B and I finished listening to the podcast “Dead Eyes” last week. I don’t normally listen to podcasts, but this one caught my attention when the creator and host, comedian Connor Ratliff, appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers to hype the final episode of the show, when actor Tom Hanks came on to answer the show’s thematic question, Why did Hanks decide to fire Ratliff from his role on the TV series “Band of Brothers,” and was it because he had “dead eyes,” as Ratliff’s agent said? I don’t normally go for podcasts, but this sounded like it might be something I could listen to.

The show isn’t really about answering the question, as it turns out. It was more about how actors and comedians handle rejection and disappointment so they can keep doing the thing they love most. Ratliff’s rejection just happened to be so devastating that he kept coming back to it again and again as a sort of prompt. I mean, how could a rejection be more crushing than one that came from Tom Hanks, the self-styled nicest man in America?

We listened to all thirty-one episodes and honestly enjoyed them all. He managed to bag some truly engaging guests to interview — actor John Ham, director Riann Johnson, singer-songwriter Aimee Mann, comedian Paul Scheer — and, obviously, Tom Hanks. And to make sure it didn’t get repetitious, Ratliff went on side quests, to find out more about John Zielinski, the role he would have played in “Band of Brothers” if he hadn’t been fired, for instance. There was a magical moment in that episode, by the way, when Ratliff’s researchers found out more about Zielinski than even the experts who wrote bible for the show “Band of Brothers” knew about.

Almost as good as getting Tom Hanks on the show to talk about what happened and why, Ratliff gave a shout-out to someone we’d been hungry to learn the identity of for weeks. Each episode begins with a cold open, to set the stage for the rest of the episode, and then there’s an introductory voice-over when a woman cuts in to say, “This is Dead Eyes, a podcast about one actor’s quest to find out why Tom Hanks fired him from a small role in the 2001 HBO miniseries “Band of Brothers.” That’s all she says, but we started wondering who she was from the very beginning. She had to be an actor, or someone who did voice work because her delivery was so perfect. We grinned whenever she jumped in to give her line, and we wailed, “Why, Tom, why?” after she finished.

Frustratingly, we couldn’t dig up anything about her. There wasn’t anything on the podcast’s multiple web sites that even hinted at it, and neither one of us could find her anywhere in other web sites like Wikipedia, articles in the news, or social media like Reddit. When we sat down to listen to the final episode, we were almost resigned to never learning her identity, but then in the final few minutes of the episode when Ratliff was handing out thank-yous to the many people who made the podcast what it is, he said, “And you know what else? Thanks to Bebe Neuwirth, for being the voice you hear at the beginning of every episode.” We had been half-listening to this part, but when he said that we both spun on each other and blurted, “WHAT! BEBE NEUWIRTH!” We rolled back to make sure we had heard it right.

Fun podcast. A+ would definitely recommend.