The Hollywood actor James Marsden has always been willing to play down his good looks on screen in favour of sending himself up. In 2007’s Enchanted, he was a comically dim prince, while in Anchorman 2 (2013), he assumed the role of a waxy TV news host with a painted-on smile. In the bawdy 2008 comedy Sex Drive, he played, frankly, an idiot.
Now, in Jury Duty, a new eight-part Amazon mockumentary, the 49-year-old takes this willingness for self-ridicule up a notch or two. Presenting itself as a fly-on-the-wall documentary, the show focuses on a particular court case and the members of the jury required to preside over it.
But the whole thing is in fact fake. Everyone in it – from the jurors to the lawyers to the witnesses called – are actors playing a part, with one exception: Ronald Gladden, a solar panel salesman from California, believes it to be real.
Jury duty being the great equaliser, “James Marsden”, Hollywood hunk, has to serve alongside everyone else, even if he doesn’t much want to. When he’s judged to be so distractingly famous that the jurors must be sequestered for the entire three-week trial – residing in a motel at night, all means of outside communication denied them – the ruse is kept buoyantly alive.
One scene features Marsden having just clogged the toilet in rather spectacular fashion. He asks Gladden to take the blame for it when the plumber comes. “If someone takes a photo of that and it gets to the gossip sites, I’m done,” he says. Gladden, who is gradually revealed to be equal parts sweet-natured and notably gullible, agrees without hesitation.
Speaking from his home in Los Angeles, a baseball cap pulled down low on his forehead, Marsden laughs out loud. “It’s definitely something I’ve never done before,” he says, referring less to any particular bathroom calamity than the show itself. Marsden readily admits that Jury Duty always felt like a gamble. “It was either really going to work, or fail miserably.”
It’s certainly intriguing on many levels. Co-created by the team behind Borat and the American adaptation of The Office, this is Punk’d by way of The Truman Show. It’s often very funny, but it’s also unsettling and could at times be seen as somewhat cruel, taking Gladden’s gullibility and running with it.
Marsden insists that this was never the intention. “Oh, nobody was in this just to make fun of the guy kept in the dark,” he says. “What we wanted to do was surround him with a bunch of weirdo people, but hoping he’d be the one who unites us all, who joins us together. And that, fortunately, is what ended up happening. Ronald’s the hero.”
For the actors, Marsden said, it all required considerable application. There was no script, no “action”, no “cut”. The jurors, each of them exquisitely eccentric in their own distinct way, remained in character for the duration, largely improvising throughout. In order to convince Gladden of its authenticity, the trial itself had to unfold in real time; the days were long, and the legalese both necessary and, Marsden admits, boring. “But it had to be. It was exhausting, but thrilling too.”
Watching it, I was struck by the fact that a hundred things could have gone wrong at any given time. Did the cast’s collective mask never slip? “I don’t think so, no – a lot of really intelligent comedians and artists were involved,” he says. Although they did occasionally come close. “One time, someone called someone else by their real name, but we got away with it, I think.”
Marsden has been acting for three decades now. In Jury Duty, he has much fun playing the preeningly self-obsessed thespian. “I wanted to send up that entitled Hollywood thing,” he says. A running joke throughout is that he focuses less on the trial and more on a film he’s up for. He can’t talk about it, he tells everyone repeatedly, but then does little else. At the time of his toilet clogging, he’s rehearsing lines from the film script with a willing Gladden, the latter overjoyed to be this intimate with a celebrity.
Marsden tells them he’s confident about landing the part, so long as it doesn’t go to another actor, specifically “one of the Chrises” (Pine, Pratt, or Hemsworth). In this, he’s terribly convincing, which begs the inevitable question: just how much of “James Marsden” is in James Marsden?
One of them, possibly both, grins a set of perfect teeth before answering. “Well, we’ve all had those phone calls, and that’s an essential part of having success in Hollywood. It does test your resolve, but you can’t get too emotional. We, as actors, can be very delicate.”
It has occasionally been suggested that Marsden is one of the best actors of his generation, but that Hollywood never quite embraced him as firmly as it might.
During the course of his three decades, he’s played pretty much everything: the romantic lead, the straight man, the brooding enigma. As evinced in Enchanted, he can sing and dance, while in the soppily romantic The Notebook (2004), a persistent use of soft focus took a match to his smouldering looks and duly set the screen alight. But in so many of his films – the latter two, in particular – he’s played a secondary role, the bit part. Isn’t Marsden a little too blue-eyed and square-jawed to play second fiddle to anyone? Shouldn’t his name be in lights?
He won’t be drawn in. “I never thought I was leading man [material],” he says, “and I’ve always viewed myself as more of a character actor. From the very beginning of my career, I’ve enjoyed playing characters. I don’t want looks to be the reason why [I’m cast].”
Which is probably why he enjoyed being on Jury Duty. (Another running joke is that “James Marsden” is only a reserve juror. Even here, he doesn’t get to be centre-stage.)
“This show was perfect for me in its very DNA,” he says. “In my career, I like to get the kind of opportunities I’ve not had before, and I’ve never played a version of myself on screen before. I enjoyed it.”
If the show is a success, then that might just prove its undoing. You can dupe the general public once perhaps, but twice?
Marsden agrees. “I don’t see how this could have a second season, no. But, you know,” he adds, “if this is a massive hit, then I’m sure they’ll figure something out.”
In which case, America: beware.
Jury Duty is streaming now on Amazon Freevee.
