Rising Star: Stephen Rannazzisi’s ‘Big Day’

by Tommy Vergason

“Rannazzisi.”

Not the easiest name to remember, perhaps. But Stephen Rannazzisi wants you to remember his name.

Steve is a rising star in Hollywood, and soon remembering his name will not be a problem. With a role in a current feature film and a primetime television series about to make its debut, Steve Rannazzisi is ready to take the world by storm with his good looks, hilarious comic persona and all-American charm. He sat down with Access Hollywood for an exclusive chat about his past, present and future, including the launch of his new ABC sitcom, “Big Day.”

Steve grew up on Long Island in New York, and went to college at a SUNY school upstate, where he got his degree in theatre. He moved to Los Angeles five years ago, and started pursuing stand-up comedy with great success. He started out as a doorman at the world-famous Comedy Store, and began to hone his skills under the guidance of established comedians like Eddie Griffin, Pauly Shore and Andrew Dice Clay. He went on to further his comedic acting skills at The Groundlings School and Theater, and eventually received his first big break in television when he was cast as a field agent on MTV’s smash hit, “Punk’d.” Steve remembers that fateful night when MTV changed his life:

“My big break would be ‘Punk’d.‘ I had never really done TV and film work before. That was my first time in front of a camera. I was doing stand-up at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles, and I was working on a set for ‘The Craig Kilborn Show,‘ and one of the producers of ‘Punk’d’ was in the audience, although I had no idea about that. Anyway, buzz had been building around me for a while, but that particular night didn’t feel good. People were talking through my set – one person would start heckling, and then a person on the other side of the room would start talking to someone, and they’re going back and forth – and I was really upset when I got off-stage because I hadn’t been able to get through some of the stuff I wanted to get through. But, as I’m backstage, this producer comes up to me and says she wants me to audition for a show on MTV. She didn’t tell me what the show was or anything. I said, ‘Sure. No problem.’

“I went down to MTV the next day and they interviewed me – it was literally like an interview, asking me where I’m from, what kind of food do I like, stuff like that. And I thought, what kind of show is this? I thought it was a dating show or something. About three days later, they had me come in and they told me it was an audition for ‘Punk’d.‘ It was basically a three-hour improv audition with Jason Goldberg [the executive producer]. He put me and two other guys through the grinder – we had to play different characters, different people…he’s yelling at us, telling us we’re not good enough – very stressful. I left there thinking nothing would ever come of it. But about five hours later he called and told me he wanted me to meet Ashton Kutcher [the show’s other executive producer and star].”

Steve was picked up by Goldberg the next morning, and brought to Kutcher’s dressing room on the set of “That 70’s Show,” where he met with Aston face-to-face.

“Ashton and I talked for a while – which was surreal, you know, I’d watched him on TV for a long time – and he says he wants me to do a ‘mini-punking’ before I can do any real ones. I was told that we were going to punk his cast mate, Danny Masterson, right then and there. Ashton told me I had to go next door to Danny’s dressing room, and then he told me what my character would be: I was a friend of [Ashton’s] from high school. ‘That’s all I’m gonna give you,‘ he said.”

Steve took a deep breath and sauntered into Masterson’s dressing room without knocking. Masterson was in there with a couple friends and his agent, and asked Steve if he could “help him.” Steve told him he was an old friend of Ashton’s who was visiting, and proceeded to make himself comfortable. He sat down, asked Masterson for a cigarette and proceeded to pocket five of them. Masterson became agitated and asked him what he was doing, to which Steve replied, “I’m here hanging out with my friend – the star of ‘That 70’s Show.‘” Masterson, appalled, gave Steve a lecture on how they were an ensemble, and Kutcher wasn’t the only star of the show. Steve said “Yeah, yeah – you’re the guy with the hair and the glasses. Ashton’s the one who’s in the movies!” As Masterson stood up and started to yell over Steve’s perceived audacity, Kutcher burst in, explained what was going on, and diffused the situation.

Steve’s ‘audition’ with Kutcher was deemed a success, and he went straight from there to participate in a punking of “Saturday Night Live” star Tracy Morgan. He would go on to punk other stars throughout the second season of the show, including Outkast, Missy Elliott, and Taye Diggs, who turned out to be his favorite practical joke subject.

“Taye Diggs is not the kind of person who expects to be punked. He’s kind-of a classy actor, you know? He’s popular, but not in a huge ‘pop-culture’ kind of way. And it turns out he’s deathly afraid of needles. I was playing his doctor, and the beauty of it was I could do anything I wanted to him – he was blinded with fear, because he knew at the end of our visit he would have to get a shot. So I got ridiculous. I took his own shirt off for him, I yelled at him about chewing gum, I accused him of drinking in the morning – he’d had a drink at 1:00 AM the night before – and I made him touch his toes while I got very close up behind him – you know, fun stuff like that. Taye ended up being a great sport. Ashton was there, so he managed to smooth things over at the end. It was always good when Ashton would show up, because people want to see him when this happens. And this joke wasn’t mean-spirited. A lot of the jokes can be mean, and that can be funny, but it’s not as funny as when you just put someone in a ridiculous situation.”

After doing a season of “Punk’d,” Steve began to get recognized by some people, which made the practical jokes difficult. He had a close call with Outkast, who thought he looked familiar and asked if they were being punked, but he managed to turn it around and save the mission anyway. Outkast would be Steve’s final punk-job.

The recognizability factor was about to be turned up a few notches, as Steve began to show up in various national commercials. The most noteworthy of these is the Verizon commercial where Steve sings Foreigner’s song “Urgent” into cell phones on a public street. With a close-up on his face, Steve sings the word ‘Urgent’ in a wide-eyed, panicked over-the-top way…and it’s paid off.

He explains, “This is the kind of recognition I get: ‘Hey, I know you – I went to high school with you.‘”

‘No, I didn’t go to high school with you.”

“Wait – you’re the guy from that commercial – uh, uh, the phone one where – ’Urgent!‘ ’Urgent!‘ –

“Yes. Yes, that’s me.”

“Dude, that commercial is ridiculous.”

Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, Steve doesn’t quite know, but he admits that it’s raised his profile considerably. The commercial is a popular download on YouTube, and was played constantly across the nation for more than a month.

With numerous commercials under his belt, a good following in the world of stand-up comedy, his stint on “Punk’d,” specials on Comedy Central, and a guest role on the short-lived Fox series “Kitchen Confidential,” Steve was slowly starting to climb the Hollywood ladder. It wasn’t long before he took the next inevitable step — a role in a feature film. And what a feature film it was.

“For Your Consideration” is the latest movie from Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy, the creators and stars of “Waiting For Guffman,” “Best In Show,” and “A Mighty Wind.” Known for their stock ensemble of talented comedic actors and their improvisational style, these films have garnered a passionate fan-base and have each opened to much critical acclaim. It was a dream come true for Steve to play a role, albeit small, in such a pedigreed film, and the fact that it was his first movie experience was the icing on the cake. Steve played a security guard opposite veteran comedienne Catherine O’Hara (Beetlejuice, Home Alone) in an early scene in the film.

“Christopher Guest had already shot the entire movie, and when they screened it for test audiences they found that something was missing. They decided to add a scene at the very beginning of the film and one at the very end to set a lighter tone. I had auditioned for the casting director before on different projects, so he already knew me, and when I went in to read for Christopher Guest, I decided right away that it was foolish to attempt to make him laugh – this guy is very funny, you know? So I played it very straight, and I got the call the next day – I was in a friggin’ Christopher Guest movie!”

Steve showed up on set and spent the entire day with O’Hara.

“Catherine O’Hara is one of the most talented human beings on the planet, and to be able to learn even a little bit from her…I mean, the movie is structured, but a lot of it is improv, and to watch her work – trying all sorts of different things – and hearing stories about her days on ‘SCTV’ and other things from her career? Unbelievable.”

As he was shooting “For Your Consideration,” Steve was also working on the new mid-season ABC series, “Big Day,” in which he is a regular cast member. “Big Day” is a sitcom which tells the story of a young couple about to be married. Each of the 13 episodes in season one takes place at a different point on the actual wedding day.

“The entire season takes place in this one day. And, basically, it starts in the morning with the first episode and goes from there. It’s not real time, where every half-hour of the day is covered – we skip some time here and there – but every single moment of every episode takes place on that one day. When we started, I initially thought, are we ever going to leave the house? But we go all over the place. We go to get our tuxedoes in one episode, and end up in a strip club. We get arrested. There’s a war with the neighbors. One character (the groom’s father) is biking to the wedding from Maine, so for the first three episodes he’s on a bike, collecting leaves from each state he goes through. And then he finally shows up for the wedding wearing a kilt. Everything that could possibly go wrong on the wedding day…goes wrong. It’s really amazing – every script we got was funnier than the last one.”

Steve plays the role of “Skobo,” the groom’s best man, and was the first person to be cast. Wendie Malick (Dream On, Just Shoot Me) came aboard soon after, and the rest of the cast began to fill out with television vets such as Stephnie Weir (Mad TV) and Kurt Fuller (Desperate Housewives). The bride and groom are played by two actors familiar to TV audiences, Marla Sokoloff (The Practice) and Josh Cooke (Four Kings). Miriam Shore (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) rounds out the cast as the bride’s sister who, in the first episode, has a sexual encounter with Skobo that ends hilariously (as these things often do). Steve explains:

“I am the groom’s best man. We grew up together, we went to camp together, we were best friends when we were kids. Our lives took different paths. He still works at the camp – he’s very earthy. I became a big-wheeling stock broker who works in Chicago – a very fast-talking, smooth kind of guy. But I become debilitated in the first episode because I sleep with the bride’s sister, and I had put my contact lenses in a glass of water. As I’m getting dressed afterwards, she drinks the glass of water. So I’m basically blind for the first nine or ten episodes. She starts to play tricks on me – in the second episode we all go outside to play football, and she dresses me in Gucci couture sweat pants and a hot pink tight shirt that says “Diva” in rhinestones across the front of it…that’s my outfit for the second episode.”

In light of the fact that the show has the “every episode in one day” conceit, would episodes still take place on the wedding day if the show were to progress beyond one season? Steve says no, the wedding plotline itself will reach a conclusion by the end of the current season. That’s not to say that there aren’t other “big days” this family has to get through in the future. And Steve is confident that it will progress beyond this initial season not only because it’s funny and has great writing and a superb cast, but because it has the full support of its producing company, Sony Pictures Television, and of the ABC network.

“ABC and Sony have been very supportive. Trust me – we wouldn’t be on the air right now if it weren’t for the belief in us from ABC, because right now, they only have one successful half-hour on the air, ‘Help Me Help You.‘ They want something good to go with it to build a strong hour. Our original time-slot was the one ‘Ugly Betty’ has now, but executive forethought decided that ‘Betty’ would be more successful in that slot. If we had started in the fall in that slot, we would have been up against ‘Survivor,‘ ‘My Name is Earl,‘ and the middle of the baseball playoffs. By starting us mid-season, there’s less pressure for us to be a monstrous hit – ‘House’ is a tough show to beat – but ABC will give us the chance to catch on and build an audience, because they really, really like the show.”

And they’re not the only ones. The Hollywood Reporter gives the show a glowing review, saying “Unlike the accident-prone wedding day it depicts, ‘Big Day’ has all of the various elements in place. The casting was superb and the script from Goldsmith and Yuspa is tight and smart…‘Big Day’ looks like a welcome addition to the TV landscape.”

Steve is locked in exclusively to the show for the time being, and that’s his main focus, but he will definitely be auditioning for future film roles. He also plans to continue performing stand-up comedy, which is great news for anyone looking for some good laughs.

“When I first started doing comedy, I saw it as a vehicle to film and TV. But the more I’ve done it – I’ve done it for five years pretty much every single night – the more I feel like I could do it for the rest of my life. It’s so much fun being on stage, saying what I want to say, being ridiculous and expressing my opinions….I would do it forever. I really would.”

“Big Day” premieres this Tuesday, November 28th, at 9:00 PM on ABC. For more information on Stephen Rannazzisi,visit www.stevewho.com.