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It had started to rain, and he stepped under the building’s awning. “We were on the ninth floor,” he said, looking up. Not far from Washington Square, Helberg arrived at his old dorm, on Fourth Street. He’s walking around in socks, and it’s like being part of a conceptual art piece.” “I’m always nervous about everything, but, in a way, I had to sort of let go, which is unusual for me. “ ‘On this note, lift one hand, and then lift ze other hand,’ and I’m, like, ‘You want me to play the piano with no hands?’ And he’s, like”-accent again-“ ‘You don’t want to disappoint your French director.’ ” He smiled. “Leos directs like a choreographer,” he said. I was, like, I guess I didn’t get the part.”Įventually, Helberg was summoned. He asked me if this was my natural color, and pointed to my hair and face, and I said, ‘Well, I’m wearing a little rouge,’ and he didn’t smile. “He ordered grapefruit juice with a little ice and kept tapping a cigarette on the table. “He came to New York, and I met with him at another one of my old haunts, Lucky Strike”-the now shuttered SoHo restaurant. He’s one of the only auteurs left,” Helberg said. In 2015, he played the accompanist to Meryl Streep’s off-key diva in “Florence Foster Jenkins.” And in “ Annette,” the new musical from the French director Leos Carax, he again plays a pianist, attempting to protect the titular character-a young singing prodigy, played, in a fantastic twist, by a mechanized doll-from her violent, mercenary father ( Adam Driver). Lately, Helberg has used his musical chops in his work as an actor. section at a nearby club: “We made it into this huge empty room, and there was just one big chair, slightly off-center, and Rod Stewart was sitting on it, alone, like Santa.” Near Bleecker, Helberg recounted how he’d once managed to hustle his way into the V.I.P. “This is very Paul Giamatti in ‘Billions.’ ” I was, like, ‘Cast me in your next lesbian period piece!’ ” He stopped outside a sex-toy emporium, peering at S & M accoutrements in the window. It was maybe four lines, and I don’t think any human being has ever hammed up a situation more. “They were putting on ‘The Children’s Hour’ at my high school, and there was a small role of a delivery boy. “As a tiny kid with braces in L.A., I played in rock and jazz bands,” he said. I bought a T-shirt, which was a great thing to wear on your first day of school, to prove that you’re really cool.” He was an accomplished pianist, and he had thought in his teens that he would be a musician. On Sixth Avenue, he said, “I remember going to the Village Vanguard when I came to look at N.Y.U. Stacked on top of each other, we make an average-sized man.”ĭone shooting for the day, Helberg had hopped across the bridge to stroll around his college stomping grounds. As a fellow-actor, he said, Hoffman is “a guide-he carries you.” Not literally: “We’re of the same stature. He pulled up a picture on his phone of Hoffman and himself nose to nose, mock-glaring at each other. Helberg lives in his home town of Los Angeles, with his wife and two children, but he was spending a month in New Jersey, playing Dustin Hoffman’s estranged son in a movie. He is best known for playing the dorky, bowl-cut-wearing aerospace engineer Howard Wolowitz on the CBS sitcom “ The Big Bang Theory,” which finished its twelve-season run in 2019. Helberg, who is forty, is slight and elfin, with a jokey, engagingly nervous manner. “I probably said this to myself five times a day, and nothing could have been further from what New York was.” “And I was thinking, I’m in Heaven! This is New York!” He laughed. Radiohead’s ‘OK Computer’ had just come out, and ‘Karma Police’ was playing,” he recalled the other day, in the West Village. “I remember going up the escalator in Tower Records. This was the case for the actor Simon Helberg when he entered N.Y.U., to study drama.
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Simon Helberg Illustration by João Fazendaįew things are purer or more open than the heart of a New York University freshman, just transplanted from his family home to the city.