Jesse L. Martin has, for two seasons now on The Irrational, showcased what a great actor he is. With the March 18 episode, he’s going to remind us of how fantastic a singer he is. The NBC drama is putting Alec (Martin) and his girlfriend Rose (Karen David) in the middle of a community theater production of a musical to solve an actor’s murder in “Suddenly Alec.” Yes, it’s Little Shop of Horrors!
“It wasn’t supposed to happen,” Martin admits of him singing on the show to TV Insider. “I guess that’s how good things normally happen, when they weren’t supposed to. But I was very adamant starting the show that everybody knows that, yes, I’m a Broadway guy. Yes, I can sing, but do I need to sing for every role I’ve ever played? No. That’s how I felt at the beginning.”
That changed after he and David talked about cases they’d like their characters to work on together. “I was like, wouldn’t it be amazing if we ended up going undercover in a local theater production?” Martin recalls. “I wasn’t thinking musical at all. I was thinking something like Shakespeare, something we can get the rights to, right? Both of us have an affinity for those things and theater, of course.”
James Dittiger / NBC
They then spoke with The Irrational showrunner Arika Lisanne Mittman, and she then approached Martin to find out how he really felt about singing. “I was like, ‘You know how I feel about singing. I don’t know if Alec’s really that guy. But if I did end up singing, you’d have to handcraft it so it looked like a big mistake. I wasn’t supposed to be there, but suddenly I was.’ And no pun intended, ‘Suddenly, Seymour,’” he shares with a laugh.
“Suddenly I was, and I gotta give it to ’em. They handcrafted the whole thing, and it was a great idea. They couldn’t have picked a better musical, always been a fan of that musical. Loved the play, saw the play, loved the movie, love the movie, watch it over and over and over again,” says Martin. “The idea of playing the plant sits right in my wheelhouse. I would love to do it on stage at some point, don’t need to now because I just did it in this show, and I felt like we actually did a real production of it, so the thing I thought would never happened, it was glorious that it actually happened.”
Alec is a reluctant performer, but Rose goes all in on helping him prepare in what David calls one of her favorites scenes of the episode. “I gave Jesse a heads up. I said, ‘Listen, I’m going to channel all the things that we did in drama college back in England.’ And I love that Rose takes this way too seriously. She’s fully committed, and I just love watching her enthusiasm as she tries to rub that enthusiasm onto Alec, who is very petrified of what he’s just committed himself to,” she says. “But we had so much with that scene. Trying to keep a straight face was very challenging during that. It was just so utterly joyful to see how these two work so well together and how they complement each other, how they’re vulnerable with each other as well. And you get all of that in that one scene, which as an actor is so utterly delightful to play.”
Martin agrees, and he, too, “hearkened” back to his drama school days. “Alec’s not an actor. He can sing, but he doesn’t consider himself a singer. So the idea of just putting myself out there like that is absolutely foreign to me. So I had to be that guy,” he explains. “It had to be absolutely foreign to me, and I was hanging on her every word because I’m terrified. What I do know about even being an actor who’s normally prepared to go on stage, if you are not prepared, it’s called an actor’s nightmare. If you’re not prepared, the terror of actually getting up there is overwhelming. So that’s where I was while she’s being this incredible drama instructor, I was absolutely terrified. And I love that that turns into just being absolutely committed to playing this plant.”
The Irrational, Tuesdays, 10/9c, NBC
This story originally appeared on TV Insider
