While waiting to discuss the 25th anniversary of A Few Good Men with Kevin Pollak, I turned on the TV, and swear to God, it was playing on TNT. The timing was fortuitous, but this wasn’t unusual; according to a 2014 study by IHS Technology, Rob Reiner’s adaptation of Aaron Sorkin’s Tony-nominated courtroom drama is one of the 10 most-repeated movies on cable, up there with Sleepless in Seattle and The Shawshank Redemption.

When I tell this to Pollak, he isn’t surprised. “You cannot avoid it, hard as you try,” he jokes.

A Few Good Men, nominated for four Academy Awards, including best picture, capped a prodigiously critically and commercially successful seven-film run for Reiner that began in 1984 with This Is Spinal Tap and proceeded with The Sure Thing, Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally…, and Misery. It also boasted a phenomenal big-name cast at the height of their careers.

Tom Cruise stars as Lt. Daniel Kaffee, a slick, cocksure Navy lawyer with a penchant for plea bargaining who is assigned to defend two soldiers charged with killing a “substandard Marine.” He wants answers from Col. Nathan Jessup (Jack Nicholson in an iconic, Oscar-nominated performance), who ordered the “code red” that led to the private’s death. Demi Moore as Lt. Cdr. JoAnne Galloway and Pollak as Lt. Sam Weinberg completed Kaffee’s defense team.

For the transplanted San Francisco stand-up, A Few Good Men was “the major leagues.” “I joke, but I was waiting for someone to tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘I’m so sorry, we’ve made a horrible mistake,’” Pollak says of his casting. “It’s funny, but it’s how I felt.”

Pollak already had some solid at-bats in movies and on television, most notably in Ron Howard’s Willow, Barry Levinson’s Avalon (“the alte kackers love that movie,” he says), and Morton & Hayes—a valentine to 1930s and 40s two-reel comedy shorts that, like Police Squad, was unappreciated and canceled after six episodes. (Check out “Society Saps,” which features a coltish Allison Janney.)

But Morton & Hayes also led to his biggest screen break. Reiner co-created the series, and he appeared each week as the on-screen host introducing each episode. “If I had not been in his face while he was casting,” says Pollak, Reiner never would have told him about the part of Lt. Weinberg. “I have an offer out to Jason Alexander, but if Seinfeld gets picked up for Season 2, he won’t be available,” he remembers the director saying. “At that point, maybe hard to believe, there was almost zero chance that Seinfeld would get picked up. It was one of those bizarre moments that could have gone either way”—but when the sitcom did get a second season, “it worked out pretty great for Jason and myself.”

Pollak came to L.A. in 1983 with more of a career fantasy than a career plan. Michael Keaton’s star-making, tour-de-force turn in Ron Howard’s Night Shift was an inspiration. “As a comedian, I thought, ‘There you go, I’ll do that,” Pollak says. Rather than take acting classes, he decided to use comedy club stages as a way to be seen by casting directors. “It took a few years, but eventually, it worked.”

His years in stand-up gave him a shot of confidence: “There was nothing I could be intimidated by, whether it was a movie star or a camera or a director.”