James Marsden has long been a charismatic and underappreciated talent whose presence is guaranteed to bump up any project a full letter grade. And now, he’s done the unthinkable: Made us care about service for judicial proceedings. In Amazon Freevee’s breakout hit Jury Duty, Marsden plays a fictionalized version of himself who’s forced to perform his civic duty despite doing everything in his power to get out of it. The results are spectacular — as is his commitment to “soaking” and jump scares — with the mockumentary ultimately pulling off its conceit of getting a regular person (Ronald Gladden, a solar contractor turned national treasure) to believe a three-week-long fake trial is real. Marsden’s role, which allowed him to embrace his inner dipshit and strengthen his improvisational skills, has given the actor the first Emmy nomination of his career for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. “It’s crazy for something that felt so small, so contained, and so questionable,” he admits after the nominations were revealed on July 12. “Like a backyard experiment.”
I mean this with great respect: You should’ve had Emmy recognition years ago. What took the TV Academy so long to get its act together?
Well, I don’t know. It seems like they were waiting around for me to play myself. I wasn’t expecting it. I know people always say that, but I really wasn’t. I made the mistake of peeking online at predictions. I was like, “What are actually the odds here?” I was always in the third tier or whatever. I was like, “All right. Well, don’t get your hopes up, but that’d be fun. It’d be a nice little bonus.” Then I got a nomination and just about levitated off my sofa. It’s not familiar territory for me. That said, I’m allowing myself to enjoy the praise, enjoy the excitement, and share it with all my Jury Duty pals.
I picture us back at the beginning of filming in an abandoned, dingy old courthouse with the feeling of stepping into this hybrid, a scripted reality show. There’s cameras filming for five hours a day, and I’m like, “What’s going on?” What we were doing is so different than anything I’ve ever been a part of before. People always ask, “Did you know when you were making it that it was going to be a big hit?” You never know! The things that do feel like, oh, this is something special, most of the time don’t pan out to be that. I’m so happy for Ronald and the way that he has a wonderful smile plastered on his face right now. He’s getting to bask in the attention and the love. It feels so good.
I must know how you and Ronald plan to celebrate.
Maybe a trip to Margaritaville. Listen, I tried to sleep in yesterday. I didn’t want to be pacing back and forth for hours before the nominations. It didn’t work. I saw Christina Applegate got her nomination for Dead to Me, and texted her immediately. But my first phone call when we got ours was to Ronald, to share that excitement with him, someone who isn’t familiar with our industry. We continue to celebrate this guy. The world is full of his superfans.
You’ve discussed how much anxiety this role gave you during the filming process, and now the show has been hailed as a beautiful study in humanity. When did you realize your fears were no longer warranted?
A lot of my anxiety wasn’t about whether or not the show was going to be a hit. It was really around Ronald — how he was going to respond when we pulled the curtain back, because this is a human being and we’re fooling him for three weeks of his life. That was my main concern through the whole thing. I never wanted to do anything to make him be the butt of the joke. I helped him process it after the fact and made sure he knew that, yeah, this was all fake, but our bond and his connection with the cast and the writers were very real. You can’t fake that. As long as he knew that, that halved the anxiety.
They did tell us at the beginning, We’re not doing a prank show. We’re seeing whether or not we can create a hero’s path for somebody. We’re going to be a circus full of weirdos, and he’s going to react how he’s going to react. It sounds nice and virtuous, but it’s still a pretty unorthodox way to celebrate somebody. It was all of these unknowns. I knew we were doing something funny and had the potential to do something really moving. I just didn’t know if the two could coexist. That was the big question throughout the process: Is it going to be funny and skew a little mean-spirited, or is it going to have a strong and kind undertone and celebrate his pure-heartedness? Maybe the comedy might be muted because of it. Somehow we struck lightning in a bottle, and it was due to Ronald. He is such a lovable, good-hearted person who took it all in stride and took a liking to characters who were supposed to repel him. If we didn’t have him, I’m not sure we would be sitting here talking. When I realized he was a good person and we were going to celebrate him, the anxiety started to go away — but mainly after the curtain pulled back and we realized he wasn’t running out of the room and having a full-on mental breakdown.
How did you approach building trust with Ronald in a way that didn’t seem beyond belief?
That was the tricky part. We know how TV shows are made — not everything makes the final cut. There’s plenty of footage of us shooting the shit and having a great time together that we didn’t use. You see a lot more jackass James Marsden on the show than you did when we were actually filming. There were plenty of hours where Ronald and I were hanging out, joking and goofing around together. But I made a point to make it realistic. If I was too friendly or buddy-buddy, it might set him off. He’s a smart guy. So I made sure that I had conversations with all the other cast members as much as I did with him. You balance it out.
It was a great deal of work and planning that went into strategizing how to get Ronald and I sitting next to each other through the beginning parts. When we go through voir dire, we’re standing next to each other so I could say, “Hey, he’s seen me in X-Men and all these other movies.” That was all sort of choreographed. Balance is the word I keep coming back to. I have to push these comedic beats that are written in the script — Marsden does this and makes an ass of himself — but you have to balance it with the real-life affable and kind Marsden to remind him that James Marsden isn’t always a self-centered prick.
How did Jury Duty’s identity evolve over the filming process? Did you want, say, a more cynical Curb Your Enthusiasm edge to it, but abandoned that when you realized how much of a hero’s journey it was?
It certainly was that. On a regular scripted show, you know the beginning, the middle, and the end. This was different. We had it all planned out with seven scripts that were like, “This is when we get sequestered. This is when I take a crap in his bathroom. This is when I destroy the birthday party.” But Ronald was the wild card. If we wanted to make him turn right and he wanted to turn left, we’d have to turn left with him. A great deal of adaptability was required to be able to flow with it. The phrase I heard most on this show is, This has never been done before.
We would have a conference at the end of every day. Once Ronald went home to the sequestered hotel, we would pretend to go home but went back and talked about the next day, what worked today and what we needed to change. We were rewriting the script every day. We had to grow with him as we went along. Our North Star was that we needed to make sure we felt good about what we were doing at the end of this, and we weren’t going to do anything that’s going to make him feel humiliated. We wanted to celebrate Ronald for his humanity. We achieved that.
There were moments where it was like, “This isn’t going to work.” For example, the Margaritaville scene was originally scripted that we got out of the big bill because there’s some hot-wing challenge — if you eat a certain amount of these crazy hot wings, the restaurant pays the bill. We were going to have the cast eat some crazy hot ones and one of them couldn’t get through one bite, but we’d give very mild ones to Ronald. I was like, “Guys, this isn’t going to work.” So how do we get out of it? We came up with the arm-wrestling challenge. It was something we could actually control.
Was there a contingency plan if Ronald found out?
Yes. It was, “Ronald is onto us. Tomorrow, get ready for six hours of no comedy and the most boring court experience you’ve ever seen. There’s going to be a lot of sitting around. There’s going to be a lot of mundane chitchat. There’s going to be a lot of legalese in the court. This isn’t going to feel like a show.” It would take Ronald down from DEFCON 5 to DEFCON 2. He would’ve been like, “This can’t be a show, because this was the most boring day of my life.”
We saw you and Ronald bond over the delights of Sonic the Hedgehog. What other pop-culture fixations did you two share that didn’t make the cut?
It really surprised me when he came in with a Sex Drive DVD. That was crazy. I was like, “That’s the movie you remember me from?” Deep cut. And probably a movie that would not be able to be made nowadays. I remember that day, the producers were like, “Oh my God, he came in with a DVD; he loves Sex Drive. What do we do with this?” I said, at the end when we pull back the curtain, maybe I could pick him up in the Pontiac GTO Judge that I drove in the movie and we’ll take a spin away from the courtroom. We were also going to find a life-size cardboard cutout of me as the character in Sex Drive, and my character was going to bring it to him as a gift and sign it for him. I don’t know why we scrapped that idea.
What was the closest you came to breaking character?
When we were shown the really low-rent animation sequence by the defense. I don’t know who did that in a chunky, crappy, Roblox-style animation, but they hadn’t shown us that beforehand and it was perfectly terrible. We were all trying to hide our laughter and couldn’t — but it was okay because it was so absurd. If this was a real case, you would’ve been laughing at it.
But the hardest part was the group interviews, because we were all in each other’s shot. You couldn’t walk away and get a bag of Doritos. In the deliberation room, you could get up and go to the bathroom if you couldn’t keep it together. You could kind of get away from Ronald. But in the group interviews, it was tough. Ron Song, who plays Ken, sat in front of me. He was one of the funniest characters because he would always speak so slowly. I couldn’t go anywhere. There would be moments where I was really trying to hold it together and pinching my leg. You know that trick? You start to laugh and you inflict pain on yourself so you don’t. That was me.
What has this role affirmed for you and your career?
This affirms that when the expectation bar is low, I fly. That sounds negative in some way, but I didn’t know if this was going to work or if anyone would see it. It’s on Amazon Freevee — I was like, What is this platform? When you don’t feel like the expectations are super-high, there’s less pressure. I’ve always been a fan of Christopher Guest–style comedies — a real mockumentary. Nothing is better than Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show. And, of course, Curb and Larry David. I’ve never been given an opportunity to do it. I was like, What would make me laugh? I don’t ever want to be in a scene where I’m seeing the script in my head. I want to be looking other actors in the eyes and have a level of unpredictability.
I wasn’t trained in long-form improv. I still don’t know what I’m doing. I just know what I think is funny. It was exciting to send up the entitled Hollywood celebrity. I got to wake up every day and do what I thought would be funny to make fun of. When you’re in there for five hours a day for three weeks, you get to try a lot of stuff. Nobody can come in and say, Hey, don’t do that. If I’m given latitude to mess around, I can get into a great rhythm and have a lot of fun with it. I love playing a character who’s a buffoon. I love making an ass of myself and have fun doing it. This was the perfect role to do it with.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that I feel you should’ve gotten an Emmy nomination for your work as Criss Chros in 30 Rock.
Talk about brilliant writing. That was as sharp as it gets. I remember feeling ill-equipped for that show. I would think to myself, Jon Hamm is here? Matt Damon was just here? And now they want me to play the boyfriend? I’m not sure I qualify. But I had so much fun with Tina Fey. I thought I was serviceable for one season, and then the show called me and was like, Actually, we want you back for another season. That was a really big surprise. I’m working here? It was pros knocking out home runs every take.