The Craftsman - interview with actor/director Michael Cudlitz from the May/June edition of Cigar Aficionado

[JohnS]

The Craftsman

Veteran actor and newfound director Michael Cudlitz built a career from the ground up, and has found a burning passion for fine cigars

By David Savona - From Michael Cudlitz, May/June 2025 

Enjoying a Padrón at Red Phone Booth in Buckhead, Atlanta. Cudlitz is one of the owners.

It’s night two of the Las Vegas Big Smoke Weekend and a cigar lover is walking through the ballroom. He slows his pace, taking a second, then a third look at the tall, strongly built man with the big, bushy beard in a black jacket, a cigar held in his powerful right hand. “Hey,” the visitor says, “aren’t you…”

The bearded man smiles back, gives a nod and extends a hand in a friendly gesture. “I’m Michael.”

It’s Michael Cudlitz, veteran actor, occasional director, cigar-bar owner and an absolute lover of the leaf. He’s appeared in several memorable roles and, while his changing on-screen hairstyles offer him a bit of anonymity, he gets recognized often, if not always early. Tonight, with a curly, thick mane of gray hair, he looks not-quite-like his most famous characters: Lex Luthor (bald), Abraham Ford from “The Walking Dead” (orangish-red), Denver “Bull” Randleman from “Band of Brothers” (blond and short) and John Cooper from “Southland” (even shorter).

On screen he’s an enormous presence, imposing, powerful, memorable. His characters have fought the Nazis, cut their way through zombie hordes and even done battle with Superman himself (spoiler alert: he lost that one). In person, he’s far more reserved, with an easy smile and a quieter-than-expected voice.

“He’s a gentle giant,” says Christopher Chulack, a producer and director who counts “ER” among his credits and cast Cudlitz in “Southland, which aired on NBC. “He’s a man’s man,” says actor and friend Ron Livingston. “He’s as sweet as they come—he’s a big teddy bear. But every once in a while there’s a moment where I’m just reminded that I would never mess with the guy in a million years,” he says, chuckling.

Cudlitz has been acting for more than 30 years. And even though performing was his childhood dream, he never really thought he’d become a TV star.

“I grew up in a very interesting house. I always knew I was loved, but there weren’t a lot of people home,” he says. He was born in 1964 in Queens, New York (he’ll turn 61 in December), and moved to Lakewood, New Jersey, when he was five, the youngest of three. Times were lean. He started working around the age of 12, delivering papers on a moped for spending money. For the beefy Sunday edition his dad would drive him in a hatchback and Cudlitz would toss the papers out from the back.

Michael Cudlitz as the cigar-chomping Sgt. Denver “Bull” Randleman in the HBO hit “Band of Brothers,” which was his big break.

“We grew up very poor . . . Both my parents worked two jobs struggling to make ends meet.” His father, Steven, was a cabinet and pattern maker. “My dad had this incredible ability to look at a three-dimensional object and tell you the fewest number of pieces that it had to be broken into in order to cast it,” he explains. His father taught him construction and woodworking. “He always had a woodshop and he would take me to work with him. I learned a lot from him.”

Performing called to him from an early age. “I had been doing theater my whole life, since the third grade. Mostly musical theater. You’ve never seen somebody do more musical theater than me. I can’t sing and I can’t dance—but I was incredibly enthusiastic,” he says, puffing on a well-aged, Churchill-sized cigar from Arturo Fuente, one of his favorites. He’s sitting in a back room at Red Phone Booth in the Buckhead section of Atlanta, his cigar bar home away from home. From a young age, he knew that acting wasn’t something he could rely on to put bread on the table. “Growing up in New Jersey, blue collar, it was also ‘get a job, kid.’ ”

When Cudlitz was 15, his parents divorced, and the following year he moved out to California to live with his father. Following in his dad’s path, he began studying engineering at Riverside City College. One day while he was doing homework, his father came into the room and watched him draft the image of a bolt. “What are you doing?” he asked. When Cudlitz responded simply “I’m doing my homework,” his father asked him again. “No—what are you doing?”

Steven knew his son wanted to act, and he thought it was time for him to try. “He said, ‘Why don’t you go pursue your dream?’ ” Cudlitz was 18, and he acted on the advice immediately. He quit school the next day, applying to California Institute of the Arts, where he could immerse himself in acting. “I got in—and then we had to figure out how to pay for it.” His father pitched in what he could, Cudlitz earned some scholarships and grants and there were loans, but it still wasn’t enough. He entered a work-study program. “I would clean the studios afterwards, mop the studios,” he says. He also started working in construction, making sets for television shows.

College worked out well for Cudlitz. It’s where he met Rachael, the woman who would become his wife. He was with a group of friends in his dorm lobby when he first glimpsed her. “Everybody was looking at her, and I turned to them and I said, ‘Don’t even think about it—she’s mine.’ ” The two have been together for 38 years, married for 34.

After graduating, he stayed in California, still planning to go back to the East Coast to try to make it as a stage actor. “We both assumed we would wind up in New York. I started working in film and television construction, doing low-budget horror movies and making a really great living.” But he still pursued acting, auditions for theater parts between jobs. “I got an agent, and they said, ‘We’re going to send you out for film and television work as well.’ ”

His knack as a handyman got him a gig making sets for a new Fox show. They had shot the pilot, and were finishing up a six-episode run when his buddy, who ran construction on the show, had to leave, leaving Cudlitz to finish the final episode. “We’re in the middle of shooting episode six, and they start airing the show.” It turns out to be a monster hit—“Beverly Hills, 90210.” All of a sudden, they needed more episodes and Cudlitz took on a much bigger operation. Still, he would duck out for auditions during breaks in the action, running the show at times via a pager, as cell phones had yet to become ubiquitous.

His many roles have come with a host of hair styles.

The show’s top brass knew he was auditioning, but explained that acting on the show itself would be a conflict of interest. When a movie he shot on one of his breaks, A River Runs Through It, directed by Robert Redford, came out, he got called back into the office.

“We didn’t know you were really an actor,” they said to him, he recalls with a chuckle. They told him they needed a spot filled on the program and thought he could fit the bill. “I was a big guy with a baby face, 28 or 29. I ended up getting cast—they kept me around for 12 episodes.”

Cudlitz kept up the construction work, doing double duty and acting on sets he helped build. “It’s very unheard of. I was very fortunate,” he says. He moved to other shows, taking roles here and there. Then Steven Spielberg changed his life.

Almost Saying No to Spielberg

Few directors have a resumé that can compare with that of Spielberg, the creator of such monumental hits as Jaws, Saving Private Ryan and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Cudlitz first met him in the 1990s, auditioning for a cop show he wouldn’t get. A few years later, he read for a role in a new Spielberg project, one that would require a year away from other work. “I get a call. They want to hire me. And the note is, ‘Steven loved your audition, and he wanted us to tell you he never forgot you.’ I’m just like ohhhh!” he says with a laugh. He got the part, and was sent a very early version of a script, printed on red construction paper so it couldn’t be copied. Cudlitz started reading, growing increasingly upset. “I read seven or eight of the scripts and my character is almost nonexistent. I’m devastated,” he says. He called his agent to say he was dropping out of the project. He got a message back—“Steven has asked that you trust him.” That changed his mind. “I said OK.”

That role was for Denver “Bull” Randleman and the project was the landmark HBO miniseries called “Band of Brothers,” about a U.S. Army company that helped save the Western World. Today, Cudlitz can hardly believe he nearly said no to such a project.

Cudlitz poses with the real-life Randleman in Paris during an epic trip that included a showing of the first episode on Normandy Beach.

“Band of Brothers” was a phenomenon, a 10-part program on HBO that won the Emmy and Golden Globe awards for best miniseries. Produced by Spielberg and Tom Hanks and based on the book of the same name by historical author Stephen Ambrose, around 10 million people watched the first episode when it aired on September 9, 2001. “That put me on the map,” says Cudlitz. “I wasn’t building too many sets after ‘Band of Brothers.’ ”

The series follows the fighting men of Easy Company, paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division who bled together on some of the most legendary fields of battle, including Normandy, France, the scene of the D-Day invasion, and Bastogne, Belgium, site of the Battle of the Bulge. It’s gripping and at times hard to watch, even when years later you know precisely what’s going to happen. The ping of spent clips, the thunder of artillery fire, the spectacle of World War II unfolds in a very realistic, personal way that helps a viewer comprehend the difficulty, the horror and the sacrifice endured by this exceptional group of men.

Unlike with his prior roles, “Band of Brothers” meant portraying an actual person, in this case U.S. Army Sgt. Denver “Bull” Randleman. When Cudlitz got the part he received information on Randleman along with the phone number of one of his friends. (A mistake early on led producers of the show to believe Randleman was dead, but he was still very much alive.) When Cudlitz finally got Randleman’s number, he was hesitant. “I dialed the number probably seven times, except for the last number, and hung up. I’m a mess. A kid calling this veteran.” He was starting to feel the importance of the situation. “These are serious men who are basically the reason we’re not speaking German.”

The first call didn’t go well. “I said, ‘Hello sir, how are you?’ ” The answer was one word: “Good.” When Cudlitz asked about boot camp, two words came back from Randleman: “Very hard.” “This was like pulling teeth,” Cudlitz recalls. “I am uncomfortable at this point. It goes on for five or six more minutes, not getting answers out of him.”

When it was time to say goodbye, Cudlitz cleverly asked the quiet veteran if he could also say goodbye to Randleman’s wife, Vera, who had answered the phone in the first place and had been far more welcoming and talkative. She got back on the phone. “And we talked for about an hour and a half. About Denver. And what I realized, as a young actor, I don’t think I ever really thought about it—but it didn’t matter what Denver thought about what he went through at that time. I wanted to know about Denver, and the way you know about somebody is you talk to other people. If you want to know who somebody is, you talk to their friends, you talk to the people who know them, you talk to people who know the things they have done. You’re not who you think you are—you’re who other people think you are.”

A red-haired Cudlitz as Abraham Ford in “The Walking Dead.”

HBO held a preview of the show on Normandy’s Utah Beach, with veterans of Easy Company. Cudlitz was there with Randleman as they took a train from Paris to get to the site. French citizens “were lining the sides of the railroad. It was like they were getting liberated again. And they were welcoming these men back. Incredible.” He takes a contemplative puff of his cigar. “We knew it wasn’t about us by the time we started the series. By the time we finished it and spent time with these families, it could not have been less about us. In the best way possible. These amazing, amazing men, amazing families, at an amazing time in history.”

Randleman was a standout among that special group, a decorated soldier who Maj. Richard Winters (played by Damian Lewis) called one of the finest soldiers he’d ever seen. In one particularly memorable episode, he’s separated from his troops and single-handedly kills an enemy solider without firing a shot. He’s tough, big, determined, a cigar constantly clamped in his mouth.

When Cudlitz was told he would be chewing a cigar in scenes, he initially thought it was a stereotype, but he found it was a genuine part of Bull’s behavior. “Everybody said he had cigars in his mouth all the time,” says Cudlitz. Being in the show meant going through an actor’s version of boot camp, plus learning how to shoot and how to march. The actors bonded. “I’ve known him for 25 years,” says Livingston, who met Cudlitz while playing Capt. Lewis Nixon in the show. “Mike pretty quickly emerged as a leader in the group. I think everybody kind of respected him. And that’s something that I don’t think has ever gone away.” He talks about the frequent show reunions, most of them held at the Cudlitz home in California, a home Cudlitz helped build himself.

When a movie or show ends, people typically go their own ways, but with “Band of Brothers” the bonds stuck. “I’ve met some of my closest adult friends that I still have to this day doing that show. Men and their families that I would do anything for,” says Cudlitz. “I love those guys.”

The Bull character led Cudlitz to cigars in a way. He didn’t really smoke them before that role. But it was just before joining the cast of “The Walking Dead” in 2014 that he truly became a cigar aficionado. The show was shot in Atlanta. “There’s a really rich cigar culture in Atlanta,” he says. Cudlitz opted to stay in a place that was a short walk from a shop called Highland Cigar. “I said, ‘This is perfect: I can finish up work, park the car, walk somewhere, have a cigar and a drink and walk back home, don’t have to worry about driving.’ ”

Cigars allowed Cudlitz to enjoy his time off. “I found it incredibly relaxing. I don’t have a lot of time to myself, so when I make that time to have a cigar it’s one of the things that force you to take that time. What you’re doing is carving out time for yourself, which I don’t think people do enough of.”

Today, he’s enjoying cigars more than ever. “I like to smoke when I study, so if I’m shooting on a show I’ll probably smoke four or five times a week. Then I’ll get into the weird situation where I’ll just smoke a lot—I probably smoked seven times this week, and it’s only Saturday.” He smiles. “And I’m probably gonna have another one tonight.”

Cudlitz firing up a big Fuente in front of his personal cigar locker at Red Phone Booth.

He’s so into cigars that it’s a part of his business—he’s an investor in several Red Phone Booth locations, including the one where he’s sitting, in the Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta. He enjoys trying new brands, to a point. “When I’ve carved out a big chunk of time, I want something I know I can rely on, that’s when I fall on my favorites: my Fuentes, my Padróns, my Patels, Partagas, things that I know are never going to disappoint.”

He also enjoys the occasional Cuban. He visited Havana during the Obama era, shooting for a Showtime series called “House of Lies.” He wanted to come back with cigars, but he wasn’t up on current regulations. “I don’t understand the laws, so I’m freaked out about bringing stuff back. All the people who didn’t know anything all agreed that we’d probably be OK with bringing a box back.” The Customs agent in Miami searching his bag was perplexed. He looked at Cudlitz and asked him a haunting question: “Why the f**k would you go to Cuba and come back with only one box of cigars?” [Current laws prohibit any Cuban cigars from being brought into the United States.] “So, my 10-day Cuban cigar extravaganza was cut down to one box and a couple of loose cigars,” says Cudlitz. “It probably took me seven years to smoke that box—and I didn’t share them with anybody!”

Cudlitz has been doing more directing, an idea born from his days at the show “Southland,” which first aired on NBC then on TNT. Cudlitz starred in the police show as veteran L.A. cop John Cooper. Chulack suggested he try directing. “He’s a very smart actor, he’s a very smart man. And he’s very creative, a deep thinker,” says Chulack. His construction background and engineer’s training gave Cudlitz an eye for problem solving, a skill that works in a director’s chair. Chulack brought Cudlitz into the editing room, let him observe how the sausage was made, but the show got canceled before he could take him up on the offer. After his character was killed off on “The Walking Dead,” he directed some episodes. He also directed one episode of the “Superman & Lois” series, which concluded last year. It’s the project in which he took on the shaved head of über villain Lex Luthor.

“The OG bad guy—the bad guy every bad guy in history has been built off,” says Cudlitz. His Luthor is sadistic and intense. “People say bad guys are more fun to play. I don’t know if I agree with that, but they are absolutely fun to play. Lex Luthor was absolutely a career highlight for me.”

The cigar he’s been smoking is nearly done, the interview close to over. He has several projects in the works. One involving New York City firefighters on 9/11 seems like a natural for a man who has played soldiers and police officers. There’s another project that he can’t discuss, plus a short film that his wife wrote and he directed. There’s the cigar bars and other business endeavors.

Thoughts turn back to “Band of Brothers,” a role he nearly turned down, a role that really put him on the map. He takes a contemplative puff.  “I can only hope that something I do in the future exceeds that,” he says quietly. “Gosh, I hope I do.” 

Source: https://www.cigaraficionado.com/article/the-craftsman

[Hoosh]

It’s really downplayed in this article, but the character he played in The Walking Dead displayed an unbelievable bit of acting on his part. More in line with the article though, I wonder what the box was he brought back from Cuba?!