Some call him Gilbert, Wolfgang or even Booger, but everyone else knows him as Curtis Armstrong. Weekender recently chatted with the “Revenge of the Nerds” star about new projects, cows and panty raids.

Weekender: All right, I think it’s working. So you have some new projects in the works. Please tell us a bit about them.

Curtis Armstrong: Well, “Akeelah and the Bee” is a family story really. It stars Laurence Fishburne and Angela Basset. It’s a story about a young girl in South Central [L.A.] played by Keke Palmer, who’s an amazing young actress. She is having a lot of issues, but has this genius for spelling and she winds up in a spelling bee which takes her to the nationals. I play her principal and Laurence Fishburne plays an old friend of mine who had, as a boy, gone all the way to the nationals and not won. I involve him in coaching her and it sort of pulls him out of his hole and the problems he’s been having with his life. It’s a great story and I actually saw some of it yesterday ‘cause I was doing the looping for it and it looks awfully good. So I’m feeling good about that. And then, let’s see, “Southland Tales” is the new movie by Richard Kelly, who wrote and directed Donnie Darko. It’s a very strange, wonderful science fiction bizarre story. It stars the Rock, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Wally Shawn, John Larroquette and, I mean, it’s just a very strange collection of actors in this movie. It’s quite amazing and I’ve read it, I think three times through and there were still elements of it I didn’t understand. There is a lot of action and a lot of humor and it’s interesting. So that’s that. “Searching for Mickey Fish” is the one I just finished and I came back on the weekend. And that’s very small-scale sort of quirky comedy about a company of these sort of endearing losers who make glow sticks. They’re sort of on the down and out and suddenly it’s discovered that if you place glow sticks on a cow’s [butt], it encourages other cows to mate with them and it is a means of … It turns into this boffo business because it encourages the bovine milk industry and they wind up getting taken over by this huge conglomerate. They think everything is going right and then of course it doesn’t. The strange thing about this is that it’s actually a true story. It’s based on a man named Stan Holly who had his own glow stick company and in fact it was discovered that these glow sticks on the cow’s [butts] had this effect on other cows. Basically, it’s the story of his company and the people working who tried to cash in on this; it’s quite amusing and a lot of fun. Treat Williams is in it, William Mapother, Charlotte Ross from “NYPD Blue” and an old friend of mine, Daniel Baldwin, who I worked with a few years ago on a different movie. Another one is a movie called “Smokin’ Aces” which is written and directed by Joe Carnahan. It stars Jeremy Piven and Ryan Renolds and Alicia Keys, and it’s a gangster story, also with a lot of comedy, but rather brutal comedy. I play Jeremy’s agent. He’s sort of a down and sort of a Las Vegas character who gets mixed up with the mob, so I’ve got a small role in that.

WE: I’d like to go back to “Searching for Mickey Fish” for a moment. Were you involved, in the film, with placing the glow sticks on the cows?

CA: No, I had nothing to do with that. That’s being directed by Donny Most, actually, Don Most who used to be on “Happy Days.” I can’t remember the name of his character right now. Ralph, I think.

WE: Oh Yeah Ralph Malph.

CA: Yeah he’s directing now he worked on the script also with Jeff Arbaugh. No, I had nothing to do with the things I was just playing a friend of theirs.

WE: Do you think this would work with people as well?

CA: That’s a good question. I don’t know and I don’t think anybody every raised that issued, but it is a good question. I’m not going to try it. There may be younger people that will try it. They may have to put a ‘do not try this at home’ thing on it.

WE: Well this is a college newspaper, so there will probably be people that will read this and then go try it. Look at that, you may have started a new fad.

CA: Yeah well, don’t blame me. I didn’t have anything to do with it. But you’re right about that.

WE: You started acting in theater productions. Have you wanted to go back?

CA: Well, I didn’t really go away. It has been five years since I did a stage production but throughout my career, I would continue to do stage plays in various places. The last one I did here was at The Old Globe in ’96, I believe. No, ’98, and that was the last one that I did. I would love to continue to do it. It’s difficult because as much as film and television are paying less and less it is, at least, paying slightly more than stage plays. I have a daughter now and I can’t be going around the country for long stretches of time. I just came back from this thing with “Mickey Fish” which was three weeks long. Before that, “Man of the House”, the Tommy Lee Jones movie, was in Austin for three weeks. That’s about as much as I can stand. Because it’s just too tough to be away from my family, and stage plays, of course, are much more time consuming with the rehearsal process and everything and however long it runs. If I could bring them with me that would be different, but my wife has her own job, and my daughter is at an age now where she’s at school, and I just can’t uproot her, as much as I’d like to. So I’m not able to do the kinds of things on stage that I used to. I keep trying to find things in L.A., but it’s difficult because there is a lot of stuff here but it manages to be time-consuming and at the same time it doesn’t pay anything. So you do have to finally say. ‘You know what? I’ll just hold off, it’s not like it’s something I can’t do sometime in the future.’ I’ll do whatever comes my way now and maybe some day I’ll come back to it. It used to bother me a lot more than it does. Now all I’m concerned about is college tuition.

WE: And making sure everyone is fed.

CA: Exactly.

WE: Understandable. Long ago you were …

CA: And far away.

WE: Excuse me, what was that?

CA: You said ‘long ago’ and I said ‘and far away.’

WE: Oh, are you making ‘Star Wars’ references?

CA: Oh, I don’t know. It just felt like it needed to be said.

WE: Fair enough, well long ago and far away you were involved with a small television program called “Parker Lewis Can’t Lose.”

CA: Oh my God.

WE: One of my favorite shows.

CA: Really? Oh my God, you’re right.

WE: Is that unbelievable that is was one of my favorite shows?

CA: No no no, I never saw the show personally. I just find it amazing that anyone remembers that kind of thing. It just seems so long ago.

WE: But you played two different characters.

CA: I played two characters?

WE: Yeah, you played two different characters according to the research I’ve done.

CA: I don’t think that’s true. All I did in Parker Lewis is that I appeared as myself. They were doing a parody of “Risky Business” and I appeared as myself, I said a couple of lines and that was it. I started to say the “what the f$@!” line and they slammed the door in my face. I don’t think I played another character. That’s my recollection. They had a guy playing Guido the Killer Pimp and the two of us were there, and that’s all I remember.

WE: You’ve done a lot of voice-over work also. Some stuff with “Batman Beyond” and a character called “Snot” on “American Dad.”

CA: Batman Beyond was a one time thing, and I did that just for one episode. It was at a time when I was trying to get into voice-over which is very hard to do because it’s a very closed shop. That was one that had happened for whatever reason. And it was very odd then because I saw it afterwards and my voice was completely wrong for it, and I don’t know why they cast me in that. I think they must have had someone drop out at the last minute, it did not look right for me. I did that and before that I did a long stretch of “Terrible Thunder Lizards” which was Savage Steve Holland’s spin off of “Eek! the Cat,” and that was my first regular job as a voice-over actor. And I only got that because Savage calls me all the time when there are things that he’s got going that I would be right for, so that was his doing. And I didn’t work again except for Batman Beyond, I don’t think, for years and then suddenly it started up again and so now I’m doing four, I think. I’m doing “The Buzz on Maggie” which is a Disney show, and another Disney show called “The Emperors New School.” And I’m doing an adult one called “Stroker and Hoop.” And it’s very gross but funny. That’s on Adult Swim.

WE: Oh, on Cartoon Network?

CA: Yeah, on Cartoon Network. And I’m doing “American Dad,” so it went from completely nothing to doing these things constantly, which has been a lot of fun and I love it.

WE: You also did a voice, apparently, for a video game, Vampire: The Masquerade.

CA: Boy, you really have done your homework.

WE: I played that game long ago when it came out and I didn’t even recognize you.

CA: I played several roles. I don’t know if they used all of them, but I did record several of them and I am very pleased that it was not recognizable. I can’t recall the game, but that was fun.

WE: Do you remember if you played a vampire or some sort of other being?

CA: I remember going in for one character and they kept throwing other ones at me and saying ‘How about doing this one or doing this one?’ And so it happened so fast I don’t even remember. I think, pink something, why does that ring a bell? Is there a character with that name?

WE: Not that I remember.

CA: I really don’t remember, those things, you don’t do much preparation for it ahead of time so you go in and you do it and you forget. It’s like cramming for a test. You come away not remembering anything because it happened so fast and you’re so focused at the time and there is no rehearsal so you don’t know [what it looks like] until you see it. Usually it’s two years before they’re finished after you’ve recorded it and you’ve forgotten it all.

WE: I’d like to talk about “Revenge of the Nerds” because my editors are pressuring me into it and I’m blaming everything on them.

CA: Well that’s fine, I don’t mind.

WE: First, did you know someone made a flash game called “Booger’s Panty Raid?” Have you ever played it?

CA: Yes, I did know that, and I have not played it, but it’s part of the Curtis Armstrong Web site, I think. Yeah, that was done, I saw it when it was first on and he had called me to tell that it was up. No, he wrote me. Shawn wrote me about it because he had done this Web site and I didn’t have any e-mail and he had no way of reaching me except by mail and he sent me a letter that said, “I put this together, would you look at it and if you disapprove of it I will take it off.” So I looked at it and I thought it was very funny, but I never played it, I just thought it was amusing. And we talked about it for a while and there were a few things that had gotten into public record and I had to correct him about appearances and things that I supposedly had done but I haven’t really. And some of the education information is not true, but I have been in touch with him periodically over the years. He just did a tremendous job. I wound up sending him things, you know pictures and stuff that he could put on there. It would have never occurred to me to have my own Web site. But yeah, that’s funny.

WE: There is supposed to be a remake of “Revenge of the Nerds.” How do you feel about that?

CA: I don’t really feel anything about it.

WE: Well, all right.

CA: It doesn’t have anything to do with me, they’re not going to use us. It’s going to be a remake by today’s standards which I’m sure, if it ever happens, will be fine for the audience and I’m sure they’ll enjoy it. I don’t have any particular feelings about it one way or another.

WE: I’m going to ask a rather subjective question, but would you have considered it a rather ‘lame’ move if they had suggested the old cast come back.

CA: Oh we did that, so that’s not news, it didn’t work particularly well when we did it and I don’t imagine it would work any better now.

WE: Kind of like “Saved by the Bell: The College Years?”

CA: Yeah we did [“Revenge of the Nerds”] three and four for television. In “Nerds” three, it focused on a group of younger nerds and we were the older nerds, and then four is mainly us again with some of the younger nerds and, you know, it just didn’t work. It was just not, you know, it just didn’t work. But, you know, people do that for reasons. They feel that there is a reason for it and an audience for it. Then there are those of us that do them do for financial reasons and that’s the way it goes. If they turn out to be good, it’s a wonderful thing, but they don’t usually and that’s what happened with those.

WE: You had mentioned earlier that you came across some things that were false on the Web sites. Has there been anything that was particularly weird or completely false?

CA: Not really, I mean nothing extreme. The only thing that has gotten into the record is the education thing. That I was a graduate of, what’s the name of it, a college in Pennsylvania. Dickenson in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. It got weird only to the extent that graduates from Dickenson remember going to class with me there and so, you know, it’s just the way those things happen. But, in fact, I never graduated nor attended Dickenson college. But a friend of mine teaches law there and I would visit his house, his family has a farm house outside of Carlisle. I was always wandering around there and somehow the idea came about that I was wandering around there because I was attending the place, and I never have. So it’s just stuff like that or episodes of shows that people claim I’ve been in and I haven’t. Maybe they’re thinking of Gilbert Gottfried or something.

WE: Is that a common mistake?

CA: Yes.

WE: Really?

CA: Oh yeah. It used to be a lot more common when I was younger. People were always mistaking Gilbert and me.

WE: Do they see you on the street and yell “Aflac” at you?

CA: What they did goes way back to the early ’80s when “Risky Business” had come out, Gilbert was on “Saturday Night Live” and I had just started doing movies. People would come up to me and would tell me they saw me on Saturday night and how much they loved it. And I was thinking that what they meant was that they had seen “Risky Business” on Saturday night but it seemed like everyone was telling me that they had seen the movie on the same night. At the time Gilbert was receiving all these compliments for his work in “Risky Business.” I was living in New York at the time and I was at a restaurant one night and these two comedians were in the restaurant and they came up to me and they said ‘Gilbert is a friend of ours and he’s always getting mistaken for you.’ and I said, ‘That’s funny because I’m always being mistaken for him.’ They said ‘You’ve got to come with us. We’re going to take you uptown to the Catch a Rising Star [Comedy Club].’ He was playing that night and they said they had to take me up there. So they bundled me into a cab, I left the people I was with, and took me to Catch and that was the first time I met Gilbert. He just laughed and laughed and laughed then the two of us laughed at each other for a while. And then we wound up being cast in a movie together and I always thought that was funny because then people would be seeing us on screen at the same time and would think they were seeing double. But it never made sense to me because it never seemed like there was a resemblance at all.

WE: Yeah, I don’t see that.

CA: Well it really doesn’t matter because I get it from a number of people. I mean I get it from Gilbert, I get it from Bobcat Goldthwait. I’ve gotten it from Wolfgang Puck.

WE: Well that I can see.

CA: Really?

WE: Yeah I’ve got his soup at home and I could see it.

CA: Thinking, that looks like the guy from “Risky Business.” I don’t know. I’ve had people stop me in groceries stores and hold up cans for me to autograph.

WE: Do you?

CA: Yeah, I mean, thinking I’m Wolfgang Puck.

WE: Do you sign them as Wolfgang?

CA: No, I should, I probably should just for the fun, but I don’t.

WE: According to the Internet Movie Database, you’re supposedly an expert on Harry Nilsson.

CA: Yes, supposedly.

WE: Well tell us about that.

CA: Harry Nilsson was an American singer/song writer. He started in the ’60s and continued recording until the late ’70s. He died a few years ago here in LA. He was just one of those people that every once in a while you hear someone that just sparks something in you and there is a connection that isn’t really explicable but you have this connection to the person. And that was the way I was with Harry Nilsson in the ’60s, but by the early ’70s I was beginning to seriously collect his records and information about him. And I wanted to write a biography about him, which I had no right to do but I wanted to do. And I wrote him about it and he wrote back a very nice letter. But I never did, of course, because I was a penniless actor and apart from the urge, I had no reason to do it. And ultimately I never met him, I never spoke with him, just a couple of letters was the extent of it. And some years ago I was trying to get a documentary going about Harry. And I contacted his label in New York which was RCA, BMG now. I talked to them about getting footage and things and they invited me to come into their office the next time I was in New York. I went in and it was only then that they realized who I was, that they saw me and recognized my name and realized that it was an actor and suddenly it was all different. They invited me to take part of a re-issue of his work. And that has been what I’ve been doing up until a year ago or so ago and we’re sort of on hiatus now. We have been doing re-releases of all the Harry Nilsson catalogue. We’ve got about six of them now and I write the liner notes and I pick the bonus tracks and that kind of thing. Harry was best known, unfortunately, as being The Beatles’ favorite American singer and group. In 1968, they were asked ‘Who is your favorite American singer?’, and they said, ‘Harry Nilsson.’ Then they were asked, ‘Who is your favorite American group?’, and they said, ‘Harry Nilsson.’ That’s what sort of launched his career. A great singer/songwriter and very unappreciated.

WE: Do you have a favorite Harry Nilsson song?

CA: No, I don’t have a favorite. There are too many. It’s like a favorite Beatles song, I wouldn’t know which one to pick. He’s got a lot of great albums. Everything is out now, I mean, I grew up on the imported stuff (some of his later music is imported) and the rest of the stuff is American releases and it’s all out there. Nillson Schmilsson is the one we just put out, which is the big popular one because it has “Jump into the Fire,” “Without You,” “Coconut,” and other songs that got a lot of radio play. But I think a lot of the earlier and later albums are actually better, although they don’t have quite as many radio-friendly songs on them.

WE: It’s getting towards the end of the interview, which means it’s time for the lightning round, I’m afraid. Five questions. Answer them as quickly as you can.

CA: Is there math?

WE: No, no math. Should there be?

CA: No, I’m not good at math.

WE: I could ask you to differentiate an equation.

CA: No don’t ask that.

WE: Name three state capitals.

CA: Oh come on. OK, Lansing, Sacramento, Charlotte.

WE: Question two: Have you seen the film “Mulholland Drive?”

CA: No.

WE: OK, I had a follow up but I can’t ask it. So number three: Can you summarize the plot of “Green Eggs and Ham” by Dr. Seuss?

CA: In “Green Eggs and Ham” there is a person who is, I believe, not named, who is constantly approached by a character named Sam who tries all sorts of different ways to get him to try his green eggs and ham. Which the person doesn’t want anything to do with because he doesn’t like green eggs and ham. Eventually Sam breaks him down and the guy agrees to eat the green eggs and ham just to be left alone and it turns out he really likes green eggs and ham.

WE: Very good, very good.

CA: Is that a fair summary? I mean, I’m leaving out all the sex and violence.

WE: Not bad. The next one is a science question: About how far away is the sun?

CA: Oh, I don’t have any idea.

WE: It’s about 93 million miles away, and that’s why it looks so small. The last one is about history: name your favorite Civil War personality.

CA: Boy that’s a hard one. Right now I’m reading the Civil War trilogy by not Horton Foote, but his brother, What’s-his-name Foote. I’ll say Longstreet; he’s kind of an interesting character.

WE: Well, that concludes the interview.

CA: Your lightning round is interesting, that doesn’t happen very often.

WE: Well, we try to mix things up a little.

CA: Was I right?

WE: There wasn’t much we could do with the “Mulholland Drive” question, but the rest seem right, I don’t know who Longstreet is, so I’ll have to look that one up. But thank you very much for doing this interview.

CA: You’re very welcome.