“This was my coming out summer for the darkness inside me,” Mark Feuerstein told IndieWire. Hardly. Though his roles in MGM+’s “Hotel Cocaine” and Apple TV+’s “Lady in the Lake” take the actor to some extreme places, he radiates an authentic ebullience even over Zoom.
That same effervescence served him well as Burton Greenberg, the owner of the titular property in “Hotel Cocaine.” First introduced as a puppyish hedonist with wild hair and a tiny Speedo, Feuerstein’s performance is precision-calibrated to mirror the season’s darkening tone. As the worlds of ’70s decadence and the grim realities of the Cocaine Wars begin to converge, Burton is at the center — and his is the biggest transformation of the MGM+ series.
“I remember thinking, ‘Oh my god, this part, Burton Greenberg, is so much fun, so different from anything I’ve done,’” Feuerstein said of first reading the script. “The thing that I’m best known for is playing a role model, heart-in-the-right-place doctor in the Hamptons on ‘Royal Pains.’ And this is a coke-snorting hippie in 1978 Miami.”
For his self-tape, Feuerstein donned a leopard-print onesie (from his sole trip to Burning Man), prepared some lines of powdered sugar on a plate, and translated half his speech into Spanish under the assumption that Burton would speak the language to his Latin staff. Then he waited. And when he finally had a Zoom call with show creator Chris Brancato, he got the news he’d landed the role. “The Zoom begins with Chris going, ‘Mark, we watch 40 to 50 self-tapes, and it always comes down to two,’” Feuerstein said. “‘But in this case, it came down to one, and it’s you.’ And I just flipped out.”
Burton’s essentially outré nature was as freeing for Feuerstein to perform as it is to watch. “Mark is just a really unique man, and he’s hysterically funny,” Brancato told IndieWire. “And I think what he does for ‘Hotel Cocaine’ is he leavens it with humor in a way that just makes the whole thing feel more special.”
In that, Feuerstein was aided and abetted by costume designer Adela Cortazar, who, in addition to unbuttoning his shirts to the navel and keeping him supplied with period-appropriate swimsuits (“There’s not a lot to do in Juan Dolio, so I did get to the gym pretty much every day, knowing I would be in a Speedo”), found exactly the kind of clothing that keeps Burton firmly in the era without making him a visual punchline.
“Not only did she have to leave the Dominican Republic, where we were filming, to go to every thrift store up and down the West Coast to find authentic ’70s garb, but she hired a cobbler to custom make the shoes,” Feuerstein said. “She just cares about making it authentic and celebrating the color and the palette of that time and the polyester and the collars — without getting in the way. And that’s what makes it feel so right.”
After years of serving as the moral backbone of series ranging from “Good Morning, Miami” to “The Babysitters Club,” Feuerstein reveled in getting to just play. “Suddenly, I get to have fun,” he said. “[Brancato] and another writer named Michael Panes let me do my thing, allowed me to change lines. Have a little improv fun to come up with an idea and bring it and then they do it. So it was heaven. It was heaven because I [never before] had that role where I get to have the fun and I get to be the funny one and I get to throw out whatever I want.”
Less fun, though just as compulsively watchable, is his turn on “Lady on the Lake.” Seen in atmospheric, dread-drenched flashbacks as the father of Natalie Portman’s boyfriend, his relationship with his son’s high school girlfriend quickly becomes inappropriate. And if “Hotel Cocaine” harnessed Feuerstein’s zillion-watt charisma to reveal the cost of pleasure over eight episodes, “Lady in the Lake” showrunner Alma Ha’rel allows it to curdle into something sinister.
“This guy is trapped in a life with this older wife, but he can live vicariously through this young, beautiful girl,” Feuerstein said. “And apparently, the rules of propriety just don’t apply to him.” Here, again, Feuerstein is served by the attention to detail that characterizes both series, with Ha’rel providing the cast with 200-300 photos of Baltimore in the ’60s, newspaper articles about the crime that inspired Laura Lippman’s source novel, and more. For him, that level of intricate detail isn’t “a deep, intellectual, academic left brain thing where you’re taking notes and writing it all down and making sure you have the sum total of the parts. It’s more of letting it all wash over you over time. And hopefully you have a few weeks to put that all together.”
Next up, Feuerstein is spending the summer working on a script about an actor who becomes an undercover FBI agent, a return to the kind of blue-sky programming that marked his reign on USA in “Royal Pains.” Not that he’s done with the darkness yet; “Hotel Cocaine” ended its first season with Burton tripping on acid after witnessing a traumatizing double murder, hallucinating that all of his hotel club patrons had pig faces. Feuerstein is ready, willing, and eager to dive back into the world for a second season — Speedos and all.
“Hotel Cocaine” is now available to stream on MGM+. “Lady in the Lake” premieres new episodes every Friday on Apple TV+ through its season finale on August 23.
