Denis Leary says Ray Romano called him in a panic over having to fight each other on TV
Everybody might love Raymond, but Ray Romano does not love performing fight choreography, according to one of his frequent collaborators.
Denis Leary, who starred in five Ice Age films with Romano, recently recalled his costar’s anxiety upon learning that the two actors would be performing a fight scene on their 2024 series No Good Deed.
“In real life, we’ve never had a fight, so I don’t know who would win,” Leary said on The Jennifer Hudson Show. “Y’know, Ray and I are getting up there. We’re part of the older generation. And when we signed on [to the show], there was only a couple scripts written, right? And then as we started the show, the other scripts started to come out.”
Leary said Romano didn’t realize what he’d signed up for. “So Ray calls me in a panic, and he goes, ‘Have you seen?’ — whatever it was, episode 4,” he recalled. “I was like, ‘Yeah, I looked at it.’ He goes, ‘There’s a fight scene, there’s a big fight scene.’ And I go, ‘Well there’s another fight scene, she said, coming up after.'”
Romano didn’t think he could handle the physical toll of a fight, according to his castmate. “He goes, ‘I can’t! I got a bad back!'” Leary remembered. “I go, ‘Well, I got two bad knees.’ He goes, ‘We can’t do this!'”
Leary thought otherwise. “And I’m like, ‘Well we’re not going to go back and say we can’t do a fight scene because we’re too old!” he said. “We’ll have stunt guys and we’ll get pads and everything else and we’ll be fine.”
The fight scene turned out to be a bit more difficult than Leary expected, though. “The stunt coordinator said, ‘I want to see you guys go through it, this is what we want,’ and they have some pads on the floor, and everything,” he said. “I’ve got knee pads, Ray’s got back pads and shoulder pads.”
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‘No Good Deed’
Leary and Romano performed the scene confidently at first. “Ray and I go, ‘Okay, we can do this,'” Leary explained. “So we go through what we think is a really cool-looking fight scene, right? Roll around on the ground, and I get back up and Ray’s pretending to punch me and I’m pretending to take the punches. And we go, ‘What do you think?'”
It turned out that Leary’s assessment of his performance wasn’t quite accurate. “She goes, ‘It’s horrible! You guys are moving in slow motion! How old are you?'” he remembered. “It was so embarrassing. So then we had to learn to speed it up. I think we did a pretty good job.”
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Leary said his and Romano’s involvement was necessitated by the logistics of the scene’s setting. “The stunt guys did as much as they could, but they had to use us, because it’s a bedroom scene, so they were close on our faces,” he recalled. “We did it all day, and in between, me and Ray are taking Advil, and ice packs, and I’m like, ‘You know, we’re getting up there!'”
