The New Yorker profiles NY1 anchor Pat Kiernan, specifically his propensity to appear as himself in feature films and TV shows. If you saw “The Avengers,” you saw Kiernan towards the end of the film. In “The Interpreter,” he played a pivotal role:
The late Sydney Pollack found himself in just such a fix in 2004, when his movie “The Interpreter” was leaving test audiences befuddled. How did he get out of the jam?
He called Pat Kiernan, the forty-three-year-old Canadian anchorman on NY1, and the go-to man for directors who need a newscaster to explain a knotty plot point to moviegoers. Since 2001, Kiernan has played himself a dozen times, in episodes of “Law & Order” and in movies such as the new “Avengers.” The other day, he took a break from the real news—brush fire in Staten Island, murder trial in Manhattan—to tape a scene for the season finale of NBC’s “30 Rock,” which will air this Thursday
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