James Marsden Was Born To Be President Of ‘Paradise’: “I’d Never Been More Prepared In My Life Than For This Job”
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.
“I was very flattered. I thought he maybe had too many drinks at the Emmys,” Marsden told Decider with a chuckle after revealing Fogelman pitched him the role at the awards show. “Obviously, I was a fan of Dan’s work. I knew everything he had done. And in this business, you really want to surround yourself as much as you can with people out there who are curious about making good stories, being original, and doing something different. He’s a gifted writer who I already wanted to work with.”
Despite Marsden’s deep admiration of Fogelman, the actor admittedly took pause when he learned he was being recruited to play the U.S. president. He’d already portrayed John F. Kennedy in Lee Daniels’ 2013 film The Butler and found taking on such an iconic figure in American history to be incredibly daunting. “I probably would not have done it if it were a movie just about Kennedy,” Marsden explained over Zoom. “Though that was a formidable attempt, I’m not sure I would do that in this day and age of social media. But there was more James in Cal than there was in Kennedy.”
Playing the Paradise president allowed Marsden to explore different dimensions of a flawed human — one who reluctantly gained immense power and responsibility. From movies like X-Men, The Notebook, Hairspray, Enchanted, Sonic the Hedgehog, and more, to television series including Ally McBeal, 30 Rock, Westworld, Party Down, and Dead to Me, Marsden has shown incredible range throughout his 30-year career. But Paradise is such a standout role because it lets him strike that rare and brilliant balance between nail-biting drama, heartwarming humanity, and charming comedy.
Cal has rocky relationships with his wife (Cassidy Freeman), father (Gerald McRaney), and son (Charlie Evans). He numbs his pain with alcohol. And he’s weighed down by the heartbreaking realization that “the world is 19 times more fucked than anyone realizes.” But he’s also a man who strives to maintain his moral compass in times of tragedy. He passionately references movies like Die Hard and is obsessed with ’80s and ’90s rock. And he has a disarming sense of humor that got Marsden excited about the role.
“Full admission: I would have been a little bit more apprehensive, or I would have given it more thought — whether or not I belong in the role of the president — if I weren’t allowed to show those sides of me in the piece. If Dan wasn’t like, ‘We want to see the charismatic, fun guy. We want people to say, I like this guy. I want to hang out with this guy,’” Marsden mused. “He afforded me a lot of latitude to play with the character, and even be a bit like a petulant child or a goofy frat boy sometimes. So there was room for play. I always try to inject that into roles as much as I can, even if it’s a big heavy drama.”
Speaking of play, Paradise marks Marsden’s first television series since Jury Duty, the docu-style courtroom comedy from Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky that earned him a 2023 Emmy nomination for playing an exaggerated version of himself. “It was completely unanticipated, the impact that show had on my career. It seismically shifted,” the Paradise star explained. “It felt like a backyard experiment you were doing with your high school buddies that you shot on a camcorder. It was like, ‘I’m going to throw caution to the wind on this one. This one is just for fun. No one’s going to see it.’ Who knew?”
While Marsden was thrilled to dive headfirst into Jury Duty‘s wonderful world of improvisational comedy, the live element of the show — making sole non-actor Ronald Gladden believe he was serving on a wacky, real-world jury — was admittedly nerve-wracking. Much to Marsden’s delight, the result was a wholesome, heartfelt, singular success. “It was a really special, unique experience; not like anything I’d ever experienced before, and unlike anything anyone’s ever seen before,” he explained. “Jury Duty was lightning in a bottle, and it also made me want to go straight back into scripted stuff as fast as I could.”
On top of the enticing Emmys pitch and a chance to preside over Paradise’s complex world, the impressive names attached to the project helped convince Marsden to join before he’d even read a script. Throughout Paradise‘s three-episode premiere, which hit Hulu on January 28, viewers witness a number of unexpected twists, including the fact that Cal was having an affair with one of his secret service agents, Robinson (Krys Marshall). Their intimate scenes, which Marshall called “a treat,” show a softer, more vulnerable side to Cal, offering glimpses of his internal struggles and the man he longed to be.
“James Marsden is just such a rare gem,” Marshall told Decider via Zoom. “He is so easy to work with, so respectful, so thoughtful. The time we spent together is very soft and connected. I always felt very empowered in everything that we did together. And so that made it really fun and very easy to work with him from a character perspective.”
Through quintessential Fogelman flashbacks, Marsden’s most frequent scene partner is Brown, who’s “as generous as an actor as he is with his heart.” In mirroring Cal’s love of Xavier, Marsden said Brown is one of those actors who he looks at and thinks, “I wish I could be more like that guy. I wish I had that guy’s talent.” The man at the top of the call sheet even inspired Marsden to up his acting game.
“I’d never been more prepared in my life, I don’t think, than for this job. And I think the reason for that was I felt a duty to the writing and the material to deliver. But also I didn’t want to be average in front of Sterling. I mean, the guy’s just — he is a force,” Marsden explained. As the two men deliver stunning, affecting performances, they share serious, Emmy-worthy scenes ripe with dense dialogue that occasionally spanned six or seven pages. “I knew that if I stepped up, we’d have the potential to do something really special with these scenes,” Marsden added. “We got along so well early on. We clicked very easily. And I think it was this unspoken understanding that he got the assignment, and I got the assignment. We didn’t even need to talk about the scene. We just did it.”
On-screen, Paradise‘s characters may navigate palpable tension and heavy subject matter, but Marsden assured Decider “it was such a party on set.” Between him and Brown singing old-school R&B duets and the cast pulling pranks with Russell — the fake bloody stand-in body that occasionally took Marsden’s place during floor scenes — rest assured, fun was had behind-the-scenes of Paradise.
When reflecting on what he learned from the job, however, Marsden shared his transformative takeaway with all the seriousness of a president commanding an underground bunker in a seemingly post-apocalyptic world.
“It’s a good process to wake up every day and ask yourself what kind of man you want to be or what kind of person you want to be. This show presents these characters with an extreme situation where you’re forced to make choices about what’s important to you. At the end of it all, what truly matters to you? What is of value to you? And I think it just pulled that into focus more than usual,” he said. “We go through our lives and we get distracted with whatever — getting a coffee or what’s on Instagram or this and that — and life very sneakily scoots by. And I never want to be anybody who looks back and with too much regret or a feeling that I could have done better, or I could have done the right thing when I knew it was the right thing to do.”
“I think that the audience is going to hold a mirror up to themselves. I know I did the same thing shooting it,” Marsden continued. “It makes you reevaluate what is important to you. And reevaluate how you want to treat people. And what you will do when everything that matters to you is in jeopardy.”
Source: Decider