When This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman first approached James Marsden about playing the president of the United States on a modern TV series, Marsden w
When This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman first approached James Marsden about playing the president of the United States on a modern TV series, Marsden was lukewarm. “I just didn’t see myself doing that,” the actor says. “I’ve done that once before on The Butler, and felt like I was too young.” Then Fogelman explained that Paradise’s Cal is a complicated president: a strenuous drinker, a man with secrets, and, most importantly, someone who “doesn’t really want to be in that position,” says Marsden. “He was sort of shoehorned into the career of politics by his overbearing father, and that immediately just sounded interesting to me.”
Marsden’s Cal is killed in the first episode of Paradise. The series follows his secret service agent (Sterling K. Brown) as he tries to figure out who murdered the president and why. The first episode also reveals a major twist: After an apocalyptic event, the remaining survivors are living in a city-sized underground bunker in Colorado, funded by a billionaire (Julianne Nicholson).
Though Cal dies right away, the show uses flashbacks to reveal what exactly happened to him—giving Marsden a lot of juicy material. The role required the sort of versatility Marsden has become known for in the projects he’s been making for decades, including HBO’s sci-fi Westworld and Netflix’s shadowy comedy Dead to Me. Both of those shows should have earned him Emmy nominations, but he was first recognized only last year for the bold comedy series Jury Duty. Now he’s up for Paradise as well. “I feel like the bar’s set too high,” says Marsden with a smile. “Only way to go from here is down.”
Marsden spoke to Vanity Fair about playing dead men, if he’ll appear in season two of Paradise, and what it’s been like to step back into his X-Men suit for the modern Avengers movie.
Vanity Fair: You didn’t get all the scripts at the beginning of production. Did Dan Fogelman walk you through all the reveals, and how Cal died?
James Marsden: I had two questions: One, how close are we to this happening in real life? And two: I’m dead the first time you see me. What’s this going to look like? He reassured me that the whole season is told in flashback leading up to that day, and the audience is left trying to solve what’s going on and who was responsible. So he gave me some ideas of where it was going to go, but he was still deliberately vague about certain things—mainly because he just wanted it all to be a surprise to me. With TV, you don’t always know where it’s going to go, so you have to have a lot of faith in the people that you’re working with and the minds of the writers. The first episode really struck a gigantic chord in me, and in that first episode, I was allowed to have a good time–he was drinking and singing Phil Collins songs. And then there were moments where you see him really carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.
What was the answer to the first question, how close are we to this happening?
He said, “Well, closer than you might think.” He cited a few examples of billionaires that are building bunkers right now. We’re definitely inching towards it. Just me, myself as a human being walking this earth and noticing all the differences taking place in the world and geopolitics and global warming and all of these things—every day you hear about what’s next in war and global warming and all these things happening after COVID.
The story is about a billionaire who is influencing the president. That part didn’t feel so far away from reality.
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