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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 Latisha) 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.”
