James Marsden interview: ‘Paradise’

The following piece contains spoilers about the latest episode of Paradise, titled “The Day.”

The series had to go back to the start before Paradise could reach the end of its acclaimed first season. In the penultimate episode of the Hulu drama, the doomsday events that led to the end of the world are shown in detail for the first time. The episode reveals how Xavier (Sterling K. Brown) said goodbye to his wife and how the bunker population, including President Cal Bradford (James Marsden), reacted to the catastrophe.

“I never had to fake it on this show; I saw myself as James in that position: What would you do? How would you be feeling in this moment? The courage it takes for this man to go, ‘No, I’m going to stand for something now,” Marsden tells Gold Derby of the episode. “This is why I liked the idea of doing this show and playing this character in the first place.”

In “The Day,” as countless ecological disasters explode around the globe, President Bradford reads a prepared statement to the American public filled with typical platitudes and false promises that everything will turn out all right despite all evidence to the contrary. Later, President Bradford runs into a longtime custodial staffer as he’s being ushered out of the White House to the Colorado bunker where the bulk of Paradise Season 1 will eventually take place. The kindly gentleman’s belief in the future of humanity — a confidence President Bradford knows is gravely misplaced — forces the young POTUS to scrap his prepared remarks in favor of some real talk about the end of life as we know it.

“He so easily could have been a puppet throughout the whole show, and at that moment — against all odds, even putting himself in extreme danger — he is going to try to do the right thing and give the American public what they need to know,” Marsden says of his character. “But even then, it’s an imperfect situation. It’s still messy, right? Complicated. He’s still f--king up. He’s still getting in the helicopter and going to the bunker while everybody's staying behind.”

The fallout from President Bradford’s speech is swift. A riot soon erupts inside the White House as the staffers who haven’t been given passage to the bunker threaten violence, with deadly results. The incident also creates an almost irreparable tear in the relationship between President Bradford and Xavier after Xavier confronts the president over his past obfuscation about the severity of the ecological threat.

“The character of Xavier was just so by the book in his dedication to his job and moral code. I’m trying to get him to loosen up the whole season and have some fun. And the moment I see him start to get emotional and really come after me; his laws of cause and effect have been turned upside down. He’s lost his wife. He might lose his children. He wants to be with his family, his kids who just lost their mother,” Marsden says of the scene, the first genuine disagreement between President Bradford and Xavier in Paradise thus far. So, at that moment, I had to pull his focus to remind him of that. The scene is less about being the president and thinking, ‘I have the power over you.’ It’s more about, if you want to survive this, you must listen to me.”

Created by Dan Fogelman (This Is Us), Paradise has been an early winter breakout for Hulu. It could have its stars, including Emmy winner Brown and Emmy nominee Marsden, back in contention at the Emmy Awards this year. Its status as a contender represents a full-circle moment for Marsden, who was approached by Fogelman at the Emmys last year when the actor was a nominee for Jury Duty.

“He said, ‘Hey, I know I’m not supposed to do this at these events. We’re not supposed to talk business. But I have you right now, and I’m going to make a fool of myself, and I’m going to send you this script, and there’s a role in it that I had you in mind when I was writing this, and it’s the president of the United States,’” Marsden recalls Fogelman saying. “And I was like, ‘What kind of bulls--t are you writing that you see me as the president of the United States?’”

While Marsden clarifies that he didn’t say that exact phrase to Fogelman, he did express some level of doubt that he would play the president, mainly because he’s so much younger than any president in decades. (If Bradford were a real-life POTUS, he would be the youngest in office since John F. Kennedy, a figure Marsden coincidentally once played onscreen in Lee Daniels’ The Butler.)

However, once Marsden read the script, the character was unlocked. “I thought, ‘Wow, this is a really fun way to play the president, but also tremendously sad as well,’” he says. “To play a president, and whatever you think that means or looks like, and then erase that and have a character like Cal, who is the President of the United States, but he does not want to be. He was shoehorned into the position by his overbearing father. He wanted to be a school teacher, but he ends up being, when it all comes down to it, pretty good at the job — if a bit of a broken individual who carries a lot of regret and sadness and is desperate for connection.”

Paradise is a show loaded with unexpected twists. Still, one of the most significant first happens in the pilot: Bradford is murdered in the present-day timeline, leaving Xavier to solve the mystery of who had him killed. Fogelman has said audiences will not be left hanging on the culprit, but the likelihood of Marsden continuing with the show for its second season is unclear — especially since the penultimate episode so neatly reveals Cal’s motivations for his post-apocalypse life. Or maybe Fogelman will take a page from the Dead to Me playbook, where Marsden’s character was similarly killed off in the first season but returned for Season 2 as his deceased character’s twin brother.

“I would love to come back for another season of this show, but I don’t know how, in what capacity, and what that would look like — I guess, more flashbacks?” Marsden says. “But it’s just rare that you’re a part of something that feels really special and a role that you go to sleep at night coming up with ideas about, and you wake up in the morning with new ideas. It was an inspiring thing to be a part of, an inspiring role to play — and you want every job to feel that way because you just feel it’s this sort of limitless well of inspiration that you can keep pulling from. So yeah, I don’t know what that would look like, but I’d love to come back.”

The season finale of Paradise debuts March 4 on Hulu.