Unlike Charlie, Mr. Mull — whose wryly acerbic characters span “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” “Fernwood Tonight,” “Roseanne” and “Veep” — doesn’t show signs of winding down. He is also in truTV’s “I’m Sorry,” playing Martin, the father of the creator Andrea Savage’s character.
A painter who studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, he spends eight-hour days in his studio when he’s not shooting. He appears in gallery shows and his work has landed in the Whitney and Metropolitan museums, and the collections of celebrities including Steve Martin and Robin Williams. In a phone interview from the Los Angeles area, where he lives with his wife, the musician Wendy Haas Mull, Mr. Mull, amusingly self-deprecating at 75, pondered growing old, “Roseanne” and the current state of Hollywood.
Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
So, how does 75 feel?
Well, it really doesn’t feel much different than 35 between my ears, but when I get out of bed in the morning, I realize I’m driving a used car. It’s a drag but it’s not indomitable.
What’s the deal with your character, Charlie?
Charlie basically is kind of where I am in a way, and that is, there comes a point in your life where your memory and imagination become kind of melded. You’re not really sure all the time if you’re telling the exact truth or the way you wanted it to be. And Charlie comes up with things every now and then that are extremely questionable, both in his judgment and his memory. But he’s not suffering from any kind of mental collapse. He’s just kind of an aging hippie, which, again, would be me.
Do you think Charlie Day was envisioning a sort of “It’s Always Sunny” for the geriatric set?
Whether it’s true or not, I had heard that he had worked in a retirement home and that’s where all of this came from. What’s interesting is even though that would indicate that we’re dealing with a lot of old-people issues, we’re really not. The emphasis here is that the calendar is not necessarily the best barometer. It’s the character of the person — and we’re as capable of doing things that teenagers do as anyone.
