TV Talk: McCandless native takes off in ‘The Flight Attendant’

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

McCandless native Griffin Matthews didn’t know a career in the arts was a possibility until one day during 11th grade at North Allegheny Senior High School.

“I was sitting next to a guy in jazz choir who got into Carnegie Mellon and everybody made such a big deal about it,” said Matthews, who stars alongside Kaley Cuoco (“The Big Bang Theory”) in HBO Max’s comedic mystery-thriller “The Flight Attendant.”

“And I was like, ‘What’s CMU and what does that mean? I can go to school for musical theater?’ That had never crossed my mind.”

After graduating from North Allegheny in 1999, Matthews indeed went on to study musical theater at CMU, graduating in 2003, and he’s worked steadily in TV and in theater, co-writing a musical with husband Matt Gould. Following a recurring role as unabashedly gay student D’Unte on season three of Netflix’s “Dear White People,” “The Flight Attendant” marks Matthews’ first series regular role that made it to air.

“I had a crisis about a year-and-a-half ago because I read this article where I think Jennifer Aniston was talking about doing nine pilots and none of them went and then ‘Friends’ happened, and it was hitting me, I’m 36-years-old and none of (my pilots have) gone (to series) so it essentially appears I’ve done nothing,” Matthews said in a phone interview from his Los Angeles home. “That’s why pilot season is so brutal: You have to invest every season in trying to book something and it’s so hard to book, especially when you come in my package, and then you shoot the show and you love the story and it doesn’t get picked up and you’re like, ‘Here I go again.’ ”

Matthews said as a Black, gay, skinny, funny guy, he’s not always what casting directors have in mind.

“My casting will say ‘other, open to all races,’ so when I’m sitting in the final callback, it’s me and an Indian guy and a heavyset Filipino dude all lined up. We’re ‘the others,’ ” Matthews said. “We show up when they can’t find the right person and they’re reopening all of their casting options. So we’re going into (audition) rooms and changing someone’s mind.”

But when he went in to audition for “The Flight Attendant,” Matthews said it was him and “a bunch of Black guys.

“It felt like we were sitting in the right pocket,” Matthews said. “And ‘Dear White People’ changed my confidence around being me and not trying to do what I thought they wanted but to come in firing on all cylinders. I don’t think I would have gotten ‘Flight Attendant’ if I had not done ‘Dear White People.’ ”

In “Flight Attendant” Matthews plays Shane, a co-worker of Cuoco’s Cassie, who gets embroiled in a murder mystery involving a first class passenger. In the show’s third episode Cassie ropes Shane into attending the dead man’s memorial with her.

“That was probably my favorite episode to shoot because it’s where you start to catch the flavor of who Shane is and what he’s doing and how he feels about Cassie,” Matthews said. “I was very aware to not make everything ‘the gay best friend’ and the fact they were in a tiff for a valid reason is kind of compelling.”

Three “Flight Attendant” episodes are now streaming, two more debut Dec. 3 and Dec. 10 and then the finale, which features Griffin’s Shane prominently, streams on Dec. 17.