Bruce Lanoil Plays Pretend for a Living

Fall 2021 • Spotlight

Growing up, Bruce Lanoil’s imagination took him on countless adventures. Now, the Muppeteer is using that same creativity to light a spark in children around the world.

By Alana Blumenstein

Growing up, Bruce Lanoil’s imagination took him on countless adventures. Now, the Muppeteer is using that same creativity to light a spark in children around the world. Lanoil’s performances have helped bring to life beloved characters from The Muppets, The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss, Dr. Dolittle, Dinosaurs, Where the Wild Things Are, and Jack Frost, among others. In childhood, Lanoil struggled to fit in. Yet his greatest strength was believing in himself.

“I knew what was going on inside of me,” he says. “All of these things that I saw as a kid, unbelievably, I manifested in my life.”

Long before his days as a Muppeteer, Lanoil had a special talent. He could turn anything – from the sugary cereals at breakfast to the cartoons they watched at night – into a moment to remember. Born by the countryside of New Jersey, Lanoil’s humor came in handy – especially in the company of his parents. “Families can get tense and my family… they all grew up in one-bedroom apartments in Brooklyn,” Lanoil shares. “All my dad’s parents emigrated, and so they were trying to fit in. Everybody was just trying to be who they weren’t.”

Whether he was narrowly avoiding trouble or simply sharing happiness; both afforded the same result. By the time Lanoil was finished, it hardly mattered what had been said or done: his parents were on the floor with laughter. “I found everybody’s sense of humor. I listened, and I saw what was missing,” he explains, detailing how comedy could cure his family’s anger and frustration. “I diffused a lot of situations, by seeing where I could inject something lighter for everybody. And I built on that.”

Though Lanoil had conquered life at home, the outside world was a different story. Wherever he went, he never quite felt like he fit in. “We were a Jewish family, and we were one of only a couple,” he says. “Then I grew up very heavy, and there was just labeling very quickly.” Kids made first-glance impressions, says Lanoil, leading his choice of friends to be limited, and his self-esteem to suffer. But the friends he made, he cherished for life. “I had a best friend named Greg Metcalf, and I was fat, and he was skinny,” he laughs. “I don't even know why he was my friend, because my self-esteem was just not there.”

With his friends, his imagination truly began to thrive. “We had an imaginative friendship where we pretended everything,” he shares, recalling how his love of Star Trek led to a particularly special birthday. Eight-year-old Lanoil was so inspired that he re-created the show with his own group of classmates. The night was magical ‘til the end, as each friend ‘beamed down’ until all that remained were him and Greg. “But it was that kind of stuff, where we would just build worlds and make forts in the snow,” Lanoil reminisces. “That's where I lived. And that's where I was alive was in these pretend worlds with my closest friends.”

As he grew older, his love for pretend led him to pursue acting. Yet time after time, his auditions were met with rejection. Lanoil contemplated quitting, but he couldn’t bear to leave his childhood passions behind. He found his answer in puppetry. “When I was in puppets, I was totally free with my sense of humor to do anything I wanted to do. I wasn't confined by what you saw, because I could do anything with my hand,” he explains. “So, all of that studying that I did as a kid really paid off as a young adult and into my professional career.”

The work was meaningful in more ways than one, as Lenoil was embraced alongside the original cast and crew of The Muppets. With it came a lot of work and he rehearsed as much as he could, learning useful skills like improvision and strengthening his hand-eye coordination. But rather unexpectedly, Lanoil found his heroes had somehow become his friends. “There's nothing like it, to be a part of something bigger than yourself. Then you understand why we're all here on the earth and how we are interconnected,” he says. “There's no black and white, there's all these colors of gray. And we all live in them, no matter who we are. That's what The Muppets were in that moment. Everybody in the audience was united.”

When he filmed Dinosaurs, a Henson company production that used ground-breaking animatronic puppets, it was shortly after Jim Henson had passed. The cast felt entirely lost without him. The movie was beautiful, says Lenoil, and Brian Henson invited him to return for another project. For the first time, Frank Oz, Jerry Nelson, Richard Hunt, Dave Goelz, would play their beloved characters without the man that started it all.

When Lenoil entered the room, the group seemed utterly despondent. Then something magical happened. “They started going through the script, and then they started joking around, and then they just started playing, and then they started remembering, and then they started laughing … and the script got funnier and funnier, and the room just lifted up,” he recalls. “And I saw who they were, and what Jim was all about, and this ensemble, who are just grown men playing their hearts out in honor and being true to who they were.”

The moment, which Lenoil calls mind-blowing, ignited a feeling of pride unlike any other. “That was my entry point to say, these are, why the Muppets are who they are, why they are so beloved, and why they will always go on because of the people who take the torch and run up the hill,” he says. “And just want to show the world that we belong, we are together, we are different. And yet we are a family.”

Lenoil went on to perform in countless other Muppet productions, each leaving lasting memories. “There are so many great adventures with the Muppets, all over the world,” he says. “It's been an honor and a privilege to keep that.” When asked for his favorite, he shares a story from 2017, when The Muppets performed live at the Hollywood Bowl. Near the end of the show, it was time to sing The Rainbow Connection. Lanoil, cast as the beloved Swedish Chef, stood side-by-side with its writer, Paul Williams.

Fireworks shot up in celebration, lighting up the sky in bright, vivid color. Looking out into the glow of the audience, Lanoil caught the eyes of his family, and groups of all generations. “It was just this magical coming together. It was holy, and it was religious, and it was healing,” he says. “That was what I hoped to do as a kid, and then I arched all the way to that moment. Afterwards, my family came up and said thank you. It wasn't even about what was on the stage. It was the feeling of just joy, communal joy, and how that can heal the world.”