductions.
Barely any gay characters had been seen on TV in the US up to that point, certainly not any that openly admitted to it, but Crystal’s character, named Jodie Dallas, had dates with other men, and his relationship issues with other characters, like closeted American footballers, would form regular parts of the plot. That was unheard of at the time, but it showed that what was going on in America in the ‘70s with the first Pride marches and the 1974 election of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay American to be elected to public office, was having an effect.
Crystal didn’t take the role lightly, and neither did he take it on without some soul searching. What’s surprising, perhaps, is that many years later, he reflected on whether it was the right thing to do, despite the fact that he was honoured by the industry several times for it.
He told Time Magazine it was a tough decision, explaining, “I had a stand-up career that was starting to bloom, and I had a lot of trepidation doing it. You know, if I had any regrets in my career, as much as I enjoy learning more about acting, I would have said no to Soap and continued to develop my stand-up.”
Regardless, he was somewhat appreciative of his choice too, adding, “I loved the time, and what we did on the show was important. But I think if I looked back, yeah, I should have waited for something that may have fit me better.”
Despite that, his career went from strength to strength after the show ended four seasons later in 1981, starring in films like This is Spinal Tap and then reaching his peak in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, winning a host of awards for movies including The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, City Slickers and Analyze This with Robert De Niro.
Meanwhile, in 2005, he picked up a Tony award for his one-man play called 700 Sundays, written about his childhood growing up on Long Island, NY, and more than 20 years later, Crystal has just announced he’ll be returning to Broadway with a follow-up, this time named 860. Again, it will be centred around the comic’s past, but this time using the 2025 fires that swept through Los Angeles and destroyed the home he had shared with his wife Janice Goldfinger for almost 50 years, and will run for a three-month period, starting in October this year.
