Jon Cryer talks his one regret for Lex Luthor and new podcast

You know what? It was. It was really nice. We watched a lot of football. My Packers won. Ate a All right. Well, you can't beat that. I'm still trying to get the Linda Blair He hasn't responded to me yet, but I'm going to send her an email right now again. I appreciate that. She should be talking to me. I know. It should be crazy. Well, everybody should be talking to you. Who wouldn't want I'm talking to you right now. I know. I need to get you on the show

sometime. You have this crazy little life we never get to talk about. This John has got me going because he's doing producing podcast like this one. And I just was talking to him, but I used to. My manager was Jackie Kahane for Elvis Presley's Soul Opening Act. And I'm going to do a podcast on him because John says to do podcasts Yes, you totally should. All right. Well, you know, I'm a podcast producer, so you could just do Oh, wow. I know that's a good business. Do you do

Okay, so you're like John, he does the same thing. That's kind of I probably cost a lot less than John. All right, we'll talk. The quality is just as good. I'm sure. Hang on. Okay. Hey, Jamie, John. Well, hello, John Cryer. Hey, how are you? I am so excited to welcome you to the KJ Today show for the first time. I think we've talked over the years because I've been a radio forever. But this is the first time we've had you on our little positive vibe

show here. So thanks for being here, John. Oh, so glad to be a part of it. Well, I tell you what, I mean, obviously, there's a lot of people that are listening and excited and love you from Pretty in Pink and Two and a Half Men. But the conversation that we have been having today about this new podcast, it's just, honestly, it's been brilliant and

exciting. And I don't want to say too much more. I want to hear from you, your perspective when you first started you know, hearing this story from your friend, Suzanne, about the man who calculated death being her Yes. Well, you know, you forget that history is all around us and it's, you know, all the people around us have, are a part of history. You know, we just, we don't always see it that way. And, and the crazy thing was that I was, this, this

whole thing came about because I was at a dinner party. And one of my wife's oldest friends, who's named Suzanne Rico, she's

an anchorwoman out here on KCBS. You know, all-American girl, you know, beautiful blonde lady. And she was talking, I sort of blithely mentioned that I was a huge fan of the space race, and I loved the history of it. And she said, oh, my grandfather worked on the space program. And I said, oh, that's so cool, you know. She said, yeah, yeah, before that he worked for Hitler. But anyway, she just went on talking about that. I was like, wait, I'm sorry, you're going to have to rewind and

tell me about the working for Hitler part. And it turns out she had been on this kind of crazy but gut wrenching adventure recently because her mother had passed away a few years before that. And on her deathbed, her mother admitted that she had been working on a memoir. She'd been writing a memoir, but that she wouldn't be able to finish it because she was dying. And she asked Suzanne to finish it for her, which is just a crazy thing to ask of somebody. I mean, finishing her

memoir. I mean, I don't even know where you start from that. And Suzanne certainly didn't. So she had to go through her family history in a way that she had never really interrogated before. And so one of the first moments of the podcast is her going through her mother's things and finding a thing called the Knight's Cross, which is actually the highest medal that Hitler awarded. And she found out that her grandfather was

awarded the Knight's Cross. And suddenly she realized, oh, wow, I've got to go a lot deeper into this story than I thought. And so she It turns out her grandfather was a guy named Robert Lutzer, who was one of Hitler's most important scientists. Hitler had had such horrifying losses in the Battle of Britain and in the Russian front that he was trying to find a whole new kind of warfare, which was robot war.

And so Wernher von Braun, a very famous rocket scientist, And and Robert Lutzer were tasked with creating new wonder weapons for Hitler, and they succeeded. They ended up succeeding too late in the war. But but, you know, but but they were a huge part of Hitler's war effort. And so Suzanne did not realize that her father was such a big part of history. And yeah, and that her mother had always been horribly traumatized by the death of her mother, Suzanne's grandmother, who died mysteriously in

a bombing. And Suzanne felt like the only way to really honor her mother and finish her mother's memoir truly was to solve the mystery of who killed her grandmother and why. And to her credit, and this is an amazing thing, when we started working on the podcast, she hadn't solved the mystery, but she did it. She actually, through shoe leather and just enormous man hours, managed to solve this 80-year-old mystery. It was just this incredible journey for Suzanne. This is

not the kind of thing I generally produce. I generally make comedies and stuff. That's not what I'm known for. But seeing a friend go through this, and you know, you're a podcast producer. Doing a narrative podcast with when she had, I mean, she traveled to Europe. She traveled all over the United States. She was interviewing military historians and interviewing family members, interviewing concentration camp

survivors. She was interviewing, just doing this incredible breadth of research, but just Just the hours and hours of audio she had to go through. I mean, hundreds of hours. Wow. It was just this incredibly daunting, challenging thing. And she has made a really beautiful, beautiful story of a family. And this is just the first half of it, by the way. This is just how they survived World War Two. Then they were illegally smuggled to the United States. to work on

the space program. And so we're going to do the second season is going to be the story of Operation Paperclip and how her family got This is crazy. How many times? I mean, like you said, you've worked in comedy. I mean, you've had this big, long career. How many times did you say to Suzanne or yourself, Yes. Yes. Well, she has. Yeah, she has those moments all through the podcast. Because the story takes so many crazy twists

and turns. I also did a podcast called Lawyers, Guns, and Money, which is about the Iran-Contra scandal, which is also an insane story of just insane characters. It's almost a comedy, Iran-Contra, except that it had global consequences. But that is the thing about so many of these true stories. There's

stories that you wouldn't necessarily believe if they were fictional. But again, the amount of introspection that Suzanne does and if I found out, recently I had my ancestry dug into by a TV program and I said, guys, let me know if there's dark parts. you know, if there's if there's, you know, I'm sure, you know, not every not every human in my family is going to be a thing. And I and I'd really love to know where where everything goes

wrong. And they sent me some things. I mean, there were there was fascinating things. The turns out I have a Mayflower ancestor who is an indentured servant, which is pretty cool, except that he was a drunk He was the first guy to ever get in a duel in New England, and he got in a duel and they both lost because they shot each other, but neither of them died. But he was apparently not a great guy and had a lot

of brushes with the law. They had a lot more interesting stories as well, but that was one of the fun ones that I remember, but not nearly the history. spanning consequences of Sure. The Man Who Calculated Death is the podcast. And real quick, John, I promise Jim who's listening, because we just hit the end of an era with the Arrowverse and Superman and Lois finale airing and a lot of people grieving, but also looking back and reflecting. Can you share just a quick

Oh, I had a fantastic time on that. The whole Arrowverse was just one for the nerds. I loved being a nerd. I loved reveling in it. We got into the deepest, darkest recesses of DC lore. It was great. We just reveled in it. It was fun because when we ended up shooting this insane crossover where we had five different shows crossover with each other. We had Flash and Arrow and all those, and Supergirl and Batwoman all crossover. And Legends of Tomorrow, as a matter of fact. And it

was just this huge, ridiculous undertaking. And we all, I don't know. You know, we every now and then there were a few days when we'd look around and all of us in these ridiculous costumes saying these ridiculous things. And but we were all having a ball, you know, and I am sorry to see Superman and Lois go as well, because I think that was just a fantastic new look at those characters. I think they managed to really crack it by being by being, you know, faithful to who

Superman is. but also finding a new way to show it. And that show is really, really solid. And my biggest regret is that I never was on it. Yes. Well, thank you, John. I know you got a lot more interviews today. The Man Who Calculated Death podcast is out. And when season two comes