Law & Order alum Jesse L. Martin on playing a different sort of case-cracker on a drama that’s more about messy humanity than police procedure
Having spent the majority of his TV career playing cops on Law & Order and The Flash, Jesse L. Martin is no stranger to onscreen police work. But his latest crime drama, the second season of which premiered last week, still represents a change of pace for the veteran actor.
A renowned expert in human behaviour who’s called in to consult when the authorities can’t make sense of a seemingly “irrational” crime, D.C.-based Prof. Alec Mercer is intimately familiar with the pain and inscrutable nature of criminality, having suffered injuries in a church bombing years ago. Martin says he relates very personally to his TV alter ego, reasoning that as an actor, “If you’re worth your salt in any way, shape or form, your whole job is to look at human behaviour and reflect it, whether it be on stage or on film or small screen. On television, I’ve been doing that all my life. Kids do it with their imaginations every single day; they figure out how to behave like a monster or a police officer, and I do that as a career. I just didn’t have scientific terms for it coming up. Now I do.
“I can see it sort of from a scientific angle, but growing up as an actor training, it was always from sort of an emotional place: ‘It gets people to feel this way or feel that way, and what does that look like in the body?’ Now it’s sort of like I’ve got terms to describe it, so I feel a little bit smarter.”
Mercer’s work with the FBI has a messy personal entanglement, since one of the agents is his ex-wife Marisa (Maahra Hill), but his sister Kylie (Travina Springer) and his university research assistants, played by Arash DeMaxi and Molly Kunz, help to keep him on track. The show is making room for Mercer to take a fresh approach in season two, since the lingering bombing mystery reached something of a resolution at the end of the first season.
“I find that it’s really satisfying for an audience to wonder, but to also get those answers,” maintains creator and executive producer Arika Lisanne Mittman, who cut her teeth on the Showtime fan favourite Dexter. “I never wanted that [bombing] storyline to be something that spanned five years of a series. I wanted it to have a satisfying ending . . . and to open up the second season for new questions, new mysteries and new stories.”
However, Martin notes, “What it led to was more questions for my character. Often when people go through a traumatic experience, it — for lack of a better way to put it — becomes part of their identity. If the story is solved, or the mystery of it is solved, there’s something that happens to their identity in it. That bleeds probably for the eternity of the series, which I think is really fascinating.”
Having done such series as the aforementioned Law & Order (in which he played Det. Ed Green for just under 200 episodes), Martin believes The Irrational is “an evolution of the things I’ve gotten to do in a procedural. Law & Order was a great time and a great career space for me, but it was mostly just the facts [of the week’s given case]. You didn’t go home with the characters, and you barely got to know anything about them.”
“In this space, first of all, I’m not a detective . . . which I was very, very glad of. Second, [Mercer is] a professor, and if I wasn’t an actor, I can guarantee you that I probably would have been a teacher in some way, shape or form. I think it’s the most noble job you could possibly ever have, and they should probably get paid a lot more money than they do and get a lot more attention than they do. So, there’s that aspect of being this person who gets involved in solving crimes and mysteries, the same way that procedurals do — but coming at it from such an emotional angle is completely different.”
On that note, Mittman adds that the crime-solving aspect of The Irrational isn’t meant to override the messy human one. “We do always look at every episode [in terms of], ‘How is this about psychology? What is the psychology in this episode?’ We don’t ever want to tell just a traditional by-the-book kind of case. Dan Ariely, who wrote the book that this is based on [Predictably Irrational], consults for us. He helps us with some of these psychological terms, and we have to do a lot of reading.”
“We and the writers have to do a lot of research and a lot of writing for characters who are smarter than me,” Mittman allows. “It’s a challenge. It’s always hard, but I love it, because it helps make me smarter. And makes the audience smarter, I hope.”
The Irrational airs Tuesday, October 15, on City & NBC