In a long and varied career, James Marsden has played an X-man, John F Kennedy, and Sonic the Hedgehog’s best friend. But one of his most unusual roles may actually have be playing himself in new show Jury Duty.
That’s because the reality show set to air on Amazon Freevee this week has one of the most bonkers premises to make it to TV this year. As the name implies, Jury Duty is a show about a criminal case. The judge, the plaintiff, the defendant, are all actors. So are the jurors. All except one, Ronald, who thinks it’s real.
Over the course of eight episodes, Ronald has to contend with jury power struggles, lawyers botching their arguments spectacularly, and his fellow jurors having meltdowns (or getting hit on the head by falling cabinets), without twigging that it’s a charade.
Alongside Ronald in the jury room is Marsden, playing himself – or at least, a version of himself, who has also supposedly been called up for jury duty. But how did such an established Hollywood actor (who’s appeared in everything from The Notebook to Westworld, no less) end up appearing on such a crackers show?
“That’s a good way to describe it,” he laughs. “A very good friend of mine, David Bernad, who is the main producer on the White Lotus, approached me about a really experimental comedy.”
Bernad, alongside the team behind the US office, had come up with an unusal idea. “It got me really excited because I’m a huge fan of improv,” he says. “[But] I was not prepared for the unpredictable, which is how this person is going to react. Are they going to believe it? You know, you’re messing with somebody’s human experience for three and a half weeks of their life.”
The challenge, for Marsden and the rest of the cast, was to hit certain story beats while not giving the game away about what the show actually was. Easier said than done: as Marsden explains, Jury Duty ended up being about “90 per cent” improv.
“There were moments where you’re terrified to laugh,” he says. In addition to the cameras hidden in random places around the courtroom (such as behind window blinds), the cast had to be on hyperalert not to call each other by their real names.
“It was kind of amazing to me that we pulled it off. There were moments where I needed to run into the control room to get an idea from the writers while [Ronald] was in the bathroom, you know, going into a fake door and coming back out. It was wild… if he saw any of it, [the show] would just go down the drain.”
Despite the protestations of his duty-dodging on-screen persona (who declares the only jury he’s sat in was “at Cannes”), Marsden himself has done jury duty, and calls it a “really interesting experience” - as you might expect in star-studded Los Angeles.
“I go into the courtroom and the waiting room there’s a wall of eight by 10 headshots from actors who have come and served. I’m like, ‘Of course, LA. Hollywood. This is so Hollywood.’ And I was selected to be on the jury after the prosecutor, [in] their opening argument halfway through, turned to me and said, ‘I love everything you do.’”
In Jury Duty, the opposite thing happens: at the start of the show, Marsden swans into the waiting room where a pretend official asks Ronald to take a photo of her with the actor.
Ronald looks baffled. When Marsden explains he was in recent video-game spinoff film Sonic the Hedgehog, Ronald tells him, “that was not a good movie.”
Did that sting? “The opposite,” Marsden declares. “It was like comedy gold… I’m playing the most self involved, egocentric version of myself and that James is relatively unaware of how entitled he is.”
Despite this, he insists that he had nobody in particular in mind when filming. “It wasn’t anyone specific. It was like when you hear stories about an actor who’s doing crazy stuff on set, and they’re just so self involved… essentially, it’s like a satire on Hollywood.”
Though Ronald is the only person who isn’t in on the joke, Marsden is adamant that he isn’t the butt of it - in fact, quite the opposite. “It’s a celebration of him and his character… it was important to me that there was not anything negative [or] bad natured in it.
“He was never the subject of being humiliated or being pranked. He was just surrounded by a bunch of weirdos who had very eccentric personalities and very strange things were happening.”
Marsden was, of course, one of those pulling the wool over Ronald’s eyes, but he still stays in touch with the cast, in particular its unsuspecting star – who had to get used to the idea that his new friends were not who he thought they were.
“This whole thing was fake. But the friendships that we forged together through this whole thing: that is very real. I still hang out with Ronald. The cast still hangs out with him. It’s like, I can’t do this to somebody and then just go ‘Hey, see you, that was fun.’”
However, he has no plans to revisit this particular brand of reality TV any time soon. “I’ve never done anything like this before. It is a challenge, [but] really rewarding from so many different perspectives.”
One of those rewards was “getting to make fun of celebrity a little bit and make fun of the entitlement that some actors feel, that they shouldn’t be held in court to serve jury duty because they think that their life and meeting a big film director is more important.”
