Kinnear In The Hot Seat
As a followup to his Oscar-nominated performance in As Good As It Gets, Greg Kinnear plays Meg Ryan's writer boyfriend in You've Got Mail.
Kinnear, 35, is a former talk show host, so CBS This Morning Contributor Eleanor Mondale asked him how it feels to be the interviewee.
"You know, it's kind of awful on a lot of different levels," he replied. "Primarily because, as an interviewer, I knew the unbearable pain of a boring interviewÂ… And so I'm wildly insecure about doing this because I'm convinced that no matter what I say, [the interviewer] is going, 'Oh my God, please get on with it! Jeez, you're killing me here.
"So," Kinnear concludes, "I'm doing my damn best to make articulate and interesting little anecdotes and be a good little interviewee."
Kinnear's father worked for the U.S. State Department and the family moved frequently, settling for a time in Beirut and Athens. But when it came time for college, Kinnear enrolled at the University of Arizona, from which he graduated in 1985 with a bachelor's degree in broadcast journalism.
He made his living as an actor in such made-for-TV movies as Murder in Mississippi and The Betty Ford Story. Among jobs he did not get was a spot as a VJ on MTV.
He worked for three years as a reporter for Movietime network. He was fired in 1990 when Movietime was reorganized and renamed E! Only a year later, he was rehired by E! to host Talk Soup, which started small but quickly snowballed into a hit for the cable network.
The year 1994 was a big one for Kinnear. He was named an executive producer of Talk Soup and was nominated for a Cable Ace Award. Kinnear left Talk Soup at the end of 1994 to become the host of NBC's Later, where he stayed until 1996.
During that time, Kinnear broke into movies. Director Sydney Pollack cast him as Harrison Ford's younger brother in Sabrina (1995) after seeing him on Talk Soup. The critics weren't crazy about the Sabrina remake but they singled out Kinnear for praise.
He went on to make Dear God (1996) and A Smile Like Yours (1997) before hitting paydirt again with his performance in As Good As It Gets (1997), for which he received a Golden Globe award and an Oscar nomination in the Best Supporting Actor category.