Two days after participating in the Tony Shaloub inteview, I got the privilege to take part in an interview with the two of the stars of USA's Psych. As much as I love Monk, Psych is quite possibly my favorite show on TV. It's a perfect blend of hilarious comedy and clever mystery. For the next few weeks I'll be looking forward to 10/9c on Fridays so I can sit down and enjoy some of the hilarity that is James Roday and Dule Hill. And so being able to ask these guys a question and listen to them answer several others was a real treat. Hopefully you'll enjoy it as much as I did.
Q: I know that you’ve both played very different characters in other things. I know that Mr. Roday had actually played alongside to Maggie Lawson in Fear Itself and Mr. Dulé you had a wonderful part on West Wing for a while. So how do you feel now about playing comedy? Do you enjoy it better; do you like doing horror or drama more? How does it feel?
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.Q: The show is known a lot for its kind of fast-paced banter between your characters Shawn and Gus. And so what I want to know is how much sort of 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.
Q; How many of the pop culture references come from you, including the Chad Michael Murray reference?
D. Hill I would say about 99.9% of them do not come from me. Maybe if there’s something in the ‘70s that might be something that I came with, but most of the ‘80s references I have no idea what I’m talking about. It’s not until after I film it that I turn around and say, “Okay, now what was that about?”
D. Hill The twins? Oh, the Mowli Twins.
J. Roday The Mowli twins. That was your 0.01% man.D. Hill That and what’s the other one? I don’t even know if it made it to air, the Gill Scott Heron.
J. Roday Oh, that was. That made it two. That made it two.D. Hill Gill Scott Heron. That’s my two for the year.
J. Roday Yes. Most of them come from the writers and then I throw in my fair share as well. Chad Michael Murray became the target of some early jabbing for us after I saw some interview where it was like a behind the scenes of House of Wax and he was wearing a wife beater. It was just a real serious interview, and I got such a kick out of it that we had to have some fun at his expense. Hopefully he’s a good-natured guy with a sense of humor.Q: 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.
Q: I just wanted to know 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.
Q: I really enjoy the pop culture references that you make in the series, 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.Q: Really. That would be interesting to see. Dulé?
D. Hill I guess for myself if I could have been a Cosby kid.Q: Cosby kid.
D. Hill Yes, of course. 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.Q: Fame. Oh, you really have to do that I think. I’m going to petition for it.
D. Hill Sounds good.Q: 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.
Q: 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 (Does a goofy voice) Halle Bear, who is also Halle Berry.J. Roday That’s it; this is classy stuff you’re getting from us today.
Q: It just seems like you have a blast; the show is so fun to watch. And I was wondering if 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.
Q: I wanted to talk about some of the telltale references. I actually thought it was really funny the jokes that you made about The Mentalist in the premiere. When that show 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.
T. Tidmore Hey, guys, thank you for talking with us today.
J. Roday Hey. No problem.T. Tidmore I’m a big fan of the show and my son is a one-year old and loves your theme song. I have a video online of him dancing to the theme song.
J. Roday Nice.T. Tidmore 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.
Q:Could tell us about this upcoming season, whatever you feel free to share either overall or specifics about what we can expect this season.
J. Roday In terms of sort of themes for episodes you saw that we’re doing sort of an expedition Canada, catch a jewel/art thief episode, and we’re doing sort of a Shawn and Gus save an old western town and everything that comes along with that that you could imagine, including a grizzled, gray bearded James Brolin.
D. Hill Exorcism episode.J. Roday Yes, we’re paying tribute to the Exorcist with our exorcism episode featuring the aforementioned Ray Wise, who is just fantastic in the episode I have to say. Just really came in and knocked it out of the park.
D. Hill American Werewolf in London homage.J. Roday That’s right, a little love letter to American Werewolf in London and werewolf movies in general featuring David Naughton, obviously, and Josh Malina. And lots of other fun stuff.
I have to say I think we’re kind of storming out of our gates this year with some really good stuff. I think last year we stormed in our heads, but we were actually like trotting at a casual pace, and this year I actually think we’re storming out of the gates for real.
Q: I was wondering if at this point there are any may or may not things you would tell us about what’s going to happen.J. Roday Well there may or may not be a continuation of the story that capped off our season last year, An Evening With Mr. Yang.
D. Hill And there may or may not be something big coming.
J. Roday There may or may be our biggest guest star ever appearing on the show down the stretch. And we may or may not be getting another dose of what Gus’ hair looked like in the ‘90s. How’s that?
Q: My question is just this year they released two books for Psych and your characters and everything, and I was wondering if you were to ever read those yourselves and you could come up with your own kind of merchandise what would you like to see?
D. Hill Well I would read it if I had one and if I knew there was one that was out.
D. Hill Maybe I’ll try to read it one day on the set.
J. Roday Merchandise.D. Hill I would have to say a video game. I love video games anyway, so a Psych video game somehow that I could play on Xbox or Wii would be great.
J. Roday I have to say I think the idea of a talking bobblehead was pretty solid, and someone actually came up with already and did it. I love the idea of little Shawn and Gus bobbleheads.
D. Hill Which, by the way, I have my President Obama bobblehead also. So when I get my Psych bobbleheads it will be Shaun, Gus, and President Barack Obama bobbleheads sitting on my counter.
D. Hill Sounds good.
Q: For the record, Without a Clue is one of my favorite movies of all time.
Q: Now look I was wondering if you, James, had visited any actual psychics in order to watch and observe them in action? And if you, Dulé, being an encyclopedia of useless knowledge that oddly becomes useful every week, is it anything like the way your brain works in real life?
D. Hill Well from my side no; I try not to fill up my brain cells with useless information. So most of the time I’m pretty much just learning it as it comes in the scripts.J. Roday And for me I visited a couple psychics back before we shot the pilot just because I was sort of interested to hear their back stories and sort of how the power manifests itself.
And of course you never know if they’re legit or not, but there were some interesting stories in terms of like physicalizing the gift. I was interested to hear like does it ever take over your body, does your body heat rise, stuff like that; anything that I could steal. Of course I did not tell them while visiting that I was going to be playing a fake psychic nor did they figure it out on their own, so maybe that tells you everything you need to know about the people that I met with.
Q: I’m going to go back to the American Werewolf episode. You wrote that, James. Right?
J. Roday Yes. I co-wrote that with my best friend Todd Harthan.
Q: Can you talk more about it? It was my favorite movie of all time. And is John Landis directing?J. Roday Wow. I’m right there with you; it’s definitely one of my favorite movies of all time. The original plan was to have Landis direct it for obvious reasons. He is off directing a feature in England right now. So we got the incomparable Andrew Bernstein to step in in his place, who did a fantastic job, who Dulé has known since his West Wing days.
It’s not unlike Tuesday the 17th; it’s an episode that needs to sort of stand on its own feet, but will definitely have moments where we’re winking and nodding and proclaiming our love for the original. But it has its own little story and its own little twists and turns.Just having David Naughton on set was enough for me, because I got to pick his brain for the better part of a week and ended up getting a signed picture of him mid-transformation with the elongated torso reaching up at me. That’s getting framed and going on a wall.
Q: Who would you like to see on the show and who do you think they would play?J. Roday My answer is going to stay the same until we get him on. The answer is David Bowie, and anybody he wants is whom he will play.
D. Hill And for myself I would like to get someone like Chris Tucker on the show. It would be great if he could play some kind of, I mean he could play anybody he wanted to also, but he could play some kind of relative of mine or something. It would be a lot of fun.
J. Roday I think David Bowie could also play David Bowie if he wanted to, and Shawn and Gus could just have an episode where they hung out with David Bowie.
J. Roday He could.
D. Hill There you go—because we change my dad all the time. Like dude, your daddy is David Bowie. … is not showing.J. Roday That would be fantastic.
Psych airs Friday Nights on USA at 10/9c starting TONIGHT!
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