In 1971 he competed in Serious Interpretation for Berkley. In 1984 he was Booger.

Curtis Armstrong represented Berkley High School at the 1971 MIFA State Finals. He went on to Risky Business, Revenge of the Nerds and four decades of character parts, with a Daytime Emmy nomination for a cartoon and a memoir along the way.

Curtis Armstrong

Berkley ’72

Serious Interpretation

In the spring of 1971, Curtis Armstrong represented Berkley High School at the MIFA State Finals in Serious Interpretation. Thirteen years later he was Dudley “Booger” Dawson, the nose-picking frat brother in Revenge of the Nerds.

It is not the usual road out of a serious reading, and Armstrong, who trained as a classical stage actor, has been telling the story against himself ever since. When he talks about where it started, though, he mostly talks about teachers.

Berkley

Armstrong was born in Detroit, lived in Switzerland for a few years as a kid, and grew up in Berkley. He was producing early: at eight he tried to talk the neighborhood kids into staging The Music Man in his basement, with himself as Harold Hill. The opening patter number came out of his record player and lost the room.

At Anderson Middle School his speech and drama teacher, Will Young, was a professional actor who had started a family and taken up teaching. Armstrong has said Young was the one who inspired him, around ninth grade. At Berkley High there were two more: Dwayne Thompson, one of the drama teachers, and Peggy Metzger, who taught speech. He told The Oakland Post in 2023 that they were “people who really set that fire.”

A friend from that speech class, Dave Stroud, described it to an Oakland University audience in 2019. There was a bit called Dummy and Stroud: Armstrong painted lines down either side of his mouth, sat on Stroud’s knee and did comedy skits for the class. Armstrong had been praising Metzger from the stage a few minutes earlier. Then it was revealed that she was in the audience, and he ran off the stage to hug her.

Curtis Armstrong in a tan blazer speaking into a microphone on stage, one arm stretched out to the side — Speaking at Phoenix Comicon, 2017 · Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

Classically trained

Thompson pointed him to the Academy of Dramatic Art at Oakland University, a conservatory set up by John Fernald, a former head of London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, as a counterpart to Meadow Brook Theatre. After a year at Western Michigan, Armstrong transferred, and he graduated in 1975. He and some classmates then formed their own troupe, Roadside Attractions, which played Ann Arbor and later the Attic Theatre in Detroit. At Meadow Brook he took on Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Sylvestre in The Adventures of Scapin.

Seven cast members of Revenge of the Nerds crowded together and smiling in a publicity photo — The cast of Revenge of the Nerds, 1984 · 20th Century Fox

Booger, and everything after

His first film was Risky Business in 1983, where he played Miles Dalby opposite Tom Cruise. Then came Revenge of the Nerds. Armstrong says he told his agent he would not play Booger, a nose-picking, belching part, because he was a classically trained stage actor. When it was offered anyway, he said yes, because he needed the money.

He has worked steadily ever since. He was Charles De Mar in Better Off Dead in 1985, and on television he has been Herbert Viola on Moonlighting, Principal Foster on New Girl and, over several seasons of Supernatural, the angel Metatron, God’s scribe. His voice has been Snot on American Dad! since 2005, and as the title character of the cartoon Dan Vs. he earned a Daytime Emmy nomination in 2013.

In 2017 he published a memoir, Revenge of the Nerd: Or… The Singular Adventures of the Man Who Would Be Booger. He is a devoted Sherlockian, invested in the Baker Street Irregulars in 2006, and he wrote the liner notes for the 2006 reissue of Harry Nilsson’s Son of Schmilsson.

He has stayed close to Oakland University. In 2019 he gave its archives seventeen boxes of scripts, photographs and contracts from his career, saying the place had added a lot to his life and he wanted to keep giving back to it. In April 2023 the university gave him an honorary doctorate of arts, and he talks with students in its School of Music, Theatre and Dance whenever he can.

Curtis Armstrong in a plaid cap and dark coat glancing sideways at another man in Better Off Dead — As Charles De Mar in Better Off Dead, 1985 · CBS Theatrical Films / Warner Bros.

The speech room

Speech is where a lot of people first find out what they are good at. Armstrong found out in Berkley, doing comedy skits for his classmates, with teachers who saw what he had. More than fifty years after that State Finals, he was still crediting them with setting the fire. Every speech coach in Michigan gets the chance to be that teacher for somebody.