James Roday.

James Roday.

IN THE US comedy/drama Psych, James Roday plays Shawn Spencer, a relentlessly infantile but brilliant private detective who runs an agency with his best friend, Gus, (Dule Hill). Andrew Murfett spoke with Roday about his role in the show, which is currently filming its sixth season.

Is it true that you were reluctant to take on the role of Spencer?

I had just come off my third consecutive failed television series. I had sworn off doing TV for a while. I was going to go to New York, sublet an apartment and find my soul again. Before I got on the plane, my agent sent me the script for Psych. I read it on the plane and realised it had a lot of potential.

What did you do next?

I got on the phone with Steve Franks, the show's creator, which is unusual because you usually audition. I didn't want to do that, though. We talked for 2½ hours about what the show meant to him, what I liked about the show and what I felt it would need to be for me to deliver the goods.

Did you have much say in casting The West Wing's Dule Hill as Gus?

Well, instead of a nerdy Jewish guy with glasses, which is how it was written, we ended up with an African-American who couldn't have been more different to that. I felt like everybody won because the pilot came out as a pretty good representation of what the series could be.

You are credited as a producer on the show. Why?

It was a function of geography first. We shoot in Vancouver but the writers' room is in Manhattan Beach [in California]. So what we discovered early on was it was the inmates running the asylum in Vancouver. So I stepped up and put on a producer's hat to make this happen. It was odd because it was a lot of people who had never done TV before. There was some 'blind leading the blind' going on.

There's been more drama and emotion of late. Is that deliberate?

We hope that's the formula that buys us space to do the ludicrous stuff. The show is about two best friends who have known each other since they were in diapers, who are living out a childhood dream as adults. We use that as an anchor to keep the show on the ground and allow us to write comedy.

Surely there must be a use-by date for Shawn's fake psychic pretence?

It's something I'm hyper-aware of. It's been a special experience for me and to overstay our welcome would be a real shame. We're getting there. We're definitely closer to the end than the beginning. There is a statute of limitations on how long a grown man can act like a child. This is Peter Pan. But the difference is, Peter Pan always looks the same but we're getting older. It's not a show that can last forever and I think we're getting to the point of asking how we can send this off.

Your show began screening as a double bill with Monk in 2006. How much has the TV landscape changed since then?

Monk planted the seed that a procedural could have character and be quirky and have comedy. They rolled the dice with us and took what Monk did and we just went all the way with it. And people cared. Suddenly you have this new breed of procedural with [characters with] tongues in their cheeks popping up all over the place.


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