USA has a winner in "Psych," the quick-witted and fast-paced buddy sleuth dramedy that takes James Roday and Dulé Hill on a weekly adventure, along with veteran actor Corbin Bernsen.
USA has a winner in "Psych," the quick-witted and fast-paced buddy sleuth dramedy that takes James Roday and Dulé Hill on a weekly adventure, along with veteran actor Corbin Bernsen.
The show returns tonight, Friday, August 7, 2009 at 10/9c for its fourth season on USA Network.
On the personal side, Shawn and his girlfriend Abigail's (Cook) relationship grows and Shawn has to adjust to being in a relationship.
According to USA, in the premiere episode, “Extradition: British Columbia,” Shawn and Gus outwit a notorious international art thief, Despereux (Cary Elwes), and when they travel to the ski slopes of Vancouver, they discover that he’s not an art thief but an insurance scam artist.
The fourth season guest stars include Cary Elwes, James Brolin and Sendhil Ramamurthy plus a return appearance by Rachael Leigh Cook.
The show premise is about the adventures of young police consultant, Shawn Spencer (Roday), who solves crimes with powers of observation so acute the precinct detectives think he's psychic – at least that’s what he lets them believe. Spencer is joined by his best friend and reluctant sidekick, Gus, and his disapproving father (Bernsen), who ironically was the one who honed his son's "observation" skills as a child. Also featured are Timothy Omundson (“Judging Amy,” “Deadwood”), Maggie Lawson (“Crumbs,” “Inside Schwartz”) and Kirsten Nelson (“Everwood”).
Show stars James Roday and Dulé Hill took time out to dish on the new season.
James, you played along with Maggie Lawson in the "Fear Itself" series and Mr. Dulé you had a wonderful part on West Wing for a while. So how do you feel now about playing comedy?
D. Hill I actually enjoy comedy; it’s a lot of fun. After doing seven years of drama on West Wing to be able to come and work with Roday and the rest of the cast has been a blast. It’s something different, especially working with Roday where he likes to improv a lot it challenges me to work on different muscles that I haven’t used before.
J. Roday Well, first of all I just want to thank you for reminding me that I did in fact appear in Fear Itself; I often forget that. Secondly, I would say I’ve actually done a lot more comedy than I’ve done drama. It’s weird the way that worked out, because when I came out of theater school I took myself way too seriously, so it’s kind of ironic that I ended up sort of going down the comedy path.
But I think what makes this role special compared to some of the other stuff that I’ve done is just the fact that I’ve had the opportunity to live with it so long and sort of watch it sort of grow and nurture it, not unlike you nurture a plant. And working with a great group and an unbelievable cast and sort of having the freedom to do what we do on the show sort of sets it apart from any role that I’ve played, comedy or drama. It’s just been a special ride. It’s been a special ride.
The show is known a lot for its kind of fast-paced banter between your characters Shawn and Gus. How much of a say do you guys get in what goes on in the dialog, particularly between the humorous segments and something like the nicknames that Shawn makes up for Gus? What goes on with those types of moments?
J. Roday Unlike, I think, the majority of shows on television right now we actually have a frighteningly high amount of say in what we do with the dialog. A lot of times it comes in great and all we have to do is say it, but any time we sort of recognize an opportunity to throw something in or add something or if we have a better name for Gus than the one that came in we just pull the trigger.
We’re pretty good at monitoring ourselves so that we only do it if we’re making it better, and it’s very rare that we find out later that the people down in LA were disappointed because we changed something. They’re usually pretty pleased.
D. Hill Yes. And the names that we come up with most of the time it has to do with somebody that we know, somebody in the cast knows or somebody that one of the writers knows or a producer, something like that. I would say pretty much eight times to of ten there is some relation to the crazy name that Gus is being called.
What detectives, in real life or in fiction, have been an influence for the characters?
J. Roday You know what, I go to this movie called Without a Clue that not a lot of people saw. It was Michael Caine and Ben Kingsley, and the idea behind the movie was that Watson was the brains of the operation and Holmes was just this very theatrical sort of charlatan that diverted people’s attention and got all the ladies. It’s a very, very funny movie that not a lot of people have seen.
But I love the fact that it was sort of rooted in the idea that these two guys absolutely, positively were dependent on one another to solve a crime, because Holmes was sort of the face of the franchise but Watson was the guy that sort of kept their feet on the ground and did a lot of the thinking. That’s not exactly what the dynamic is on Psych, but the sort of ying yang element of it of there’s no way that either of these guys could work on their own and there’s no way that they could accomplish what they were doing without the other one is definitely sort of a big element of what we do on Psych.
So that’s my answer. I feel decent about it. I’m passing it off to Dulé.
D. Hill I guess for myself it’s not any real I guess template that I came in to with a preconceived notion about like in terms of a previous detective team. I guess if I had to choose one I would say Cosby and Poitier in Uptown Saturday Night. I want to say that would be the equivalence that I could think of, but besides that there’s not really anything that I’ve thought about before to say yes, this is what the template is.
What was behind the decision to actually feature Vancouver in the premiere episode?
D. Hill I think it’s that we work in Vancouver. We’ve been working—
J. Roday Yes, it was an opportunity to finally not worry about everything that was in the background of all of our shots. We actually could play the locations for the actual locations, and make believe stickers and Canadian flags all those things were good. And it was actually a lot of fun; I’m glad we’ve lasted long enough to do one to do that. It was fun.
D. Hill And we finally didn’t have to move our palm trees with this; we could leave the palm trees—
J. Roday That’s right, our three movable palm trees got an episode off.
D. Hill Right. They were tired, you know what I mean; the palm trees were tired. With every episode they were …
J. Roday We gave them a much-deserved break.
The Thomas Crown/Remington Steele reference and the pop culture references that you make in the series are clever, and I just wondered if you could be in any television show of the past which would it be? Or if you could spoof a show as an episode what would it be?
J. Roday Well, my answer is one in the same. I would have given anything to be on Twin Peaks, and if we last another season we will be doing a Twin Peaks episode. So there you go.
D. Hill I guess for myself if I could have been a Cosby kid.
If I could have been on Cosby that would have been great for me. And I guess if we could spoof any show I would say maybe Fame; I could be Leroy.
If you could investigate anybody who would it be
D. Hill If I could investigate anybody who would it be?
J. Roday I think I might have to just really roll up my sleeves and investigate Monica Bellucci and just make sure that she’s living her life along the straight and narrow, she’s not cutting any corners in life, in her work; just really get in there and make sure that she’s on the up and up.
D. Hill And from my side I would investigate Halle Bear, who is also Halle Berry.
J. Roday That’s it; this is classy stuff you’re getting from us today.
Is the show is as much fun to shoot as it is to watch?
D. Hill Yes.
J. Roday Absolutely.
D. Hill We have so much fun up there. The cast is great, the crew is even greater, and we just have a lot of fun. No one takes themselves too seriously; we all come to work and we are pretty much getting paid to laugh all day. We sing songs; we have the best singing crew in Vancouver. One day if you get a chance you come up there and we’ll have them sing you Happy Birthday just for no reason in particular. We sing Happy Birthday about three or four times a day just because. There’s a really great bunch of people up there.
J. Roday And we don’t pay royalties for it. It’s free; we can sing Happy Birthday for free.
At Comic Con you kind of teased that Twin Peaks would be this season. Is that not true?
J. Roday That is not true, unfortunately. I think that something got lost in the translation there. This season has sort of been locked for a while; there are no unaccounted for episodes. That was us teasing with the hoax that if some of our executives were in the audience it was like a hint, hint listen to how bad everybody wants this. You have to keep us on the air. It’s a promise; it’s definitely a promise that if there’s a season five Twin Peaks will definitely happen.
D. Hill I guess a little teaser too Twin Peaks would be Ray Wise doing our show this year. A little prelude.
J. Roday That’s true. It’s a Twin Peaks prelude.
When 'The Mentalist' started were you guys like going, “Hmm, that sounds familiar,” and was it sort of fun to sort of point that out on screen?
J. Roday It was. No one is off limits when it comes to us, including ourselves. We’ve made fun of our own sort of resumes on this show. As long as they have a sense of humor over there I would think that they would be sort of flattered and get a kick out of it.
Obviously, it’s not malicious in any, but it’s what we do on our show and if you’re going to go make a bigger show that’s kind of like our show and get four times as many viewers and Emmy nominations then you should expect to hear about it when our show airs.
Do you guys have a favorite episode to film or that you think is the best episode you guys have done so far?
J. Roday I like different ones for so many different reasons, but I can say that for me personally, just as an actor, I think the most fun I’ve ever had on our show was an episode called Life’s Camera Homicidio when my character got thrust into the world of a Spanish telenovela and I got to improvise in both English and Spanish. That was a blast.
D. Hill Well I guess for that episode I guess Roday to be able to improvise in Spanish he was getting in touch with his roots so he was really excited about that.
But for myself it would still have to go back to American Duos. I just can’t help it, I just loved dressing up as Michael Jackson and being able to do a moonwalk, have John Landis direct me while I’m dressed up as Michael Jackson in Thriller. And there was a crowd there, too, so you can’t really beat that. You can’t really beat that. That’s one of my all time favorite experiences on Psych.
American Duos has to be my favorite episode. What was it like working with Tim Curry and the rest of the guest stars?
D. Hill Oh, wow, it was great. First of all, just the fact that Roday and Tim Curry went into a little back and forth saying, “No.” You couldn’t really beat that. You’re working with a comic genius, a great actor, along with Gina Gershon too, it was great. And then having John Landis direct, as I said before, for myself it was one of the all time great moments for me on Psych.
J. Roday It was a blast of an episode and it was cast perfectly. It was just one of those things where all the pieces came together and you just sort of sat back and pinched yourself a little bit, because you’re like I can’t believe this is A, happening, and B, like episode one of season two. So the planets definitely aligned on that one.
Your show’s Twitter feed said they were tired of hearing the same questions over and over again. Both of you play characters who are more complicated than they first appear, like it would be easy to play Shawn as just this grifting slacker but there’s more to him than that. What do each of you think is your character’s most difficult trait to capture and what moment in the show has allowed that character element to shine?
J. Roday Well that’s very insightful and thoughtful indeed. For me I would say the most challenging thing about playing Shawn is the tight wire act between slacker and man child, and then also somebody that you really do want to invest in emotionally and like every week. And the line between wanting to rub his head and slap his face is very, very, very thin. And sort of walking that line and always knowing when to stop is sort of the most challenging on a day-to-day basis.
In terms of like a single event that sort of helped me with that I would say probably when we brought Shawn’s mother onto the show, first episode of season three. Kind of we peeled back a layer that I think by tapping into it has allowed that sort of tight wire act to get a little easier just because you sort of saw a side of him that was way vulnerable that he didn’t have complete control over. And once we sort of put that out there I think it made things a little bit easier in terms of the balancing act.
D. Hill And then just for myself is one I don’t I guess get too cerebral with my character, so I don’t really think about it like that too often. I guess when a question comes up it makes me think about it, but in my day-to-day action on the set I don’t really process it I just do it.
I would say I guess for me it would be that Gus to not make him too nerdy but not make him too cool, because he is a nerd. But at the same time you want him to be cool also, and I think too far in either direction would change the dynamic of the show. So it’s always trying to find that balance of cool nerdiness or nerdy coolness or something like that. That would be my answer to that.
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