Jim Barone of Hamden had a run of very bad luck starting in 2012. That year, when he was 51, Barone was diagnosed with diabetes. He got an infection in his right foot that wouldn’t heal, leading eventually to the amputation of that leg in 2015. Then he got another infection, a very dangerous one, that led to the amputation of his other leg. In the midst of all his medical difficulties, Barone lost his job managing a gym at Yale.
In a strange twist of fate, Barone has been cast in a Netflix movie because the film’s producers wanted a legless actor to portray a legless man.
“The Week Of,” starring Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, Rachel Dratch and Steve Buscemi, debuts on Netflix on April 27. In Robert Smigel’s comedy, a Long Island father (Sandler) zeroes in on the date of his daughter’s wedding and struggles to financially cut corners and juggle family obligations.
Barone plays Seymour, Sandler’s 87-year-old uncle and Buscemi’s father. Seymour flies in from Florida for the wedding, and his wheelchair keeps malfunctioning, forcing Sandler to carry him everywhere.
“I met Adam five minutes before we shot the first scene. He had to put me in a car in the back seat. I didn’t know what my line was,” Barone says during an interview at Gaylord Specialty Healthcare in Wallingford, where he goes for outpatient physical and occupational therapy.
After that confusing start, he and Sandler became friends. “Almost every scene I did was with Adam. He’s a great guy. We’d give each other a hard time all day,” joking and goofing around, he says. “Everyone else was like, wow, Adam Sandler, but he was my buddy.”
Barone had a great time making the movie. “I thought it was hilarious,” he says.
Childhood
Barone, one of six children who grew up in Hamden, has had experience with physical trauma. When he was 11, he was hit by a car and broke his foot. Later he lost half of his right foot hopping a train. At age 21, he was in a car accident, not wearing a seat belt. The car was traveling 89 mph, but Barone walked away. He has had a few more accidents. “I wrapped my car around things a few times,” he says. “My father didn’t think I’d see 20.”
After high school he held a variety of jobs: a general contractor, a kitchen installer at Sears, a gymnasium manager and electronics installer at Yale University. He had his share of success: While working for boat-builder Vespoli USA, he built a shell used by a medal-winning rowing team at the 1984 Olympics.
Now, post-movie, Barone is an aspiring stand-up (or as he says “sit-down”) comedian. He has prosthetic legs, but he has had trouble with them fitting properly.
Barone snagged his acting role by chance. Allen Covert, the producer of “The Week Of,” says that in addition to querying professional actors with disabilities, the production team approached VA hospitals and rehab facilities last year.
“We didn’t want to cast a guy with legs and do a green screen,” Covert says. “That works great but this is a very specific role. We wanted to find a real person to fill the role.”
He ‘Fit Right In’
Among those who received the production company’s query was Dan Bergeron, who runs Gaylord’s amputee support group. Bergeron got the email on the Thursday before Easter 2017.
“I thought Jim would be perfect. He had just left as an inpatient. I’d been working with him for five months before that,” Bergeron says. That night, Barone emailed the production company. The next day, Good Friday, he got a response, asking for an audition tape.
Among all the audition tapes, Covert says, Barone’s stood out.
“Jim was real and funny. He had that grumpy attitude we were looking for,” he says. Barone went to New York and fit right in. “He just really fell into the groove. There really wasn’t a big learning curve for him,” Covert says.
At the audition, Barone gave his character a grouchy temperament and a gravelly voice. “My line was ‘I’m 87. My prostate is as big as a watermelon’,” Barone says. “Robert Smigel said, ‘That’s Seymour’.”
His line delivery, and his weight — at the time he was a slight 140 pounds – got him the part, Barone says, because he had to be carried in some scenes. (Barone has since gained about 60 pounds.) Sometimes, a stunt double was used, a legless Iraq war veteran, Bryan Anderson. In other scenes, a dummy was used.
Barone got the role even thought he is much younger than the character. He said he was in makeup for an hour and a half each morning to be turned into an “old man.”
The filming took place on Long Island last year from July 5 to Aug. 10.
Barone enjoyed the work and the atmosphere during shooting — the lodging in a luxury hotel on Long Island, the catered food for the cast, the two assistants assigned to him. “I went to the movies, to the beach, got manicures, got back massages” when not required on the set, he says.
It was quite a change from his “reality,” he says, which is “doctor appointments, surviving, going shopping.” But it’s a life without one certain element, he adds. “I don’t have Netflix.”
