Jury Duty: James Marsden on the times Amazon Prime show almost blew up

Publish date: 2024-05-03

The day before James Marsden was due to start filming his ambitious new series, he had a moment.

“I was like, ‘I’m out, I’m out, I can’t do this,’” he told news.com.au.

It was a daunting gig. Marsden only had three days of rehearsals for a role that would require him to be “on” for a five-hour take every day. If he broke character, it would be a disaster.

That role was to play himself. Not the real him but the Hollywood arsehole version of him. And the job was Jury Duty, a mockumentary series about the ins and outs of serving on a jury in California.

From American Vandal and The Office to Christopher Guest movies such as This Is Spinal Tap and Best In Show, there’s a contract that exists between the audience and the mockumentary. It looks like a documentary but we all know it’s fake. Everyone is an actor and it’s all scripted.

While we know that, Ronald Gladden, a 30-year-old solar contractor from San Diego, did not.

Gladden answered an ad to be in a doco about jury duty and had no idea the whole scenario was constructed with him in the centre, the Truman Burbank of Jury Duty.

Alongside Marsden, two dozen other actors filled out the roles of all the jurors, the judge, the court officers, the lawyers, the defendant, the complainant and witnesses. Everyone had to keep up appearances for hours on end. There would be no one yelling cut, no do-overs and no breaking.

Hence why Marsden was overcome with a sense of dread the day before production. He said, “I was definitely sweating bullets going into it. I was like, ‘I don’t think I can do this, I don’t know if I can be funny, I’m going to screw the whole thing up, and what is my life going to be like for the next month?’”

He said he knew he could play the exaggerated, entitled actor version of himself – “That was just fun, I knew how to play that” – but it was the logistics of everything else that was challenging.

“It was a highwire act. You have to pivot, and you have to have adaptability. If Ronald wants to take a left turn and we want him to take a right turn, you have to take a left with him and just adjust.”

The stakes escalated as the three-week shoot went on. The deeper they went into it, the more they had invested in it.

He said it got more stressful “the closer we got to the finish line”.

“Because if we screw it up now, Amazon’s going to have two-and-a-half weeks of footage that they can’t use,” he said.

It got dicey a few times. Marsden said someone accidentally called one of the actors by their real name instead of their character name, or Gladden almost noticed one of the hidden panels on the wall which secreted the cameras.

“And there was a moment where there was a scripted beat where the security guard was arguing with somebody and it got a little silly and Ronald was like, ‘This can’t be real.’ So, we were like, ‘OK, everybody heard him say that, so pull it back, pull it back.’”

But what the audiences didn’t see, the parts of that were edited out of the eight-episode series, were the hours and hours of sitting around and doing nothing. The banality was necessary to sell the concocted reality to Gladden.

“Anytime he became suspicious, we would have a day in court where the judge and the two attorneys would just do legalese speak ad nauseam,” Marsden said. “And it was like nothing absurd [can happen]. There were no crazy beats happening.

“So, Ronald then would go, ‘Well, this can’t be a fake reality show because that was the most boring five hours of my life.’”

Many comparisons have been made between Jury Duty and Peter Weir’s 1998 drama The Truman Show, about a man (played by Jim Carrey) whose entire life has been constructed as part of a long-running documentary-reality series.

Jury Duty is actually closer in concept to a 2003 series called The Joe Schmo Show, created by Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese, who would go on to write Deadpool and Zombieland.

In the series, a real-life man named Matt Kennedy Gould thought he was a reality TV contestant on a Big Brother-esque show called “Lap of Luxury”. He was the only one who didn’t know it was fake, and everyone were actors, including a then-unknown, pre-Saturday Night Live Kristen Wiig.

Gould later said the experience made him feel dumb and afterwards he holed himself up in an apartment and smoked a lot of pot. A few years on from that, with a bit more distance, he managed to make peace with it.

The tone of Jury Duty varies from The Joe Schmo Show. Gladden felt less like the butt of the joke.

Marsden admitted he was initially nervous about the ethics of the piece when he heard the pitch.

“What was this show going to be like? Is it going to be like Joe Schmo? Is it going to be like a Nathan Fielder thing? Is it a Sacha Baron Cohen kind of thing? Those can be a little mean-spirited sometimes.

“I said, ‘I don’t want to be in a prank show’ and [producer David Bernad and creators Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky] said, ‘We’re not making a prank show, we’re creating a hero’s journey for someone and we’re surrounding that guy with a bunch of eccentric characters and absurd circumstances and we’re going to see how he reacts, and hopefully by the end, when we pull the curtain back, we will reveal what a great guy he is and his humanity will shine through.’”

Gladden’s casting was a masterstroke. He proved to be every bit the generous and kind-hearted bloke the producers and writers had hoped for.

Marsden said, “He’s the reason why this show works. He’s the heart and soul of this whole thing. We got to dance around him and act like fools and he just kind of smiled it off. Characters that were supposed to weird him out, he just embraced them, put his arm around them. He was such a prince.”

Despite his panic on the eve of filming, acting like a fool turned out to be a delight for Marsden, an actor who has played extensively in drama (Westworld, The Notebook), comedy (30 Rock, Death at a Funeral) and musicals (Enchanted, Hairspray).

Acting like the most foolish version of himself was the “most method” he’d ever been on a project, and really allowed him to live in the scene. Not that he had a choice. Once you start, you’re really in it.

“You’re living this character for a five-hour take every day. I liked that part of it.”

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Marsden may have gone into Jury Duty as its biggest star, but he knows Gladden is the reason why the series has permeated the culture the way it did.

Jury Duty balances the sharp wit and comedy from the scripts with the pure-hearted sweetness of Ronald,” Marsden said. “It’s one-of-a-kind, for sure. I’m sure there are a lot of people out there now trying to figure out the formula of how to duplicate it but I’m not sure we could do this again.”

Jury Duty is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video

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