James Marsden was in the only place he could be. Not in his acting career, which has been fruitfully darting this way and that for years—quite literally, sitting for a recent phone call in his car in the driveway of his Los Angeles home, the only spot where he gets decent cell reception. “If it sounds like I’m talking from a submarine, let me know and I’ll change positions,” he said sheepishly.

Marsden has, over nearly three decades in Hollywood, proven surprisingly amenable to change, recalibrating his hunky star profile to best fit each disparate role that has come his way. He and I were talking during the COVID shutdown because I, perhaps like many of you, recently noticed in my unending watching of things just how ubiquitous James Marsden seems to be. Especially, of late, on television. Marsden wrapped his two-season run as a hapless and later murderous robot cowboy on HBO’s massive sci-fi series Westworld in 2018; in the spring of 2020, he appeared in both the lauded FX on Hulu period series Mrs. America (as a smarmy politician and TV host who doesn’t do right by Cate Blanchett) and the Netflix sleeper hit Dead to Me, as the (spoiler alert!) twin brother of a man murdered by Christina Applegate in the season-one finale.

In the fall, Marsden will migrate to CBS All Access as part of the ensemble of a much-anticipated adaptation of Stephen King’s doorstopper 1978 novel The Stand. From science fiction to historical drama (with some satire), to contemporary dark comedy, to plague apocalypse is a pretty wide range to walk, yet Marsden has never seemed uncomfortable in building his curio cabinet of roles. He has become a true journeyman actor, one whose matinee-idol good looks can sometimes belie the thinking, shape-shifting performer behind them.

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James Marsden is everywhere. He knows it too. “I get texts from people saying, ‘You are on my TV screen all the f**king time. How do you do this?’ I’m like, ‘I’m sorry!’”

There’s truth to the ubiquity of his Hollywood existence. Since coming onto the scene in the early ’90s, Marsden, 46, has amassed an extensive resume of more than 75 credits (and counting), featuring roles so different from the others that it’s nearly impossible to put him in a box. If you’ve thought it, he’s probably done it. From playing the hot guy on The Nanny’s first episode to earning superhero cred as Cyclops in the X-Men franchise, to capturing hearts as the dreamy leading man in 27 Dresses, to dipping into the secretive world of Westworld as an innocent cowboy, Marsden has led a charmed career — a fact he’d be the first to acknowledge. (When you can check Disney prince off the proverbial bucket list, you’ve reached a different level.) More impressively, he hasn’t slowed down since.

When Marsden hops on the phone on a Tuesday afternoon in June, he opens with an apology for mixing up the interview times as his Oklahoma niceness peeks through. “I told my PR rep, ‘I’m an actor. I never said I was smart,’” he playfully jokes. Somehow, we doubt that to be true; after all, he’s been more than a little busy. By mid-March, right before a nationwide lockdown was ordered, Marsden wrapped three incredibly varied TV projects during a six-month span, hopping back and forth from Netflix’s dark comedy Dead to Me to FX on Hulu’s period piece Mrs. America, to CBS All Access’ upcoming Stephen King drama The Stand. Ask him how he pulled off triple duty and even he doesn’t know.

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The Season 1 finale of Dead to Me could have easily been the end of James Marsden’s involvement with the Netflix dramedy. His manipulative and malicious character Steve Wood was undeniably dead after he confronted Jen (Christina Applegate), who knew he was responsible for her husband’s death, and aggressively demanded access to his ex-fiancée Judy (Linda Cardellini), who’d been living with Jen. Apart from flashbacks that might explain exactly how Steve wound up face down in Jen’s pool, it was hard to envision a future for the character on the series.

Creator Liz Feldman had an idea for how to bring Marsden back for Season 2, though. He’d return as Ben, Steve’s “semi-identical” twin who looked exactly like him but was his polar opposite in terms of personality. And yes, the show leaned right into the soapiness of that development, starting with an absurdly comedic introductory scene, which finds Jen opening her front door to find the man whose body she stuffed in a deep freezer suddenly standing right in front of her with a cheesy grin.

Ben’s arrival on the show is just as stunning for audiences as it is for Jen, but it’s virtually impossible not to be won over by the guy as the season progresses. Instead of oozing arrogance and cruelty like Steve, Ben is completely disarming and leads with self-deprecating humor. His surprise arrival does more than just keep Marsden in the picture for Season 2. As Ben, Marsden becomes an essential component of the show’s action, heart, and humor and remains an absolute scene-stealer — quite a feat considering both Applegate and Cardellini are still firing on all cylinders this season.

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The title of Netflix’s dark comedy “Dead to Me” suggests that mortality is a relative state, but it’s still a bit surprising to see James Marsden — whose character ends season one face down in a swimming pool — return for season two.

It wouldn’t be “Dead to Me” if there wasn’t a twist. Marsden is no longer playing Steve, Judy’s (Linda Cardellini) wealthy, aggressive former fiance. Instead, he’s Ben: Steve’s sweet, dorky, not-quite-identical twin brother.

In the latest episode of Netflix’s “Scene Stealers,” Marsden joins “Dead to Me” casting directors Sherry Thomas and Russell Scott to discuss the unusual casting coup that changed the stakes of creator Liz Feldman’s half-hour show.

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I’ve uploaded HQ scans from the April 2020 issue of Safari (Japan) Magazine.

GALLERY LINK:
Magazine Scans > 2020 Scans > Safari (Japan) (April 2020)

The second season of “Dead to Me” on Netflix started with one hell of a twist: Steve (James Marsden), who Jen (Christina Applegate) killed and then secretly buried with a little help from her friend — and his ex — Judy (Linda Cardellini), had a twin brother. The two had the same face but seemed to be worlds apart in personality — but by the end of the season they ended up sharing a more cosmic connection: Both were responsible for dangerous hit-and-runs.

“I love the perversity of the show,” Marsden tells Variety. “To me, that comedy can come from that is more of a mirror on the way we are in real life.”

As a series as a whole, “Dead to Me” began with the aftermath of Steve and Judy’s hit-and-run — although it was not known from the start that they were at fault for the car accident that took Jen’s husband’s life. Instead, the show started with her meeting Judy in a grief group, which Judy was attending to get to know Jen after the guilt from her role in the accident was weighing so heavily on her. The truth was slowly unraveled over the course of the first season. Similarly, the truth about Steve’s death gets unraveled over the 10 episodes in Season 2, and at the end of that second season, Ben learns his missing twin’s body has been found and he falls off the wagon, resulting in him drunk-driving into the side of the new car Jen just bought for her son. Thankfully this time, both Jen, who was driving, and Judy, who was in the passenger seat, lived.

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Is James Marsden’s character alive or dead? A reasonable question to ask when watching him in almost anything lately: For two seasons he was repeatedly killed and brought back on HBO’s Westworld. Then on his next big TV show, Netflix’s Dead to Me, it seemed like he was finally playing a mortal human, killed off in the final episode of the first season, only to return in season two. Even his Sonic movie came back from certain doom. Perhaps the problem is Marsden is just too damn charming to kill off for good.

“I remember people saying… You got a good look. You’ll do well in this town,” he told me when we chatted in on May 13. “I never wanted to really lead with that. I wanted to be treated more as a character actor than a marquee-idol, good-looking dude with nothing else behind him.”

Ah yes, the classic challenge of being too good looking and too charming. I relate. But sure enough, Marsden’s character work is seemingly unending; in the past few years, he’s played opposite Cate Blanchett, Christina Applegate, a robot played by Evan Rachel Wood, and Sonic the Hedgehog. He knows how to stand out alongside Oscar winners just as well as he does, um, a CGI hedgehog.

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The first season of “Dead to Me” ended with James Marsden’s character dead in the water — face down, eyes open, blood coming out of his head. The lying, cheating, money-laundering Steve Wood was a floating corpse in a pool, and Jen Harding and Judy Hale — played by Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini, respectively — were trading panicked glances when the finale cut to black.

What really happened that night is revealed throughout the second season, which premiered Friday on Netflix. While the 10 episodes are sprinkled with flashbacks of a cold, harsh Steve, they also include scenes with his warm, semi-identical twin brother Ben, also played by Marsden.

Yes, having an actor re-enter a show as a previous character’s never-before-mentioned twin is a tired soap opera trope. But anyone who dismisses this season because of it would be missing a standout performance by Marsden, one that defies expectations after a career playing suave, powerful men.

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