![]() Unlike most of them he wasn’t trained in improv, but says he picked up pointers playing Ron Burgundy’s nemesis Jack Lime in Anchorman 2. Marsden is also full of praise for his fellow cast members, who pull the whole thing off without ever breaking character. “Somebody else could have been like, ‘Fuck you, dude!’ He really was a champ.” “He took responsibility for the shit!” laughs Marsden. Surprisingly, he takes it all gamely in his stride, including being blamed for a comically oversized turd he thinks his new celebrity pal left in the toilet bowl. “We were creating a hero’s journey where hopefully, by the end, you have this Twelve Angry Men moment where we’re hoisting him on our shoulders.”įortunately Gladden rises to the occasion, emerging as an empathetic yet guileless centre of calm even as the absurdity around him ratchets up. “It was important to me that this wasn’t a prank show,” he explains. “I wanted to step into that world.” What he wasn’t prepared for was spending weeks messing with his co-star’s reality. When he was approached, Marsden leapt at the chance to test his improv skills. ![]() Each day was loosely scripted with increasingly outlandish scenarios, but no specific dialogue. Jury Duty’s big twist is that Gladden is a real-life member of the public: a solar panel salesman from San Diego who has no idea he is taking part in a fake trial played out by actors. ‘The Notebook is my favourite movie,’ she said. I turned round and there was Julia Roberts. I’d much rather do that than play James Bond.” “Someone who thinks they’re great at something but are clearly not. “I love playing the buffoon and the ass,” he says. He is still boyishly handsome at 49, all piercing blue eyes and cheekbones that could cut glass, but he insists that beneath the leading man looks, he’s a clown at heart. We’re meeting at a fashionable hotel on the Sunset Strip, the actor’s LA base since moving to Austin, Texas, during the pandemic. Marsden, it soon transpires, likes nothing better than getting a laugh at his own expense. “That’s comedy gold,” says the actor, who also played android gun-slinger Teddy in Westworld, and the poor guy Rachel McAdams dumps at the end of The Notebook. Marsden, the real Marsden, gives a hoot as he finishes telling me this story. ![]() Marsden then mentions his recent part in Sonic the Hedgehog. Marsden stars alongside Ronald Gladden, very much the Truman in this blend of The Truman Show and The Office, and the two first encounter each other as they’re about to enter a jury room, with Gladden eventually twigging that he recognises Marsden from his X-Men role as Cyclops. I n Jury Duty, an inspired new docu-style comedy series that blurs fact and fiction, James Marsden plays an obnoxiously awful caricature of himself who boasts about auditioning for a soon-to-be-disgraced director, throws a hilarious tantrum at a birthday party and gets involved in a bizarre sex act known as “soaking”. ![]()
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