Entertainment

Buddy system

Reno Wilson is sitting in the front seat of Billy Gardell’s spectacular vintage 1956 Bel-Air sedan. The exterior of the car, parked outside Stage 24 on the Warner Bros. lot, is a blazing burnt orange (with cream trim) that sparkles in the bright Burbank sun; the steering wheel, Wilson notes, used to belong to a Corvette. While Gardell polishes his pride-and-joy, Wilson’s like a kid waiting for dad to get in the car so they can go for a ride. These two actors, who play policemen Mike Biggs and Carl McMillan on CBS’ “Mike & Molly,” are friends in real life, which comes through in their natural rapport on screen, discernible in something as routine as the morning table read.

They met on an NBC show called “Heist,” which was cancelled in the middle of filming an episode in 2006. “We connected from the first table read,” says Wilson, 41. When he received the script for “Mike & Molly,” he read 10 pages and picked up the phone. He called Gardell, who was in Cincinnati, doing stand-up. “I said, ‘Have you read the script? Get the script, get the script,” Wilson says. “The next time I saw him we were meeting [show creator] Mark Roberts and Chuck Lorre. It took a couple of minutes [of us talking and then] Chuck said, ‘I get it. Now get out of here.’

“It’s an absolute dream to be working with your best buddy. ‘Mike & Molly’ was my 17th pilot.”

For their first two weeks on the show, Gardell drove Wilson, who didn’t have his own wheels, to work in the car he had before the Bel-Air. “We were like Fred and Barney [on ‘The Flinstones’] driving to the plant,’ Wilson says. “We’d get to the studio 60 minutes early and work on the script.” He describes the show as a “master class” in sitcom. “It’s like playing for the Lakers. [Director] Jim Burrows is Phil Jackson. Mark and Chuck are like Tex Winters. All you have to do is just run the offense and everything else falls into place.”And now that Gardell has the Bel-Air, they drive to a local bakery on their dinner break before taping the show and buy cookies for the guards at the studio gate. The success of the show has been a bit of overdue good news for a local boy who’s been living in Los Angeles for 18 years. Wilson was born in Brooklyn Jewish Hospital (now an apartment building), spent his first five years in Bedford-Stuyvesant and the bulk of his childhood in East Flatbush with his parents, Roy and Shirley, and three older sisters. His dad was a blues pianist who had his own trio; his mother was a nurse and a mezzo-soprano who sang with the Met. (“I’ve seen ‘Porgy and Bess’ 12 times,” he says).

The actor says he inherited his perfect ear for music from his dad, who died of a stroke, on stage, when he was only 51, and blossomed in the theater arts program at Meyer Levin junior high school. His teachers there, Eddie Gentile and Michael Pearlman, steered him to a career on stage. When Wilson was 15, he studied with the Big Apple Circus to perform in a local production of “Barnum.” He graduated from the High School for the Performing Arts and went on to pursue a drama degree at SUNY Purchase, alma mater of Edie Falco and Stanley Tucci. At 19, he left school when he got a job playing Howard, friend of Theo Huxtable (Malcolm Jamal-Warner) on “The Cosby Show.”

He met his wife, Coco, an artist, on one of those failed TV pilots he did before “Mike & Molly.” The show was called “If Not For You” and it starred people who went to have hit shows: Peter Krause (“Six Feet Under”), Debra Jo Rupp (“That ‘70s Show”) and Elizabeth McGovern. “Coco was helping a friend on the set with her baby. I saw her with the flowing summer dress and asked for her number. We eventually made a date to see a movie. We saw ‘Othello’ with Laurence Fishburne. It was January 28, 1996,”

They’ve been together ever since and have two children, a girl, Deni, 9, and a boy, Renzo, 6. Wilson has taken his family back to the old neighborhood and the kids love to eat the local Jamaican treats, the cocoa bread and the beef patties. His mother is now 83 and lives in New Jersey with one of his sisters. If “Mike & Molly” runs a long time, Wilson says he plans to give back to the community that set him on the road to success.

“One of my goals is to go to East Flatbush and create an after school center,” he says. “If we go eight to ten years. I want to have an incredible edifice in the middle of East Flatbush, Brooklyn, where kids can explore their inklings in the fine arts.”

MIKE & MOLLY

Monday, 9.30 p.m., CBS