Jury Duty may be over, but James Marsden’s friendship with Ronald Gladden is still going strong.

Marsden, 58, revealed to PEOPLE at the season 2 premiere of Your Friends & Neighbors at the New York Historical in New York City on Monday, March 30, that he still keeps tabs on his Jury Duty costar, who served as the only non-actor in the hit 2023 series.

“I talk to him occasionally, make sure he’s… I mean, he just seems like he’s flourishing,” Marsden says.

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When This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman first approached James Marsden about playing the president of the United States on a new 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 hard 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 dark 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.”

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James Marsden has had a long and versatile career, starring in superhero movies (“X-Men”), sci-fi epics (“Westworld”), comedies (“Jury Duty” “30 Rock”), dramas and rom coms (“27 Dresses,” “Enchanted.”). But when he was talking to The Post about his Hulu show “Paradise,” he admitted there’s one dream role he hasn’t done yet.

“I’ve always loved emulating some of the old crooners, like Bobby Darin and Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. I always thought there were so many interesting stories of Frank Sinatra’s life that could be played. And for whatever reason, you’ve never really seen a movie about him,” Marsden, 51, told The Post.

“To do a biopic like what Jamie Foxx did with Ray Charles would be a lot of fun. I would love to,” he continued. “And you’re actually using your singing voice, as well.”

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James Marsden is reflecting on the challenges of filming Jury Duty.

During a recent episode of Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, Marsden, 51, opened up about his experience filming the mockumentary and how it differed from his past projects. Explaining that he was tempted at times to blow his cover to the unassuming Ronald Gladden, Marsden said he was warned about the difficulty of the fake reality show.

“I remember having this conversation with one of the producers who had also worked on Borat, all of Sacha [Baron Cohen]’s stuff,” the actor explained. “And he was like, ‘If you’re a really good guy, this might not be for you.’ And he didn’t say that directly at me, but it was kinda like, this is f—ing hard, how you navigate getting the comedy people actually wanna see. Yes, it’s at the expense of somebody. The nature of the show is that.”

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“Paradise” centers its murder mystery around Sterling K. Brown’s Agent Xavier Collins and James Marsden’s President Cal Bradford — a complex relationship Marsden describes as reminiscent of “The Odd Couple.”

“I love the fact that they are so different — it’s an odd couple relationship,” Marsden told TheWrap. “[Xavier] is very stoic, very rigid, very by the book. [He’s] a man of of a code [with a] very strong moral compass, and Cal has a lot of those things as well. He is a good human being who tries to do the right thing, but he’s much more loose.”

From the first time Xavier meets Cal, the president immediately disarms Xavier with his brazen disrespect for how the White House should operate, with Marsden explaining Cal “does not subscribe to the idea that just because you are President of the United States, that you can’t drink in the Oval Office, that you can’t have a good time.”

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One week after the 2025 inauguration, America welcomed another new president to the Oval Office: James Marsden.

While the 51-year-old actor isn’t leading the nation off-screen in Washington, D.C., you can catch him calling the country’s shots as President Cal Bradford in Paradise, Hulu‘s new political thriller from This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman.

The idea for the murder mystery series with a major twist predates Fogelman’s popular NBC family drama, but it also stars This Is Us alum Sterling K. Brown as Xavier Collins, a secret service agent to Marsden’s character, and the main suspect in his assassination. Set in a community populated by the world’s most prominent people (including characters played by Julianne Nicholson, Sarah Shahi, Nicole Brydon Bloom, Jon Beavers, and Krys Marshall) Paradise required a specific set of skills to nail its unconventional portrait of a Commander-in-Chief navigating unique circumstances. Right away, Fogelman knew that Marsden was the perfect man for the job.

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Can “This Is Us” collaborators Dan Fogelman and Sterling K. Brown reunite without making viewers cry?

It’s possible in the new TV world of Fogelman’s creation, Hulu’s “Paradise,” which stars Brown as CIA agent Xavier Collins, who is suspected of killing the president, Cal Bradford, played by James Marsden.

But did he? Or is someone else responsible? And is that the only question we should be focused on?

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