Where ‘The Chair Company’ Found Its Wildest Wild Card

This story contains spoilers for The Chair Company episode 5.

Joseph Tudisco appears for the first time at the tail end of The Chair Company’s debut episode, though any viewer could be forgiven for thinking that it would be his only scene. The HBO comedy series, created by I Think You Should Leave comedian Tim Robinson, is packed to the gills with seemingly random guests in every scene. It’s nearly impossible to predict if or when any of them will pop up again, let alone how important they are to the overarching story. Thankfully, Tudisco’s character, Mike Santini, reappears constantly throughout the season.

The 76-year-old actor is arguably Robinson’s most prominent costar, notching a win for any viewer who instantly fell in love with the tough guy turned absolute softy. He’s also funny as hell. But mainly? He’s just excited to be here. “This kind of thing doesn’t happen to a lot of people,” Tudisco told me over Zoom earlier this week of the role. “I just find it very amazing that I’m here in this.”

Tudisco’s Mike Santini joins The Chair Company after Robinson’s character, Ron Trosper, drops flat on his back when his office chair breaks during a presentation. Ron sets out to demand an apology from the manufacturer, because he embarrassed himself in front of his coworkers, but instead falls deep into an Internet spiral. He can’t seem to reach the chair company, almost as if it doesn’t exist. As his investigation stretches on, one night, Santini pops out of the bushes outside Ron’s office and pops him in the head with a metal pipe—threatening him with more violence if he doesn’t cease investigating the chair company.

As it turns out, Santini is just a security guard for a local diner who was hired for this one-off altercation by a mysterious man he’d never met before. So, the two foes end up joining forces to track down the chair company and figure out what nefarious operation they’re trying so desperately to hide. Robinson is usually the character on screen who acts a fool, but The Chair Company allows Tudisco to dispense unhinged chaos as well. His character blasts “comedy albums” in the car featuring two men cursing at each other at the top of their lungs. He hands Ron a gun to intimidate a suspect in the second episode, and he barks lines like, “We’re gonna scare the shit out of him, and we’re gonna give that fucking pussy what they did to you!” He’s an absolute wild card, and exactly the wild card player that The Chair Company needs.

“Mike Santini is a difficult character, but very simple,” Tudisco tells me. “There was a lot of people like him in my growing up—people from the neighborhood. I’ll think back and I go, ‘so-and-so used to be like that.’ So, it was almost like, subconsciously, I remembered some of those antics. But he developed because every episode, there was a whole different craziness about him. Some people are bipolar. Mike Santini is quadpolar.”

Tudisco grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where he’s lived for most of his life. “You know Bath Beach?” he says, zeroing in on his region of origin. “It’s right off the Belt Parkway tucked in between the Verrazzano Bridge and Coney Island.” He’s worked steadily, mainly as a background player, in the business for over 40 years now, all while coaching a junior varsity football team at Sheepshead Bay High School (with a few undefeated seasons under his belt). Tudisco’s appeared on Law & Order, Blue Bloods, FBI, The Sopranos, and Boardwalk Empire—always as a truck driver, delivery man, Italian mobster, etc.—before finally getting called up for a named role on The Chair Company this season. Still, a working actor is always proud of the hustle. “I did speak!” he protests.

“I’ve made a lot of friends during the course of my career, and a lot of them have dropped out,” he says. “You need to have stick-ability, because the harder you work, the luckier you get. It may not happen, but it’s a blast trying to get there, because we’re never as bad as we think we are and we’re never as good as we’d like to be. And to all those people that I’ve gone through the ropes with, they’re still out there and [they know] I love this business.”

A paycheck is a paycheck, after all, and it takes a hundred people not named Tim Robinson to push one of those HBO series forward until it appears on your TV. “They have their own satisfaction, those roles, because you’re working and you’re getting a contract and it validates you,” Tudisco says. “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. I enjoyed every bit of it, but… you always say, ‘Oh, I’d love to be a series regular,’ never really thinking that it would happen. But you just keep working, and for all those actors out there who are in that same boat, it happens. All of a sudden, here I am.”

This Sunday, episode 5 peels back another layer of Mike Santini. We briefly meet his estranged daughter, who he attempts to reconcile with before she turns him away. He also shares more about his bouts with loneliness; he’s come to view Ron as his best friend over these past couple of episodes. It’s a moment for Ron to really zoom out and reckon with the fact that Mike Santini isn’t just a cog in his investigation. He’s a real human being, even when he’s acting insane.

“I have read some reviews,” Tudisco says with a smile. “I’ve been called the ‘heart and soul of the show,’ and I’m the ‘breath of the show.’ It’s amazing.” Those write-ups aren’t wrong.

For the last few weeks, as the show’s aired on HBO, Tudisco tells me he’s been testing his newfound fame during trips to the supermarket. “We’ll be standing in line—people in front of us, in back of us—and I’ll look at my wife as she goes, ‘Don’t you do it,’” Tudisco says. “I’ll just say, ‘Mike Santini,’ and then just leave it at that.”

Nobody’s recognized him yet, but you never know. We’re only five episodes in so far. As he tells me, excitedly, “I hear some people are starting to binge it now.”

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