Steve winds up dead in the pool in the first season’s finale, putting a violent bow on his one-season arc. “I like playing the cocksure guy who gets his comeuppance in the end,” he laughs. What attracted him to the dark comedy, led by Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini, was the chance to play Steve, Cardellini’s character’s horrible boyfriend in Season 1. While “Jury Duty” and “Party Down” offer a similar brand of humor, “Dead to Me”’s final season remains something of a departure for Marsden. “It’s just too much fun to take the piss out of that.” “You’re telling me I get to play whatever version of myself I want to be and lampoon the Hollywood entitled, petulant brat?” he says. What really stuck with him from the initial pitch was the opportunity to use himself as a vessel to poke and prod at the modern concept of celebrity. “I feel like those are the ones where I’m having a ball, and I’m having a ball in ‘Jury Duty.’” “The projects I work on that do really well, I always look back and try to find the common thread,” he says. Unfortunately for the cocky Marsden he’s playing, the series doesn’t dare dismiss its biggest name on day one - nor did he want to leave. Marsden’s first major prompt instructed him to ask the judge to dismiss him from the jury pool because he thinks his star status will bring unnecessary distractions to the trial. There were no scripts for the series, only story beats and prompts that cue up scenarios from which the actors can take the wheel. Comedy is something I have always respected.”Īnd while he idolizes improv legends like Christopher Guest and recent co-stars like Ben Schwartz who are trained in the “yes, and…” style of improv, his career hasn’t been flush with opportunities to go off-script. I would go to school and do ‘Saturday Night Live’ bits and Eddie Murphy stand-up. “Even in high school, I would always do musicals and plays where I was the goofy guy who did impressions. “I’m way more comfortable playing that than I ever was playing the leading man,” he says. At the end of a long day on set, the ones that send him home with a smile on his face, hungry for more, have often been the weirder, left-of-center comedy projects. Again, he’s everywhere.īut the longer he’s been in the industry, the more honest he’s been about the roles he takes. Marsden has had his fair share of dramatic turns in projects like “X-Men” and HBO’s “Westworld,” the fourth and final season of which resurrected his robot character last summer. “I never thought there was one thing that was my strength, but over the years, I just find myself being pulled back to making an ass of myself.” “When you’re young, you want to be taken seriously as a dramatic actor and sure, if given the chance, show that you can also do comedy,” says Marsden. Being the consummate comedic character ready and willing to make a fool of himself for the sake of the material isn’t where a young Marsden thought he would be at 49.
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