Illustration by Michael Dunbabin; Source photograph by Kevin Winter / Getty
Alan Alda was not likely to appear in our pages before, even though we knew about this work that he has been doing starting some years ago. Not likely because celebrity is more often than not a distraction. But this conversation is worth sharing, because we care about science, and effective communication about science:
Alan Alda Is Still Awesome
The actor and director talks about his podcast, the comedic chops of Volodymyr Zelensky, and being called an “honorary woman.”
Few actors inspire the warm fuzzies like Alan Alda. At eighty-six, he’s still the platonic ideal of “nice dad”: the type of guy you’d find in a cardigan, reading a copy of the Sunday Times in an armchair. But the popular image of Alda doesn’t cover the remarkable breadth of his career. There was, of course, his eleven-year run playing Hawkeye on “m*a*s*h,” the era-defining wartime dramedy. (The series finale, which Alda directed, is still the highest-rated episode of a scripted series ever aired.) He was a genial presence in Woody Allen movies in the eighties and nineties, a voice in Marlo Thomas’s children’s album “Free to Be . . . You and Me,” a Republican Presidential candidate on “The West Wing,” an aging hippie in “Flirting With Disaster,” and a kind but inept divorce lawyer in “Marriage Story.” During the “m*a*s*h” years, Alda was an outspoken advocate in the feminist movement. He’s directed four movies, written three books, and, from 1993 to 2005, hosted PBS’s “Scientific American Frontiers,” becoming a kind of pop-culture science teacher. In 2009, he helped create the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, at Stony Brook University.
These days, Alda’s primary occupation is podcaster. He recently released the two-hundredth episode of “Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda,” on which he has interviewed authors, artists, scientists, and luminaries, including Yo-Yo Ma, Helen Mirren, Stephen Breyer, and Madeleine Albright. (It has an all-science offshoot, “Science Clear+Vivid.”) His conversational style, as you might expect, is gentle, informed, and unendingly curious. When Alda appeared on my Zoom screen recently, he wore tortoiseshell glasses and occasionally sipped from a blue mug with a sailboat on it. His right hand had a visible tremor, a symptom of Parkinson’s disease. He was at his house on Long Island, where he’s spent the pandemic with his wife of sixty-five years, Arlene Alda. When he’s not preparing for his podcast, he and Arlene play chess during the day (“She’s just beaten me three times in a row, which she’s exultant over”) and ladder ball before dusk, then eat a nice dinner and binge-watch TV shows (lately, Scandinavian family dramas). “It’s not noisy in the country,” Alda said. “I don’t have to show up places. Places come to me.” Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
What made you want to become a podcaster in your eighties?
It was to help the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science. Whatever income comes in from the podcast goes directly to the center. We’ve trained about twenty thousand scientists in nine different countries to communicate science better. But the podcast is fun just in itself, so it’s a double whammy for me. It’s about communicating in every way, which includes through acting, music, food. I get to talk to some of the most interesting and smartest people in the world.
Do you have a guiding philosophy for interviewing?
I do, and that is to have a genuine conversation and not ask them questions that I prepared in advance. It should come out of genuine curiosity, because that opens the other person up. I realized, while I was doing “Scientific American Frontiers,” that I was making use of things I’d learned as an improviser and as an actor.
How does improvisation help you communicate with people who are not actors?
Improvising requires relating. I’m not talking about comedy improvising—I’m talking about improvising based on the work of Viola Spolin. You have to observe the other person. You have to be watching their face, their body language, because from that you find out what they’re really saying to you. When I would be talking to the scientists, it took them out of lecture mode and put them in conversational mode.
I’m going to try to keep all this in mind as I ask you questions.
You know, it’s funny. For the book that I wrote about this, called “If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?,” which is in a nutshell what we’re talking about, I think three people who interviewed me said, “I’m taking the challenge. I’m closing my laptop right now.”
Helping scientists communicate is a real passion of yours. Were you seeing a problem you wanted to help solve?
It didn’t occur to me that there was a problem to be solved. What we were doing on the television show was useful to making science more accessible to the public, and I wondered, If we trained scientists, starting from actually improvising, would they be able to relate to the audience the way they were relating to me? I did a kind of experiment. One day I was at a university in L.A., and I had twenty engineering students come in one at a time to talk to the others about their work. Then we improvised for three hours and they talked again, and everybody in the room was surprised at how much clearer it was, how connected they were to the audience, not just rattling it off at them. Later, we developed a curriculum.
Can you give an example of an improv exercise that you’ve done with scientists?
One of the most basic things is the Mirror Exercise. Let’s you and I do it. You be my mirror. [He holds his palms up.] No matter what I do, you have to instantaneously do the same thing. [I put my hands up to the screen. His hands drift apart and then together, and I follow. Then he jerks his right hand to the side, and my left hand trails behind.] Now, did you see what just happened? Why weren’t you able to keep up with me?
Was I not concentrating?
Read the whole conversation here.
Organikos 
Interesting man, Alan Alda. You need to read ‘Never have your dog stuffed and other things ive learned.’
Hi, found that memoir online just now, thank you for mentioning it.
It’s a worthwhile read. Alan Alda had such an interesting life before we met him.