Inside the Golden Globe Nominated Comedy TRANSPARENT with Producer Rick Rosenthal

Producer/Director Rick Rosenthal previews his new Golden Globe-nominated comedy series Transparent and discusses some of his past successes including Halloween II and discovering Sean Penn at the beginning of his career for the 1983 drama Bad Boys.

“It’s about a dysfunctional family, and that’s why everybody in America is watching it, because is there a family that isn’t a dysfunctional family?” Rick says about the universal appeal of the Amazon Prime original series.

“It reminded me a little bit of when I was producing… a series a long time ago called Life Goes On, about a family who had a Down Syndrome son. But it was really about a family who had an underdog in their family – and every family has an underdog.”

He relates this same concept to Transparent, in that people are responding to and relating to the struggles of the various characters in the family, which include Jeffrey Tambor, who portrays the family patriarch who is beginning the process of transgender transformation.

The series is nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Comedy Series and Tambor picked up a Globe nom for Best Performance by an Actor in a Comedy.

“It’s really about how does the family deal with all of its issues in a big family that has all sorts of secrets – it’s like every family,” Rick said.

He added that Transparent actually came out of the movie Afternoon Delight, which won writer/director Jill Soloway a Best Director award at Sundance.

Amazon was so impressed with that film and her body of work that they were anxious to do business with her, so she ended up creating Transparent, which is partly based on her own personal experiences, Rick said.

Addressing his early film work, Rick said his involvement with the iconic Halloween franchise came about when he was showing a horror short around town and it caught the attention of the agent representing Halloween writer John Carpenter.

“What we never anticipated was that a few months later he called me up and said, ‘How would you like to do Halloween II?’” He explains that he basically “lucked out” by getting the film, since Halloween II had a director, but had to drop out of the project, and his scary short was just what they were looking for.

Rick also talks about casting Sean Penn in his first leading role for the film Bad Boys, which also starred iconic ‘80s actress Ally Sheedy.

Tom Cruise also read for the Penn’s role, but Rick said he just wasn’t believable as a street kid, which was crucial to the part. He said Penn came in and pulled off a “phenomenal” audition.

“It was just everything you could want – emotional, physical, and dangerous, and it was Sean Penn.”

He explains that when he requested that Penn do the audition for a recorded copy, the actor declined, saying if he does it once, he preferred not to perform it again during actual filming. “I liked that logic. I mean, I bought it, I understood it, I was like, okay, great, sold. But I’ve got to sell these other guys.”

So Penn agreed to go into a studio with Rick and do some improv work, which ended up turning into an incredible monologue. “It was the single, best monologue I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said of Penn’s powerful performance that secured his spot as lead in Bad Boys.

Watch the full interview to also hear Rick talk about the differences between directing television and film, as well as another producing project - the comedy film Match, starring Patrick Stewart.