Terence Winter
speaker
107 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Terence Winter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I grew up in Marine Park, Brooklyn, which is an area that I usually have to describe by its proximity to other neighborhoods in Brooklyn that people have heard of. You may have heard of Sheepshead Bay, which actually was a an integral neighborhood in terms of prohibition because boats used to come right in there. And that's kind of near Coney Island.
So, you know, basically blue collar family, blue collar neighborhood. I actually started to be an auto mechanic in high school and that didn't stick. I took a detour into the deli business, eventually figured out that I needed to go to college. eventually went to law school, practiced law for two years, hated it.
And then my deep, dark secret was I had always wanted to be a sitcom writer, which was something that, you know, on the East Coast in the 70s, you dare not tell your friends that you wanted to go to Hollywood and be anything.
Because it's very difficult for me to talk with that. I do hold the record for the most uses of the word fuck in a movie, Wolf of Wall Street, which I'm very proud of. So it's very hard for me to have a conversation. So that'll slip out occasionally. Anyway, once I came out of the closet as a writer, I just said, I'm moving to L.A. and I'm going to figure this out.
I showed up here in 1991 and I just kind of plunged in and I started out, you know, attempting to be a sitcom writer and then eventually just morphed into drama that kind of had comedy in it. So I just got incredibly lucky and still lucky to be doing that kind of stuff.
I was a lawyer in Manhattan. My only ambition as a kid was I wanted to be rich because we were not. And the only two jobs I knew that could make you rich were doctor and lawyer. The doctor was out. And I remember there was a quote by Benjamin Franklin. And he said, pour thy person to thy head and no man can take it from you. And, you know, get an education, basically.
Yeah, that's a beautiful quote. I like that. Yeah, I love that. So I took creative writing and eventually I stumbled onto journalism. And, you know, again, you know, my ambition was to make money. That was what a good job was. The concept of liking your job was something, you know, you know, you just want to make money. So lawyer was the thing.
So I had another professor, journalism professor named Jerry Schwartz, who was a managing editor at the Associated Press. And I asked him to write me a recommendation for law school. And he did. He wrote me this glowing recommendation. He gave it to me in a manila envelope. And he said, there's another letter in there for you personally. And that letter said, please don't go to law school.
Please be a writer. And I was like, holy shit. This is the second adult who's told me I'm a good writer.
Actually, I should. It might have saved me a lot of time. Meanwhile, all my friends who became auto mechanics were making a fortune. And they all thought I was the biggest idiot in the world, Joe College. I'm already now in the whole student loan-wise from NYU. And I said, all right, there's only one way forward, and that's the law school.
So I did that, went at night, worked for Merrill Lynch during the day as a legal assistant to one of the lawyers who counseled the trading people, and graduated. Got a job at a big Manhattan law firm, passed the New York bar, the Connecticut bar. And my first week there, I realized I had made a grave, grave error. I hated it. I didn't, I just couldn't give a shit about any of it.
Within about a week and a half, I was sneaking out during the day, going to movies, bookstores. I just, two years in, I couldn't get out of bed in the morning. I just didn't want to go there. So it was really, you know, it was very, you know, really- Yeah, yeah, it was great. I had everything I thought I wanted. I had an assistant. I had an office. I had a diploma written in Latin.
I was like, holy shit, look at me. I'm a lawyer. And was that, did you go to NYU Law School also? No, I went to St. John's Law School, which is the Harvard of Queens. Sure. And I was in the top 5% of the bottom third of my class. So I was very proud of that. Again, it was like, I wasn't even thinking in terms of, are you happy?
And, you know, it was, I was like 29 at this point. And I had that moment like, OK, you were going to either jump out a window in 10 years from the depression of working somewhere you just don't like. And you'll never be good at this because you don't like it. What do you want to do when you wake up in the morning? And I was like, all right, well.
Maybe I'd be a salesman, you know, because I like to bullshit. And I was like, all right. And there's a little voice that said, come on, it's not salesman. What is it? And it's like, all right, well, an ad copywriter. Maybe I could do that. And then even the voice like, come on, go deeper. And then it's finally I want to go to fucking Hollywood and write sitcoms. And.
Once I said that out loud, it was like everything changed. But then I thought, all right, well, I remember this bit in Mr. Saturday Night with Billy Crystal, where he talked about the idea of you're either living room funny or you're really funny. You know, you can be funny with your friends. And yeah, I'm the funniest guy in the group. Can you do that for real?
And I thought, all right, well, I think I can. And I thought the fastest way to figure this out is write my own material and do stand up. And if I can get people to laugh, then I'm legit. I wasn't particularly interested in being a stand-up, but I wanted to see, am I crazy or am I funny? Or I really am funny.
So for a couple of months, right around that time, I was doing stand-up at Catch a Rising Star. And this is what year? The comic strip.
Yeah. Oh yeah. And it was interesting too, because it was like this young woman named Sarah Silverman. Sure. Holy shit. Chris Rock was still around, you know, I was, well, these are the real deal, you know, and I was doing open mics and watching these people and going, oh man, you know, like a young Sarah Silverman was just great to see that. And then to watch her career after that was great. Wow.
You know, I did OK. You know, I get on at two in the morning, the three people. And it's OK. I said something. They laughed. Great. That worked. This worked. And then once I once I said, OK, I'm not crazy. Then I was like, all right, I'm doing this.
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