Tudyk

Even if you’re not sure you’ve seen Alan Tudyk in the numerous films or TV shows he’s appeared in, you’ve definitely heard him. Tudyk has been endearing audiences with his vocal stylings ever since 2002’s “Ice Age” — he voiced characters like the Duke of Weselton in “Frozen,” Heihei the rooster in “Moana” and King Candy in “Wreck-It Ralph.”

In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.

Still, many fans know Tudyk best for his sci-fi and genre roles, including his four-season run as Dr. Harry Vanderspeigle of Syfy’s “Resident Alien,” which comes to an end with its final episode on Friday. “It’s a tough goodbye,” says Tudyk. “Fingers crossed for the reboot ‘Resident Alien versus Predator.’” In the meantime, you can catch him as Gary in 2025’s “Superman” and as K-2SO in “Andor,” for which he recently netted an Emmy nomination, as you await the handful of upcoming live-action and voice-over projects Tudyk has in the works.

We caught up with the busy actor to discuss his perfect L.A. day, which would involve, first things first, coffee. “I have to say that the last thing that Charissa [Barton, his wife] and I are thinking of when we go to sleep is, ‘I can’t wait to have more coffee tomorrow,’” he admits. “It’s such a beautiful promise for a new day.”

Also vital on any great Sunday is time with Charissa and their dogs, Raisin and Clara, a lot of delicious gluten-free food, shopping, writing time and a car nap. And then there’s their crucial tradition: a music listening session leading up to a very important decision. “I choose a summer song every year,” he said. “It’s down to the final. There’ve been songs that come and go all summer long that are potential songs. We choose the summer song, and to celebrate, we go eat some more.”

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

7 a.m.: Coffee and a dog run in the Hollywood Hills
I bounce right out of bed, and I have some coffee that I make at home, Intelligentsia Coffee with oat milk. I use a frother, and a little bit of granulated monk fruit sugar on top. I love that stuff. I feed my dogs, Raisin and Clara. And then we go for a run in the Hollywood Hills, near the Hollywood sign up in the Beachwood Canyon area, around where people rent horses to go horseback riding. Raisin, a terrier mix, is 15 and a half. She has run those hills her whole life; she’s chased coyotes over the edge. Just disappears into the brush of the canyon and comes back smiling. She’s 10 pounds. And Aunt Clara, a 20-pound goofball cockapoo, stays by my side because half of her is an obedient dog and the other half is afraid. But Raisin is in charge of the world, and she can do what she wants.

9:30 a.m.: Two (gluten-free) breakfasts at Honey Hi
We come back home, I quickly shower, and my wife then wakes up, because she sleeps longer than me. And we all go to Honey Hi, a gluten-free breakfast place, mainly. We can bring the dogs, as long as they’re on leashes. Although, yeah, Raisin prefers to be carried, especially after an hour-long hike chasing coyotes.

I order two breakfasts, because I’ve been jogging and I’m hungry and all I’ve had is coffee, which seems really like a bad idea. It sounds like a recipe for a stomachache. I get the community bowl, which is just so very healthy and tasty. And also the pancakes, because one breakfast isn’t enough. I eat half the pancakes and my wife eats the other half. So it’s really just one and a half breakfasts.

11 a.m.: A stop at Wacko
We go up to Wacko on our way back home. It’s over on Sunset Boulevard, where Sunset and Hollywood kind of become one, right around Vermont. Wacko is a store that sells collectible stuff, but also a lot of books. If you ever want to get a cool book for somebody that’s more like a picture book or an artist book or a coffee table-type book, they have those. And in the back is La Luz de Jesus Gallery. We always go in there and check out what local artists are being hung.

11:45 a.m.: 15-minute car nap
We come back out to our car and turn on the air conditioner, and we have a good little 15-minute nap, to get the energy to drive. And nobody even bothers us, and we’ve found great parking. It’s a perfect day.

12:15 p.m.: Coffee No. 2 and some bagels
On our way home, we stop at Blue Bottle Coffee on Hillhurst. There’s a Pop’s Bagels truck that parks outside of that coffee shop up until about 3 p.m. every day. And they have gluten-free bagels. So we’ll just grab some of those for later, and we get a second coffee — a nice oat milk latte. I get like three to four coffees a day.

1:30 p.m.: Writing time at home
We love our house, so we’re probably going to spend a little time at home. The dogs nap. I write, and my wife reads. Writing always makes a day better, so let’s do one hour solid. When you get done, you’re like, OK, you’ve got to come back to the world.

3 p.m.: A perfect burger for a perfect day
Then it’s time to eat more. Oh my God. We have to eat. We drive to Crossroads on Melrose and have that burger of theirs. It’s on their weekday menu, but on this magical Sunday, let’s say they happen to offer their weekday menu. It’s like an Impossible vegan burger, but it tastes just like a double cheeseburger from McDonald’s, with a gluten-free bun. And the fries are delicious. You also want to get the kale Caesar salad on the side. It’s just fantastic. We decide to splurge and get their vegan chocolate sundae.

4 p.m.: Coffee No. 3 and shopping at Dover Street Market
We should probably get some more coffee, and good thing there’s a Blue Bottle just off Melrose. Then we go to the Arts District downtown, to this cool clothing store called Dover Street Market. Some people will say, “Alan, but aren’t you old? Why would you be shopping at Dover Street Market? Those are really hip clothes.” Look, first of all, Charissa pulls off a lot of really hip stuff, and I can almost keep up with her. So there’s stuff for people in their fifties, and we find those items and we buy them. They’ve got stuff from really hip Japanese brands and local fashion people, and they’ve also got stuff that’s like skatewear. I don’t skate anymore, but it doesn’t mean I can’t wear some skate brands now, because I left a lot of the skin from my knees and elbows in ditches and on streets and launch ramps back in the ‘80s. Skate or die. Which at this point, if I did skate, I would die.

So we go there and we shop and spend a little too much money. And there’s Rose Bakery in the back, and they have a strawberry cake that is gluten-free and delicious.

6 p.m.: Crown the 2025 Song of the Summer
We take the cake that we bought at Dover Street, and we go sit in the car and listen to music while we eat cake and trade songs back and forth between us, deciding on the song of the summer. This summer’s vibe for me — because it’s been such a crazy time in the world, I need an escape from it — I really have been trying to find songs that take me away from everything. It’s between “Punkrocker” [by Teddybears featuring Iggy Pop], the song on the credits of “Superman”; “Chaperone,” from Mermaid Chunky, and “Pick Up the Phone,” by Sofi Tukker. And although “Pick Up the Phone” almost edges it out, “Chaperone” wins the day because of the madness of the summer of 2025. You need something that matches the madness but chooses absurdity, and it really does a great job.

7 p.m.: Pork chop and peaches at Manuela
Since we’re downtown, we go to Manuela. It is so very good. I get the pork chop. So if anybody was reading this thinking, Oh, he’s all about the vegan, hell no. This is the moment. The pork chop at Manuela is on the menu at all times, and it is fantastic, and especially great right now because they serve it with fresh peaches. It’s like a whole peach. And Charissa gets something with fish. Charissa has a nice glass of white wine, and I have some silly mocktail that isn’t too sweet, because I’m driving. On the way home, on Hillhurst near Franklin, we’ll stop at Alcove Cafe and Bakery, which has the best gluten-free carrot cake you could ever put near your face.

9:30 p.m.: Cake and Colbert in bed
We take the cake home with us, and in bed we watch Colbert and eat cake and then brush our teeth because there’s been so much cake. And then we will be up for another hour, but I don’t want to get into it what goes on. But that’s still part of the day after Colbert leaves.

Alan Tudyk was nearly 50 when he scored his first starring role in a TV series as the titular extraterrestrial Harry Vanderspeigle in Syfy’s “Resident Alien.” It’s not that he was underemployed or little known — he’s been celebrated in genre circles since “Firefly,” the 2002 single-season western-themed space opera in which he played the sweet, comical pilot of a spaceship captained by smuggler Mal, played by Nathan Fillion, with whom he has since been linked in the interested public mind, like Hope and Crosby, or Fey and Poehler. His own 2015 web series “Con Man” (currently available on Prime Video), based on his experiences at sci-fi conventions, in which he and Fillion play inverted versions of themselves, was funded by an enormously successful crowd-sourced campaign, which raised $3,156,178 from 46,992 backers; clearly the people love him.

You can’t exactly call “Resident Alien” career-making, given how much Tudyk has worked, going back to onscreen roles in the late 20th century and on stage in New York, but it has made him especially visible over a long period in a marvelous show in a part for which he seems to have been fashioned. He has, indeed, often been invisible, with a parallel career as a voice artist, beginning with small parts in “Ice Age” in 2002; since channeling Ed Wynn for King Candy in Disney’s 2012 “Wreck-It Ralph” (which won him an Annie Award), the studio has used him regularly, like a good luck charm. You can hear him in “Frozen” (Duke of Weselton), “Big Hero 6” (Alistair Krei), “Zootopia” (Duke Weaselton), “Moana” (Hei Hei), “Encanto” (Pico) and “Wish” (Valentino). He played the Joker on “Harley Quinn” and voices Optimus Prime in “Transformers: EarthSpark.” Performing motion capture and voice-over, he was Sonny the emotional android in “I, Robot” and the dry droid K-2SO in both “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” and again in “Andor.” (He’s a robot again in the new “Superman” film.) This is a partial, one could even say fractional, list. Among animation and sci-fi fans, being the well-informed sorts they are, Tudyk is known and honored for this body of work as well.

Alan Tudyk at his home in Los Angeles last year. The actor has been in a variety of roles onscreen, on stage and as a voice actor.

(Ethan Benavidez / For The Times)

“Resident Alien,” whose fourth season is underway on Syfy, USA and Peacock (earlier seasons are available on Netflix, which has raised the show’s profile considerably), is a small town comedy with apocalyptic overtones. It sees Tudyk’s alien, whose natural form is of a giant, big-eyed, noseless humanoid with octopus DNA, imperfectly disguised as the new local doctor, whom he kills in the first episode. (We will learn that the doctor was, in fact, an assassin, which makes it sort of … all right?) Learning English from reruns of “Law & Order,” the being now called Harry will preposterously succeed in his masquerade, and in doing so, join a community that will ultimately improve him. (By local standards, at least.) It’s a fish way, way out of water story, with the difference that the fish has been sent to kill all the Earth fish — I am being metaphorical, he isn’t actually out to kill fish — although he is now working to save them from a different, nastier race of alien.

Some actors play their first part and suddenly their name is everywhere; others slide into public consciousness slowly, through a side door — which may lead, after all, to a longer, more varied career. Tudyk has the quality of having arrived, despite having been there all along. Like many actors with a long CV, he might surprise you, turning up on old episodes of “Strangers With Candy,” “Frasier,” “Arrested Development” or “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” or repeatedly crying “Cramped!” in a scene from “Patch Adams,” or in the movies “Wonder Boys,” “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Tale” or “3:10 to Yuma.” You might say to yourself, or the person you’re watching with, “Hey, that’s Alan Tudyk.” (You might add, “He hasn’t aged a bit.”) It was “Suburgatory,” an underloved ABC sitcom from 2011, though not underloved by me, where he played the confused best friend of star Jeremy Sisto, that, combined with “Firefly,” cemented Tudyk in my mind as someone I would always be happy to see.

He’s handsome in a pleasant, ordinary way. If he’s not exactly Hollywood’s idea of a leading man, it only points up the limitations of that concept. His eyes are maybe a trifle close set, his lips a little thin. There’s a softness to him that feeds into or productively contrasts with his characters, depending on where they fall on the good-bad or calm-hysterical scales. (In the current season of “Resident Alien,” a shape-shifting giant praying mantis has taken over Harry’s human identity, and this evil twin performance, which somehow fools Harry’s friends, is as frightening as the fact that the mantis eats people’s heads.) It makes his robots relatable and roots his more flamboyant characters, like Mr. Nowhere, the villain in the first season of “Doom Patrol” — who comments on the series from outside the fourth wall, inhabiting a white void where he might be discovered sitting on a toilet and reading a review of the show he’s in — in something like naturalism.

Sara Tomko and Alan Tudyk in a scene from Season 4 of “Resident Alien.”

(USA Network / James Dittiger / USA Network)

As Harry, Tudyk is never really calm. Relaxed neither in voice nor body, he tucks his lips inside his mouth and stretches it into a variety of blobby shapes. The actor can seem to be puppeteering his own expressions, which, in a way Harry is, or splitting the difference between a real person and an animated cartoon, in the Chuck Jones/Tex Avery sense of the term, which is not to say Tudyk overplays; he just hits the right note of exaggeration. Harry often has the air of being impatient to leave a scene and get on with whatever business he’s decided is important.

Though he’s given to explosive bursts of speech, as the character has developed, the humor he plays becomes more subtle and quiet, peppered with muttered comments and sotto voce asides he means to be heard. He is, as he likes to point out, the smartest and most powerful being around, but he has the emotional maturity of a child. At one point, having lost his alien powers, Harry was willing to sacrifice the entirety of his species to get them back.

Where once he had no emotions, now he is full of them. Last season, he was given a romance, with Heather (Edi Patterson), a bird person from outer space, which has continued into the current run; he is also a father, with a great affection — anomalous in his species — for his son, Bridget, an adorably fearsome little green creature. And he loves pie.

And that Tudyk himself seems genuinely nice — there are interviews with him up and down YouTube, and my friend David, who worked on “Firefly,” called him “kind, grateful and curious” — makes him easy to like, however likable a person he’s playing. That possibly shouldn’t matter when assessing an actor’s art, but it does anyway.