The party’s just getting started for Jury Duty stars James Marsden and Ronald Gladden.

On Wednesday, nominations were announced for the 2023 Emmy Awards, and Amazon Freevee’s surprise hit comedy picked up four nods: Outstanding Comedy Series, Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series for Marsden, Outstanding Casting for a Comedy Series, and Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series. Once Marsden found out that he earned his first-ever Emmy nomination for playing a fictionalized version of himself, he immediately called up his onscreen-turned-IRL BFF Gladden to celebrate the news.

“Once I heard him pick up the phone, I just kind of yelled as loud as I could,” Marsden tells EW with a laugh just a few hours after nominations were announced. “It was just gibberish, I don’t think I was even speaking English. And he started yelling too. It was just like two drunk college buddies.”

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James Marsden and the Jury Duty cast are overjoyed by their four Emmy nominations.

Marsden, 49, and the cast have “many, many big plans for celebration” after the announcement Wednesday morning, he tells PEOPLE. The first celebration began with Marsden’s initial phone call to none other than his unwitting costar Ronald Gladden.

“I just wanted that to be my first call and make sure he’s still enjoying all of this, and feeling like we’re all going through it together,” Marsden said. Of Gladden — who was the only cast member who didn’t know the show was a mockumentary — he adds, “He’s over the moon.”

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James Marsden went to bed as late as he could Tuesday night, hoping he would sleep through the Emmy nominations announcement this morning. “But of course, when you do that, you wake up three hours before the nominations, and you just ruminate for three hours,” he tells Vanity Fair with a laugh.

The actor, who stars in Freevee’s unconventional comedy series Jury Duty, was just as unsure as the rest of us if his show would be acknowledged by the TV Academy. “It’s not your traditional comedy. You could argue that yes, there were scripts, but it wasn’t really scripted. It was a hybrid of reality and scripted architecture,” he says. “There’s these incredible shows like Ted Lasso and Barry that are proven. I didn’t think I was ever in the conversation, and I really didn’t know if the show was either. So it was a real genuine surprise when the show got its love…. I know everyone always says, ‘Well, I didn’t expect it.’ But I really, really didn’t this time around.”

Jury Duty followed an unsuspecting man (Ronald Gladden) who thinks he’s been chosen for a regular jury when in reality, he’s on a hidden-camera show, surrounded by actors. Marsden played a character called James Marsden who exhibited all of the stereotypical traits you’d expect from a celebrity trying to get out of jury duty. But in the end, Gladden’s enigmatic and kind personality made him an unexpected hero on the show.

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We don’t have to feel sorry for “the other guy” from “The Notebook” any longer. James Marsden can now boast that he’s scored an Emmy nomination for playing himself!

The actor, known for his roles in “The Notebook,” the “X-Men” franchise, “Westworld” and “Dead to Me,” received some of the best reviews of his career earlier this year for playing a satirical version of himself in Amazon Freevee’s genre-bending sitcom “Jury Duty.”

The series revolves around an unsuspecting man, played by Ronald Gladden, who thinks he signed up to be in a documentary about jury duty. The gag? It’s all fake. Everyone except him is an actor, including meta-Marsden.

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Lizzy Caplan and James Marsden are friends. Good friends. Close enough that Caplan calls Marsden “Jimmy”—“When I hear ‘Jimmy,’ I’m like, Okay, that’s someone who knows me from a long time ago,” he says, smiling—and has programmed her phone so a very, er, colorful photo appears whenever the two of them get in touch.

“Your picture when you call me is of this Toblerone bar stuck in your butt,” the Fleishman Is in Trouble star tells Marsden, holding the proof up to her laptop’s camera. Some 4,000 miles away, Marsden—Zooming in from Bavaria, where he’s shooting an unscripted show for National Geographic—hoots and claps his hands.

A fitting image, considering the project that first brought the pair together. They met in the summer of 2011 while shooting Bachelorette, Leslye Headland’s caustic comedy based on her eponymous play, about three grown-up mean girls (Caplan, Kirsten Dunst, and Isla Fisher) causing chaos the night before their high school frenemy (Rebel Wilson) gets married. Marsden played best man Trevor, a charming snake who spends most of his screen time schmoozing Dunst. In their only solo scene together, Caplan’s Gena clocks Trevor on the head with a metal pitcher.

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Based on James Marsden’s history of playing impossibly handsome leading men — and often, would-be leading men — in movies including “27 Dresses,” “Enchanted,” “The Notebook” and the “X-Men” films, a burning ambition to do comedy wouldn’t be the first thing you’d imagine he’s been harboring all this time.

But the laughs have always been the Oklahoma native’s first love. “Before I moved out here (to L.A.), I wanted to be a regular on ‘SNL.’ Not a host — I wanted to actually be one of the cast,” Marsden said during a recent interview in Los Angeles. “I just felt like that played to my strengths. I was never that comfortable playing the super leading man. I was more interested in the character actors, the goofy roles.”

So when David Bernad approached him about a series he was exec-producing that was not only funny but also preposterously off-the-wall original, Marsden was intrigued. Created by Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, who were writer-producers on “The Office,” Amazon Freevee’s “Jury Duty” shares plenty of DNA with that beloved NBC comedy. Only think of it as the version where everyone at Dundler Mifflin knows what’s being filmed is fake — everyone but, say, Dwight Schrute.

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James Marsden is not a jacka**, but he loved playing one on TV. In “Jury Duty,” Marsden shows up to do his civic duty alongside a room full of average mortals and nonchalantly lets everyone know how famous he is. As he ingratiates himself with Ronald Gladden, the easygoing hero of the documentary-style comedy, Marsden can barely contain his excitement at being recognized.

What Gladden doesn’t know is that this version of James Marsden is not the real Marsden. The civil case he and the other jurors are considering isn’t real, either. The only real element in this production is Gladden. And Marsden, working with the show’s creators Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky (who worked together on “The Office”) along with showrunner Cody Heller, was adamant about ensuring that Gladden emerge from the story as its hero.

Based on the escalating popularity of “Jury Duty,” that direction is striking a chord. Viewers have fallen for Gladden’s sincerity and forbearance, especially when he responds to characters like David Brown’s tech apparatus-obsessed Todd by showing him “A Bug’s Life” to let Todd know that he understands and accepts him. (The next day, Todd shows up to court wearing “chair pants.”)

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James Marsden likes playing the jackass.

Especially when that jackass is the entitled version of himself he’s playing in Amazon Freevee’s breakout comedy “Jury Duty.”

The improvised docu-style series follows Ronald Gladden, a real person unaware the increasingly chaotic jury he’s found himself on is completely fake. Everyone around him — including Marsden’s portrayal of himself as the out-of-touch celebrity — is an actor playing their part in the ruse.

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In Amazon Freevee’s runaway hit Jury Duty, James Marsden plays James Marsden. But he’s not the James Marsden who has earned himself a reputation as Hollywood’s jovial song-and-dance man and charm personified. No, this James Marsden is an asshole.

The series revolves around Ronald Gladden, a man who believes he is taking part in your run-of-the-mill documentary taking people behind the scenes of sitting on a jury. The catch, however, is that everything is entirely fake. The trial? Fake. The lawyers and judge? Fake. The jury of his peers, including James Marsden playing a satirical, egotistical of himself called up to do his civic duty like us regular schmoes? Fake. All that’s real is Ronald.

Everything in Ronald’s orbit has been orchestrated by a team of comedy writers and producers running proceedings like the epicentre of a NASA space station. While outlines of each episode were laid out for the players, the improvised scripts evolved in real-time as the action reacted to Ronald’s movements and decisions. The result is eight episodes of long-form improvisation that feel akin to watching train tracks getting laid as a carriage is speeding away. Miraculously, it’s pulled off to create one of the most original and, surprisingly, given the logline of the series, kind-hearted television conceits in years.

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