He's back - and he's buzzing

Since his sitcom ended, Jerry Seinfeld has steered well clear of Hollywood. It took a wise-cracking cartoon bee to lure him back into the spotlight. The comedian talks to Dave Itzkoff
Jerry Seinfeld
Going hive... Jerry Seinfeld. Photograph: Monica Almeida/New York Times.

In the dressing room of an Atlantic City nightclub, furnished by the request of its current occupant with cheese steaks from the White House Sub Shop and a full array of Tastykake snacks, Jerry Seinfeld is explaining the stand-up comedy ritual of "getting in the bubble": a state of mind that a performer seeks before show time, a few final moments of calm before the tumult of an unpredictable live audience. Minutes later he emerges from the bubble and on to a stage at Resorts, Atlantic City.

  1. Bee Movie
  2. Production year: 2007
  3. Country: USA
  4. Cert (UK): U
  5. Runtime: 100 mins
  6. Directors: Simon J Smith, Steve Hickner
  7. Cast: Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, John Goodman, Matthew Broderick, Renee Zellweger
  8. More on this film

The hour-long routine is a crucial opportunity for Seinfeld to practise his act at a time when he feels, as he often does, that he's not performing enough. More important, it's a warm-up for his biggest leap yet out of his bubble, into a medium he has never attempted before. This week Paramount will release Bee Movie in the US. The DreamWorks animated comedy is by far the most substantial project the 53-year-old comedian has taken on since pulling the plug on his Seinfeld television sitcom in 1998. In the ensuing years Seinfeld has starred in an HBO comedy special and a low-budget documentary, and written a children's book. He has also married, and fathered three children; in whatever spare time remains, continues to perform his stand-up act with a triathlete's zeal.

Yet none of these endeavours - the professional ones at least - has demanded as much of Seinfeld as Bee Movie, a studio feature with a budget of about $150m (£73m) for which he not only supplied the voice of the lead character, a wisecracking honeybee named Barry B Benson, but also helped write the script and spent nearly four years overseeing every element of the production. He is also a central component of the film's marketing campaign, showing up in TV commercials and at live appearances (occasionally dressed in an oversized bee costume), suggesting that this cartoon movie about talking insects is just another part of his indomitable comedic continuum.

But to many fans, and to many people who worked on Bee Movie, the film represents the first real return of Seinfeld since the end of his TV show, a welcoming back after what appeared to be a self-imposed absence. "When you watch this movie, it feels like you've found your best friend who you haven't seen in ages," says Jeffrey Katzenberg, the chief executive of DreamWorks Animation. "It's like, where have you been the last 10 years?" Just don't mention this to the man whose name appears atop the movie poster.

Two days after his Atlantic City appearance, Seinfeld is walking through Central Park on his way to lunch. He is dressed in blue jeans and wears a pair of John Lennon-esque spectacles, offering pointed analysis about anyone who enters his field of vision. Much of Seinfeld's success is predicated on the nonchalant persona he cultivated in his comedy act and on his TV show, and the apparent accessibility that comes from his insightful observations of the quotidian and the ordinary.

The rewards that he has reaped have been substantial: Forbes recently estimated that he makes $60m (£29m) a year, primarily from his share of the syndication revenue Seinfeld still generates. (A representative declined to confirm this figure.) His live touring and royalties from Seinfeld DVD sales also contribute to this sum.

In person he can be affable, but he doesn't hide a certain earned arrogance. While attending the US Open tennis tournament, Seinfeld recalled, he was approached by a well-attired fan who handed him a business card and invited Seinfeld to visit his brokerage house. Both men became noticeably perplexed when the offer was declined. "I said: 'We don't know each other. You're a total stranger,"' Seinfeld recounts. "He says, 'But we really like you.' I said, 'Thank you so much, but this is as far as we go."' Seinfeld adds: "This is a sophisticated guy who doesn't understand that TV only works one way."

In our meeting, Seinfeld is playful but also perturbed about a short article he had read over the weekend in the New York Times, 69 words about Bee Movie that described the film as his effort at "gingerly" re-entering mainstream entertainment. "Gingerly," he says with emphasis. "If they only knew. There was nothing gingerly about this."

Seinfeld likes to tell a story of the film's spontaneous origins, about four years ago at a dinner on Long Island with Steven Spielberg, at which Seinfeld joked that Bee Movie would be a fitting title for a movie about bees, and Spielberg concluded this would actually be a good idea for a film. "I wasn't pitching him," Seinfeld recalls, "but then he started pitching me: 'You gotta make this.'"

Bee Movie represents the culmination of a campaign more than 13 years long, waged by Katzenberg, to recruit Seinfeld into animated movies. Dating to his tenure at the Walt Disney company, Katzenberg had frequently tried to persuade Seinfeld to lend his voice to a cartoon project, but to no avail. "He was always amazingly open and accessible," Katzenberg says, "and incredibly polite and definitely not interested."

At first the reason for Seinfeld's refusals were fairly straightforward: he was still fully invested in his sitcom. But after ending the show, his rationale became more complicated. The unprecedented success he had enjoyed had left him without a clear road map of what to do next.

What persuaded Seinfeld to take on Bee Movie were the assurances by Spielberg, and his DreamWorks partner Katzenberg, that he would have free rein to make the film his way (as well as access to a videoconferencing system so that he could work from New York when necessary), and his naive assumption that it would take three to four months to write a script, record his tracks and finish the job. "I could not have been more wrong," he says. Seinfeld estimates that it took him and three hand-picked writers nearly two-and-a-half years just to complete the script for Bee Movie, the story of a talking bee who falls in love with a human florist and discovers, to his horror, that mankind has been stealing his community's honey.

As Seinfeld became further entrenched in the film's pre-production process, he was in for a rude awakening about how he was really perceived in the entertainment industry. Working with a casting director to recruit voice talent for the film, Seinfeld was given two lists that supposedly represented all the A-list male and female stars in Hollywood. When he looked at the lineup of male performers, he was surprised to find his own name missing from the roster. "I said, 'How come?"' Seinfeld recalls. "She said, 'Because everybody knows you only do your own thing."'

To the extent that Seinfeld engages with Hollywood any more, these interactions are often fraught with ambivalence. "I never get offered things that I think I could really bring something special to," he says, though it is hard to imagine what kind of project he would deem a good fit. Over the years he has turned down his share of offers - most recently, a comedic caper written by David Mamet - often because he cannot find the time, and sometimes through lack of interest. "I could just take parts to act in movies," he says, "but they don't need me."

Nor can Seinfeld understand why the industry seems to believe he has spent his post-sitcom career in a cushy exile of his own design, when he continues to appear at clubs and theatres as much as possible. "That's what I do," he says. "That's all I can do. That's what a comedian is. Our thing is not disappearing into other characters. It's being this character that you are."

Friends who have known Seinfeld for years say that he has always been sharply attuned to the fitness of his stand-up act, and eager to perform it no matter what else was occupying him in his personal or professional life. "When he wasn't out there for a period of time, he would start to get antsy and feel like he was losing his edge," says Larry David, the co-creator of Seinfeld and star of Curb Your Enthusiasm. "The phrase he would use was 'out of shape'. I never looked at it like that."

Still, the rarity with which Seinfeld applies his full creative energies to a project like Bee Movie would seem to add pressure on the film's critical and box-office results, if only to prove that its star remains a powerful draw.

Seinfeld's colleagues agree with him that it is unfair to categorise Bee Movie as a comeback project. "It's not like he's been hurt or injured or anything," David says. "It's not like he tried something and failed, and now has to come back from it. He's just been doing what he wants to do."

Some Bee Movie collaborators are already wondering if Seinfeld's experience on the film could be parlayed into a larger producing career. "Don't think I haven't thought about it," Katzenberg said. "I think about it every day." But Seinfeld quickly snuffs out such pipe dreams. "So I would have an office, I guess," he said, "and people would come in and pitch me something, and I'd go, 'Yeah, that sounds good.' Oh my God, I'd kill myself. Give me a gun."

When his promotional duties for Bee Movie are over, Seinfeld says, he has no concrete plans, except perhaps allowing his daughter to see his stand-up act for the first time and proving to his two sons that their father is more than just a guy who makes films about bees for a living.

He says he took a certain pride in measuring his life against those of other stars - he declines to name names - who have achieved comparable success, but who haven't found the time or the will to settle down and raise a family. "There's certain celebrities," he says, "where I see where they're at, and I know how old they are, and I know what they're doing, and I'm like, 'Yeah, what are you going to do now, Potato Head?'" Seinfeld understands that these same people might derive a similar schadenfreude from seeing him - formerly the quintessential single guy - made over as a happily married man, or in secretly wishing that his remarkable streak of good fortune comes to an end. "I can't imagine that they wouldn't," he says. "I sure would. 'Enough of this guy, it's about time he fell on his face.'"

Then the man who has almost everything considers what he might need most of all. "I think it might be time for that big, juicy flop," he says - as long as it isn't Bee Movie. "Not something that takes this long. I don't want to spend that much time on a flop."

· Bee Movie is released on December 14. ©2007 New York Times News Service

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