One of the big shows coming to the international market at the MIPCOM programming bazaar in Cannes this week was Einstein, the long-in-the-making series from CBS Studios with Paramount Global Content Distribution across sales.
Criminal Minds star Matthew Gray Gubler plays Lewis Einstein, great-grandson of the famous physicist. He has inherited the brainy family DNA if not the drive and has a comfortable life as a tenured professor. After he has a brush with the law, he ends up having to use his genius to help the cops solve knotty cases.
Gubler is also a producer on the series, which comes from Andy Breckman and Randy Zisk. The star tells Deadline about bringing Lewis to the screen and how he got to employ some of his other creative skills as the show came to life, designing the title sequence and having his drawings as part of the show.
DEADLINE: You’re a producer On Einstein. How does having that extra seat at the table change the way you approach the whole thing, you got to flex lots of different muscles?
Matthew Gray Gubler: I designed and animated the title sequence. Every episode has a lot of my drawings, that’s how I solve clues in the show
And we have the greatest crew. I got to set that up and meet everybody and make sure that everyone was on the same page. I was doing 19-hour days because the minute I wrapped, I would go into the editing room.
DEADLINE: Those are crazy hours, when did you sleep?
Matthew Gray Gubler: That was also a little bit of the benefit of this character. It made it easier sometimes, the lack of sleep, because he is a very carefree individual that might just wake up in the back seat of his car.
DEADLINE: There’s an archetype of an eccentric genius, to what extent did you want to either riff on that, or step away from it with Lewis?
Matthew Gray Gubler: The thing with Lewis that really stuck out to me and feels like the core of who he is, is he’s someone whose purpose is to spread joy, to either his partner, Teri, who at the beginning of the season is very serious and a little bit haunted, or spread joy through teaching.
DEADLINE: Are you conscious of making Lewis Einstein fundamentally different from Dr. Spencer Reid, your character in Criminal Minds?
Matthew Gray Gubler: Spencer Reid was a very smart character and Lewis is a smart character, but I see absolutely no resemblance between the two. I look at them both as trees. One is a palm tree, and one is a pine tree. They take to the wind differently.
I’m really not smart in real life, so the biggest joke of all is that I keep getting cast as smart characters. Spencer Reid was very cautious, very obsessive, he had a heavy weight upon him. Lewis is the exact opposite. He’s comfortable at all times. He’s happy at all times.
Criminal Minds was an absolute joy and I treasured every second of the 15 years I was there, but it was also challenging because that character of Spencer, he brings joy and light to the world by encountering really dark subjects and living in a world that is really intense.
DEADLINE: How would you describe the tone of the new show?
Matthew Gray Gubler: The beauty about this new show is that this character gets to bring joy in a dimension of fun. He’s terrified of dead bodies, and that’s a wonderful benefit to us as filmmakers because it’s not gory. The mystery is very lighthearted. It’s an entirely different take on what I’ve been doing. It’s like the yin and yang of mystery, and it’s a place that I feel so much more at ease in.
DEADLINE: The show has had quite a journey to the screen. It got pushed back a year and the female lead changed when Rosa Salazar exited and Melissa Fumero came on. How did all of that affect what the series has become?
Matthew Gray Gubler: Andy Breckman pitched it to CBS eight years ago. Amy Reisenbach, who now runs the network, remembered it and loved it. When she took over, she revived it. Andy joked that he forgot he’d written it. We were both excited at the serendipity, because had it gone earlier I wouldn’t have been able to be a part of it because Criminal Minds was still on the air.
DEADLINE: What did you discover about the dynamic between Lewis and his detective partner, Teri [Fumero], once you actually started shooting?
Matthew Gray Gubler: [Melissa] has the hardest job in all of comedy, which is being the straight man/woman. People don’t realize how important that is, but also what sort of nuance and talent it takes. She does it in a way that I have never ever seen before.
DEADLINE: How was it working with Andy Breckman?
Matthew Gray Gubler: I just naturally follow wherever it feels like the wave is taking me, and I’m just so grateful that it led me to Andy. I’m a giant Monk fan. When I got the call about this, I was so flattered. But I was also kind of like more interested if I was going to ever act again.
Andy Breckman is a comedic genius. He wrote so many of the sketches in early SNL that I grew up with and memorized … to get to be with him, making stuff, feels so full circle.
He’s so comedically gifted that I think people sometimes overlook the talent he has in just homing in on the human soul.
DEADLINE: When the show was delayed, what was the process?
Matthew Gray Gubler: I got to hang in the writers’ room, and Andy has the best process. I go into the office and there’s a board that has a mystery section and there’s Post-Its with mystery ideas, and then there’s a board that just has like comedic set pieces, and it’s three times the size of the mystery board.
DEADLINE: After 15 years on Criminal Minds, what did miss about being part of kind of a long running series?
Matthew Gray Gubler: That was something I really fell into. I never really pursued acting. I graduated from film school, and all of a sudden, I was cast in this awesome movie that a guy I interned for directed. That led to this TV show that no one expected to go that long. Then it was canceled right before COVID, and I had two or three or four years to kind of disengage.
It was nice to get to kind of just see family and hang out and go into my other loves of writing and illustrating and painting and Halloweening.
I never really miss anything and I feel like it’s all one big, beautiful loop, and now I’m back in.