A Man on the Inside star Ted Danson and creator Michael Schur discussed the new Netflix series’ approach to humor and serious topics. Inspired by the documentary The Mole Agent, the series sees Danson’s Charles becoming an unexpected spy in a retirement home. It is now streaming on Netflix.
“Retired professor Charles (Ted Danson) feels life has nothing new in store for him. A year after his wife’s passing, he’s become stuck in his routine and grown distant from his daughter Emily (Mary Elizabeth Ellis). But when he spies a classified ad from private investigator Julie (Lilah Richcreek Estrada), he’s inspired to roll the dice on a new adventure. Charles’ mission: to go undercover inside the Pacific View Retirement Home in San Francisco and solve the mystery of a stolen family heirloom,” says the synopsis.
“Everyone, residents and staff alike, is a potential suspect, and it’s up to Charles to solve the case without landing on the radar of Didi (Stephanie Beatriz), the all-seeing, all-knowing director of Pacific View. But keeping a low profile proves difficult as the affable Charles quickly endears himself to his fellow residents. Being a ‘man on the inside’ sends Charles on an exciting journey that makes him realize there’s a lot more life left to be had — and allows him to reconnect with Emily in the process.”
Tyler Treese: Ted, I loved your performance, and what I really enjoyed seeing was Charles really just feeling so alive from being a spy. There’s a pure giddiness to your performance, and when he is learning the basics, he always feels like a kid again. How was it imbuing your performance with that aspect?
Ted Danson: I love doing it. I mean, there’s part of me that, well, I don’t think will ever not want to be silly. Mary once said that “silly men everywhere love me because I am silly forever.” I love how earned it was in the story. Here’s a man who is shutting down his life out of the loss of his wife. He just said, “All right, that’s it for me in life,” and he shuts down. Then his daughter tries to get him out into the world and whimsically, he picks an ad in a paper that ends up putting him into a retirement home as the assistant to a private eye. He becomes a spy [to figure out] what’s going on there.
He’s so bad at it and yet so delighted to be doing it. I totally get that. It’s like, “Wow, I get to be a spy.” You know? That’s how I would be. I’d be a total loser as a spy, but I would be delighted at the idea of it.
I think you’d win people over, too, just like Charles does in the show.
Michael, what really impressed me about this show was that it is so funny, but you really captured the heart of The Mole Agent, the documentary that inspired this. You’re really tugging on my heart as the show goes along. How is it really earning that emotional payoff that you get to later in the show?
Michael Schur: Well, I’m glad you think that because that was the goal. The documentary was very special, I think. Because it’s broadly comic idea, and then as it goes along, it starts to really get serious and in-depth about a lot of really serious things about aging, memory loss, death, and a lot of the practical realities of being in your seventies, eighties, and nineties.
I thought, “Wow, the real trick here would be to make a series that gives you all of the same feelings.” That was always our North Star; that’s how we navigated in the writer’s room. We want people to feel the same way when they watch the show that they felt when they watched the documentary. So that meant not shying away from that stuff. We’re gonna run right at it. We’re gonna do stories about memory loss and even death and tricky relationships and what it means to get older. I think it wouldn’t have been a faithful adaptation of the documentary if we hadn’t run right at all of those really serious subjects, even while trying to be funny.
Ted, I wanted to ask you about Stephen McKinley Henderson because you share some really powerful scenes together later on. What stood out about him as a scene partner? You guys are brilliant together.
Danson: He is. Thank you. I agree. From the moment we met and locked Eees, it was… He’s one of those actors who doesn’t have an untruthful bone in his body, and as an actor, you just fall into him. It’s so easy to work together, and I just couldn’t [fail]. We knew our lines, and then it was just, “Where are you gonna take me, buddy?”
I have no idea where we’re gonna go, but I so trusted him to be real and human, and he’s one of those actors, like when you play tennis with somebody who’s way better than you, your game ups. He was that way. You just get better working with Stephen.
Thanks to Ted Danson and Michael Schur for talking about A Man in the Inside.
