Adam Goldberg On ‘The Equalizer,’ Post-COVID Hollywood & New Comedy Project With ‘Hebrew Hammer’ Director

Adam Goldberg is rather hard on himself.

The 52-year-old actor — whose Hollywood resume includes Dazed and Confused, Saving Private Ryan, A Beautiful Mind, and Zodiac — seems to think he is the reason so many of his television projects (such as Taken and God Friended Me) stall out after a season or two. Speaking with me over Zoom, the onscreen veteran recalls how he jokingly tried to warn the producers of CBS’s The Equalizer against casting him in the role Harry Keshegian, the computer savvy member of Robyn McCall’s (Queen Latifah) team of clandestine investigators.

“I was like, ‘I know this looks like a sure thing for you guys, but I know that if you cast me, you’re not going to last more than a season,’” he says. “I have a history of being on underrated, unsung TV series for about a year and then something or another happens.”

Thankfully, he had nothing to worry about, as the show (a contemporary reboot of the ‘80s-era program starring Edward Woodward as private investigator Robert McCall) scored a double renewal for third and fourth seasons last May. “The show was too strong for that [and] it lives on,” Goldberg says of his alleged cancelation curse. After a three-month hiatus, The Equalizer will return this Sunday (Feb. 19) for the latter half of Season 3, which includes an episode centered around Mr. Keshegian.

“I don’t know if they want me to talk about that or not, to be honest with you. But I’m probably behind a computer and I’m probably hacking stuff,” Goldberg teases. “They say I’m a hacker but half the time, she could just be having somebody Google stuff. In fact, if they edited all the outtakes in, you’d hear me say that half the time. I’m like, ‘Why don’t you just Google it? I’m sure you could find out the exact same information. You don’t need a bank of servers.’ For some reason, they never use that ad-lib.”

Despite the fact that he hasn’t picked up any genuine hacker skills so far, Goldberg does find the role to be “a good exercise for me to prevent early onset dementia.”

“It’s sort of like playing piano or a guitar when you have to do one thing with your right hand and another thing with your left,” he explains. “I don’t know whether it’s the right brain or the left brain, or it’s some integration of the two of them, but [it’s the dual action of] tapping and saying lines that sometimes last up to a half a page of essentially gobbledygook. And somehow being able to work my fingers and say really strange terminology and tons of names … It’s sort of like my job is Wordle.”

Since its very inception, The Equalizer has been filmed under the strict health safety restrictions put in place to protect cast and crew from COVID-19. For a self-proclaimed germaphobe like Goldberg — “I’m probably wound a bit tighter than the average bear on set,” he admits — the new protocols removed a modicum of professional stress.

“I always wish it had been the case where sick people don’t come to work and if you coughed, you’re shot on sight,” he jokes,” going on to add that the post-pandemic entertainment industry is certainly a strange place.

“It definitely makes work even more of an alien experience than it is to begin with … The first person that I shared air with for several months — other than my immediate family — was Queen in this car … Everyone was masked at this time [and] it felt really surreal. You have to have a lot of trust in people.”

Looking ahead, Goldberg reveals he has partnered back up with The Hebrew Hammer writer-director Jonathan Kesselman for a new comedy film, whose aim is to skewer anti-Semitic conspiracies. “It’s really funny and really dark,” the actor teases, describing the project as a “spiritual” successor to the cult favorite Hebrew Hammer (a Jewish-themed sendup to the blaxploitation films of the 1970s like Shaft) and an “almost Ed Wood-ian take on things” in terms of its budgetary needs.

“It’s, ‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Anti-Semitism, But Were Too Afraid to Ask,’ could be the working title,” he continues. “It’ll be funny to anybody, kind of like The Hebrew Hammer. Some jokes for ‘The Tribe’ and other jokes for people who like things that are funny. But it’s definitely a political comment. It’s about how f***ing idiotic these conspiracies are.”

There is some bad news, however: Mordechai Jefferson Carver will not return in that long-awaited Hebrew Hammer sequel Goldberg and Kesselman attempted to get off the ground in 2017 with a crowdfunding campaign. A reaction to the presidency of Donald Trump, the follow-up would have seen the titular Hebraic hero battling Adolf Hitler with a time-traveling sukkah.

“That sequel is never gonna happen,” Goldberg states in no uncertain terms. “By the time we tried to reboot it with this crowdfunding campaign, I had become really ensconced in this world of social media, battling anti-Semites and trolls. [We] really tried to retrofit the script, so that it had a contemporary significance rather than a totally absurdist, Mel Brooks-ian political take on anti-Semitism.”

While it’s unfortunate that The Hebrew Hammer vs. Hitler fizzled out, Goldberg assures me that his and Kesselman’s new effort will be much more impactful.

“This thing that we’re doing now is a soup to nuts, ground up really concise, and right to heart of things; born out of exactly what’s going on right now,” he concludes. “There’s no trying to fit a square peg into a round hole in order to update it in any way. It does feel like the sort of thing where we need to shoot it immediately and get it out there. But I feel like The Hebrew Hammer is just gonna be one of those things where it’s gonna be this weird cult movie, and that’s all it maybe should have been.”

The Equalizer returns to CBS this Sunday — Feb. 19 — at 8 p.m. ET.