Paradise Star James Marsden Keeps Coming Back to Life
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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