Courtesy of HBO
An Iowa native has landed a role on HBO’s new series “Carnivale.”
38-year-old Toby Huss of Marshalltown stars as Stumpy Dreifuss, a barker for a traveling carnival set in the dust bowl of 1934.
Besides the bearded lady, a lizardman and clairvoyants, the show’s rife with mysteries and supernatural strangeness that even Huss can’t explain.
“We tried to get it out of the writers just what it was about or what they were going for and we could never get a straight answer out of any one of ’em, because we’d sit down and read the scripts and we still didn’t know what it was about.”
The first 12 episodes of “Carnivale” have been shot and HBO has yet to say whether it’ll buy a second season, so Huss says his future is a bit uncertain, though as an actor, he says he’s used to it.
He says “You can never really think that far ahead. Tomorrow I could go out on an audition and get a role and everything could change and I could be doing something completely different for the next six months. It’s sorta’ strange because if Carnivale doesn’t get picked up then, hopefully, they’ll grab you for some role in something else. You can’t really count on anything, you can’t really count on getting work.”
Huss has appeared in T-V commercials and several films, including “Bedazzled,” “Dear God,” “Down Periscope” and “Jerry Maguire,” in T-V programs from “Seinfeld” and “Reno 911” to “Newsradio,” and he’s a voice on many cartoons including “The Country Bears” and “The Adventures of Pete and Pete.”
Now that “King of the Hill” has wrapped for the season, when he’s not acting, Huss helps run a photography and painting studio/art gallery in L.A. to sell his paintings, photographs and other works.