Martin Short On ‘OMITB’ Season 6 And Documentary ‘Marty, Life Is Short’

Actor Martin Short is hotter than ever – literally. He has been sweltering in London this summer where the temperatures have soared to extraordinary levels: Thursday’s forecast calls for a high of 97°F (36°C), the latest furnace blast in a succession of UK heat waves.

“What’s amazing is that London is not used to it,” Short says of the brutal temps. “We’re working with the biggest stars and they’ll say, ‘We don’t have air conditioning.’”

Short has been in the British capital shooting season 6 of Only Murders in the Building, the hit Hulu series that recently earned him two more Emmy nominations – one for Outstanding Comedy Series, where he’s recognized as part of the show’s producing team, and another for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series, for his role as Oliver Putnam. One more measure of just how molten his career has become — he also scored a nomination as Outstanding Host for a Game Show for his emcee role on Match Game.

And the Emmy love doesn’t end there: Marty, Life Is Short, the Netflix documentary about him directed by the actor’s close friend Lawrence Kasdan, has earned three Primetime Emmy nominations including Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special and Outstanding Directing for Kasdan’s work. For director and subject, their match game began decades ago.

“We made a film together, Cross My Heart, in 1987 that he executive produced, but he was very hands-on. It wasn’t like one of those things where you just sign a deal and walk away. He was on the set every day,” Short explains. “Sometimes when you work with people, you kind of go, ‘I don’t want to lose that person. I like that person.’ So, we continued a friendship all these years.”

Fortunately for Kasdan the filmmaker, Short has been compiling a sort of archive of his life, going back to childhood.

“I always recorded things. My brother Michael used to say — this is in the days of the cassette tape recorders – ‘Marty will record the first half of his life and the second half he’ll just listen to it,’” he tells Deadline. “My father was a steel executive, and I remember he brought home an early tape recorder and I was just fascinated. I was like 9 or something… I recorded everything.”

Later, he graduated to video cameras. “I was someone who always picked up a camcorder and filmed everything. And I never looked at it. You just transferred to a DVD, put it on a shelf. So I had 30 years of that. And then my close friend Steven Spielberg kind of does the same thing. And because I trusted Larry [Kasdan], I gave him everything and Steven sent over everything he had on me, which was a lot. And so, Larry had lots to work from.”

The film examines Short’s upbringing in Hamilton, Ontario as the youngest of five siblings, showered with love and attention from his earliest days (perhaps the only dark cloud in those blue skies being his father’s alcohol problem). He gravitated towards performing from a young age and by his teen years could credibly imitate the singing voice of Frank Sinatra. Short got his big break in show business – as so many other future greats did – in the 1972 Toronto production of Godspell (explored in-depth in the 2025 documentary You Had to Be There). His big break in TV, of course, came when he joined the cast of SCTV, where he satirized Jerry Lewis, played a pugilistic Mister Rogers boxing Julia Child, and introduced the world to Ed Grimley, the teeth-baring, triangle-striking manchild with irrepressible energy and an oddly endearing awkwardness.

On SCTV, he co-starred with John Candy (coincidentally, the focus of another Emmy-nominated documentary this year, John Candy: I Like Me), his pal Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas, Rick Moranis, Andrea Martin and Catherine O’Hara. Short and O’Hara shot an interview together for Marty, Life Is Short, not long before her passing earlier this year.

“That’s the thing that’s so moving is to see that brilliant, perfect person,” Short says of O’Hara. “There was no one funnier and there was no one sweeter.”

RELATED: Remembering Catherine O’Hara: A Career In Photos

The way he expresses his affection for his friends – like O’Hara, Kasdan, Spielberg and many others who appear in the film – says something about the man and his capacity for love. Short and his wife, actress and singer Nancy Dolman, became devoted parents to three adoptive children. And the sheer delight Dolman and Short shared in each other’s company – they met while working on the Godspell production – became an object of admiration in Hollywood (especially among people who perhaps couldn’t say the same of their own marriages

But as if fate wished to balance all the joy, love and laughter Short has experienced in his 76 years, he has faced recurrent losses and tragedies – his eldest brother dying in an auto accident when Martin was just 12, his parents dying by the time he was 20, his wife Nancy taken by cancer in 2010 at the age of 58. Earlier this year, Short’s daughter Katherine took her own life.

Kasdan finds a way to acknowledge painful moments in Short’s life while emphasizing his incredible vitality and resilience.

“I’m glad that people react emotionally to [the documentary] because it is emotional material and he’s a good guy, so you’re really invested in him,” Kasdan tells us. “The thing that amazed me about him, that made me do this film, was that spirit that goes through anything.”

Short seems blessed with an unusual degree of equanimity, which has helped him keep going amid devastating loss. The level head has also served him well in handling fame. After making an appearance on a late-night talk show, for instance, he studies clips online, not to bask in his own image but to analyze how bits went over.

“Because sometimes you’ll love these jokes that you did, but for time they’ve trimmed them. So you look at the last Kimmel and say, ‘Oh, what did I…?’ And then you’re seduced by the comments below. And you’ll read, ‘He’s great. Oh, I love that guy.’ Then there’s, ‘I’ve hated that guy my whole life. He’s desperate and needy. He pushes. I don’t find it funny.’ And all I think is comedy is subjective. But what I do know is that if I had dinner with you, the hater, I would be bored to death. So, I don’t really worry. That’s not what fueled me. I’ve always had a joyful experience. I’ve never worked with nightmare people. I think if I did work with a prick director, I think I’d be fired because I’d tell him he was an asshole and I’d be fired. And there goes me. But I could never hold it in. I’m very easygoing except my Achilles heel is rudeness and mean people.”

Those values, it seems, carry over to the filming of Only Murders in the Building. “I’m proud of lots of things about Only Murders. But one of the things I’m proudest of is the perception of it,” he says. “It’s one of the loosest, happiest sets that any guest star guests on. And we get these reviews from all these famous people endlessly like, ‘Oh my God, I had the best time.’”

Short gave us a scoop on some of the big names joining the London-based season of Only Murders in the Building, including an Oscar winner.

“What’s crazy is the level of the British actors we’re working with. It’s insane. I mean, one day it’s Olivia Colman,” he shares, “and then David Tennant, and then it’s Martin Freeman, and then it’s Jennifer Saunders. It’s just, as Harry Shearer once said, ‘The crème de la cream.’”

The runaway success of Only Murders has propelled his career to new heights. But even that he appears to keep in perspective.

“I would say my career has been 80 percent failure,” Short observes in the documentary. “And I would say those are pretty good odds.”

“I use that word tongue-in-cheek,” he explains during our conversation, “because I do think failure is not if the critics don’t like it or if the box office doesn’t like it. I think failure is you don’t like it, this is not the piece of quote unquote ‘art’ you wanted to create… When I call failure, I am talking about commercial failure. But I consider real failure is if your film could make a hundred million dollars and the critics love it, but you go, ‘I don’t think it’s very good.’ That’s real failure.”

By that standard, his success rate is much closer to 100 percent. Characters he’s created, from the petite (the boy Clifford) to the XXL (Jiminy Glick), have become signatures along with Ed Grimley, Father of the Bride’s Franck Eggelhoffer, and Ned Nederlander — one of Three Amigos – and now Only Murders in the Building’s Oliver Putnam. And that’s just in comedy on screen — there’s also his dramatic roles and Tony Award-winning work on Broadway. Again, he keeps it in perspective.

“I’m 76. I am not on social media. I’ve never been on social media. I will say honestly, I’ve never done this for the admiration of strangers. I never have,” he insists. “I just do this because I love doing it.”