Coming Back for the Laughs

Pivoting from his six season run as the ruthless Wynn Duffy on FX’s Justified, veteran television actor Jere Burns dives right into a police squad as a series regular in TBS’s seriously unserious crime procedural parody, Angie Tribeca.

For fans of the Dear John actor, who has over 70 television credits to his name, this marks his long-awaited return to a half-hour comedy, but for Burns, it’s about the work, not the genre. “For me, it never comes to whether it’s a comedy or drama; it just comes down to the words and whether they are good or not.”

The Cambridge, Massachusetts native can’t quite put his finger on exactly what nudged him toward acting as a young man, but he cites a story his dad likes to tell as a possible turning point.

“The way my father tells it is, my parents brought us to the Cape Cod Melody Tent production of The Music Man and he said it was a particularly dreary audience. No one was laughing and the cast weren’t getting reactions from anyone.

"There was a scene where all these businessmen were supposed to be on a train and the train came to a sharp stop and all the actors playing the businessmen crashed into each other and my brother and I, probably like 6 or 7 [years old], started laughing so hard at the fact that all these actors crashed into each other that as a result of us laughing, as my father tells it, the entire audience started laughing.

"Then they [the audience] started laughing at all the other things that were happening in the show.”

He theorizes that maybe it was that laughter he elicited as a child that somehow got him hooked on the idea of performing. Burns attended University of Massachusetts Amherst and later New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Regularly attending live theater performances with his family as a child probably also had a big influence as well, he notes.

After college and some time in New York City, Burns began appearing regularly in guest roles on television series in the 80s. He marvels at the way television has changed since he started acting.

“The only way you’d really make money would be to get on a series or, if you could just skip to it, do movies, but most people couldn’t just skip to movies.

"There was a culture of the revolving door: be in LA for three months, try to get a pilot, hope the pilot goes, if the pilot goes, hope the series goes. And 9 times out of 10 if any number of those things didn’t happen you’d just do episodic or plays or movies, if you could get them, until the next time pilot season came around. And a lot of the TV was horrible.

“These days, people are always making pilots so pilot season doesn’t have that desperate two and a half month window anymore. I was just surfing with an actor who has a show on MTV that I’ve never heard of. He’s been on a show for six years on MTV. I’ve never heard of it. There are so many options now.

“And now television is better than television has a right to be and better than most of the movies that get made and now everybody wants to be on TV.”

Burns has worked steadily since his breakout turn as ladies’ man Kirk Morris on Dear John, with recent recurring and regular roles on Breaking Bad, Burn Notice, and Bates Motel. Last fall, he made an appearance in the pilot episode of ABC’s The Muppets.

While he may have been in his 20s during The Muppets’ heyday, like many, he feels like he grew up with Jim Henson’s creatures. Playing opposite Fozzie Bear in the reboot of The Muppets was a uniquely memorable experience for Burns. Many months later, he was still teeming with excitement about his time on that set.

“To actually see the way those artists create those characters with those puppets was amazing. It was really, really fun.

“You are acting with a huge puppet that becomes a real actor in the scene. It’s really tricky. Those guys are so creative and so fun to be around. It was like no other experience I’ve ever had on a half hour.

"They are a different breed, those guys. They add a level of creativity just because of the logistics of a seven foot or six foot puppet being operated from below the stage that you are shooting on by a guy who is looking at a monitor of your face and a monitor of everyone else’s face in the scene while he operates this puppet from four feet below the set. It was wild.

“When you’re acting, you’re acting with a big piece of cloth and totally convinced it’s another character in the scene. I never wanted to leave at the end of the day.”

Burns describes his first meeting with the Steve and Nancy Carell, co-creators and executive producers of Angie Tribeca, as “a love fest." Burns loved the script and the Carells and they loved him.

The new series follows the exploits of Angie Tribeca, played by Rashida Jones and the rest of a squad of LAPD detectives. Burns plays Lieutenant Atkins, Jones’ boss—a gruff, yet earnest leader.

“There is absolutely no sense of irony or cynicism about him. I think he really loves Tribeca. He’s the stereotypical head detective. He’s that guy.”

The series is unique in the sense that the actors do not appear to be in on the joke. “This comedy comes out of not knowing it’s a comedy. In other words, we try to never be aware that we are in a comedy. Everything is played deadly seriously. And I think that’s what makes it so funny and what makes it so fun.”

Burns says he never really missed being on a half hour comedy. “I was just happy to be most recently on Justified for the last six years. We certainly had our moments of dark comedy.  I always found Justified hilariously fun and funny in a very, very dark way.”

When Burns has down time, he can often be found catching waves in the Pacific Ocean.

“I think surfing, skiing—anything that has a certain amount of speed, danger, commitment, and focus involved is a lot like acting because it requires distilling yourself into the moment and nothing else. When you are in a wave that is three feet overhead and going over a reef, there’s no time to think about anything else. And I think that’s what acting is about. Thinking about nothing else and being present in the moment.

“That’s what I love about the things I do when I’m not working. They tend to be activities that isolate the moment. I’m always happiest there. I’m always happiest in the present.

Burns furthers his musing on the surfing-acting connection, “Being able to respond to the waves just like you are responding to the person across the scene from you and not thinking about how I want this to go, just being able to go with whatever you are being thrown at the moment… That’s when the purity of the work comes through, when you lose yourself in it.”

Angie Tribeca premieres on Jan. 17th with a 25-hour marathon of commercial free episodes (Sunday 9 p.m. – Monday 10 p.m. ET/PT). Episodes will begin airing weekly on Monday nights, starting Jan. 25.