Direct From Hollywood with Ryan Seacrest: How 9 Perfect Strangers’ Murray Bartlett Discovered His Love of Acting by Getting His Teeth Knocked Out

9 Perfect Strangers star Murray Bartlett revealed his love of acting all began...with getting his front 4 teeth knocked out...

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Direct from Hollywood with Ryan Seacrest.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Most stars have fond memories of how they first discovered
their love of acting, but Murray Bartlett's memory is actually
a painful one, literally getting his teeth knocked out. Murray,
best known for playing the doomed resort manager Armin on
Season one of White Lotus and most recently, the puppeteer
on nine Perfect Strangers, was about four years old when
his not much older brother tried to kill a spider
with a hammer and accidentally knocked out Murray's two front

(00:24):
teeth instead. Then, only weeks later, Murray tripped and knocked
the bottom two out all by himself, which gave him
a gaping hole in his teeth, and in turn, he
developed a bad lisp, and the list persisted even when
eventually it grew his adult teeth. So his mom sent
him to a speech therapist, and that's where the magic happened,
he tells movie maker. She had me learning monologues and poems.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
I just absolutely loved it.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
So I kept working with her for years doing speech
and drama things, and it felt like my thing. So
I went to a high school with a great theater
program and auditioned for an acting school and eventually moved
to New York to pursue professionally. That's Murray Bartlett, who
adds there are plenty of anxious moments wondering if he'd
made the right decision, but eventually it all worked out.
Nine Perfect Strangers. He's in it. It's on Hulu

Speaker 1 (01:02):
That's direct from Hollywood.