Jason Alexander memorizes the 'Seinfeld' golf ball speech in half an hour

Jerry Seinfeld

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Revealing the beloved golf ball SeinfeldThe “Marine Biologist” episode never happened. Jerry Seinfeld revealed this week that he and Larry David wrote the scene just hours before the scene was filmed, and actor Jason Alexander only had a few minutes to memorize the script.

“I don't know the schedule for this week, but let's say we're shooting it on Wednesday. It's Tuesday,” Seinfeld said during an appearance on CNN. Rich Eisen Show. “We don't have a golf ball going into the whale's hole. We don't have it, and it was never in the script.

in Seinfeld Season 5, Episode 14 (“Marine Biologist”) Alexander George Costanza delivers an impressively long monologue about trying to impress a woman, eventually revealing that Kramer (Michael Richards) has a golf ball stuck in a whale's blowhole. The speech is known to begin with the following line: “The sea was angry that day, my friends.”

“It was the night before we shot the scene with Jason,” Seinfeld recalled this week. “I told L [co-writer David]”Hey, what if what's putting the whale in distress is a Kramer golf ball?” He hits golf balls on the beach. George is walking on the beach with the girl, and we don't make the connection between them. We didn't see any contact the night before. We write this letter the night before. “It's two o'clock in the morning.”

After a late-night lightbulb of inspiration, Seinfeld said it was Alexander who became the true hero of the day.

“We show up the next day. We give Jason, who's an influential genius, this speech. How long is this speech? It's a page, two pages. This is TV, okay? This is why movies suck. You go to a TV actor like Jason and you give him two and a half pages, I say to him: “We have to film this in half an hour.” He says: “No problem.”

Seinfeld said Alexander's feat led to a better performance than everyone else that day, including himself. “When Jason is giving the speech, this one take, there's one cut in my eye. My eyebrow — I'm watching him. You think I'm reacting to the story, I'm reacting — I can't believe he's giving this speech, with perfect words. This is what I'm thinking,” Seinfeld said. In it.” “I'm not even at the scene. I don't act. I'm just watching Jason give the speech in front of a live audience. Well, it's not a movie. In the movies, the movies, you screw it up and we'll do it again. On television, this live audience will hear this speech for the first time Once. So you want those sexy laughs, they hear these jokes the first time, and he gets them perfectly. That's why I have that look on my face.”