Richard Karn’s road to landing his iconic role as Al Borland on Home Improvement was anything but ordinary. But it did involve a road! The actor blames Shakespeare for setting everything in motion.
“I’m doing Shakespeare’s Scottish play, which has a lot of bad juju associated with it,” Karn shared on the Pod Meets World podcast, referring to Macbeth. “People have died, had accidents…there are real witch incantations in that play.”
After one rehearsal, he was driving home when the superstition seemed to catch up with him. “I know there’s a stop sign, but I see in my peripheral there’s nothing going on and I kind of roll through it. The next thing I know there’s a cop behind me.”
That ticket forced Karn into an all-day, in-person traffic school. He wasn’t thrilled, until he realized fate had seated him next to an agent from the Gersh Agency. The two struck up a conversation, and she mentioned a new sitcom in the works starring stand-up comic Tim Allen.
“At first, they told me there was nothing for me, that I was too much like Tim,” Karn recalled. The producers had originally cast Stephen Tobolowsky as Al, Tim’s friend and co-host. But when Tobolowsky had to drop out for a play in New York, Karn got his chance.
He went in to read and was asked, “Can you make the lathe sound like a question?” With his professional training, he nailed it and the rest, as they say, is television history.
