No objection, your honor. After appearing in last year's Seinfeld finale, the bombastic Chiles is holding court again. In two new commercials for Honda's Odyssey minivan, Chiles plays an attorney for an infant who wants baby-bottle carriers installed in the family vehicle. Indeed, although Morris, 40, also stars as chief purser Will Sanders on UPN's Love Boat: The Next Wave TV series, he's currently making a bigger splash as an unctuous lawyer. Says Cochran: "I'm a big fan."
The feelings aren't entirely mutual. "The O.J. thing was abhorrent to me," says Morris, who lives in a two-bedroom L.A. condo with his interior designer wife, Carla, 40, their son Jordan, 13, and daughter Rachel, 9. "I didn't understand the ethic behind Johnnie Cochran." Still, Morris says, on Seinfeld he tried to be fair. "I gave people a chance to not like [Cochran]," he says, "but not to be mean-spirited about it."
He almost didn't get the chance. Despite Morris's pedigree—his father, Greg, who died of lung cancer in 1996 at age 62, starred on TV's Mission: Impossible from 1966 to 1973—he wasn't always set on acting. His father, for one, had reservations. "The business was hard for him, especially as a black man," says Morris of his father's difficulty in finding good roles after M.I. ended. "He didn't want that for his children. He wanted me to go to college."
But Morris, the second of three children born to Greg and his wife, Lee, was a born entertainer who recited Bill Cosby comedy albums word for word at the dinner table. "He would make us laugh so hard," says his actress sister lona, now 42. "We would have to beg him to stop." In 1966, at age 7, Phil moved with the family from his native Iowa City, Iowa, to L.A. After graduating from Beverly Hills High in 1976, he worked as a production assistant on a never-released film—Com-Tac 303—which featured his father. "I got paid, and I was meeting chicks," says Morris. "I had the whole Hollywood experience in six weeks."
Bit parts in TV shows followed before he was cast on daytime's The Young and the Restless in 1984. At one point, a bizarre story line required him to spend six months playing a white man, a role that required three hours in a make-up chair each day. "It was one of the most difficult tasks of my life," says Morris, who left Restless in 1986. "I was spending half my life as a white person. I felt like a freak."
His next break, in 1988, was playing the son of his father's old character on a new Mission: Impossible TV series. Sporadic work followed the show's cancellation that year, and in 1995 he auditioned for Jackie Chiles. "He had the character from the beginning," says Seinfeld co-creator Larry David. "It was instant."
And not that much of a stretch. "Phil as a person is a goof, a real kid," says wife Carla. Which is why, at first, he tried to play against type. "I wanted to be the next Sidney Poitier or Denzel Washington rather than the Richard Pryor or Bill Cosby," says Morris, who now hopes to spin off Chiles in a new sitcom. (Jerry Seinfeld, who owns the rights to all Seinfeld characters, has withheld his blessing so far.) "I wasn't into being funny. Then Jackie Chiles came along, and I said, 'It's okay to be a fool.' "
Jeremy Helligar
Ken Baker in Los Angeles
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- Ken Baker.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
