"So Charming, He Doesn't NEED to Use His Jedi Mind Trick Powers"

Gregory Marcel is an actor who, until recently, has been best known for his work on the stage and in independent films like Sun Kissed and The Fall. Now, however, all of that is about to change.

All of the years of hard work, dedication and devotion to the craft and business of acting began paying off for Greg at the end of last year when against all odds he landed the biggest break of his career; a leading role on a new ABC Series called Mind Games.

The series’ premise deals with a graduate student taken under the wing of two brothers Clark and Ross Edwards, played by Steve Zahn and Christian Slater, who run a problem-solving firm based on psychological mind manipulation.

Marcel talked with us about how he landed the role.

“I’m a unicorn,” he says, “I shouldn’t exist in nature. I booked this show without an agent and without a manager. I was completely unrepresented. I had been for a couple of months at that point. I’ve been on-again, off-again with representation the entire time I’ve been in L.A. I was with an office for a little while and nothing catches and always smaller side offices that a lot of people have never heard of, never really swimming with the big fish. The casting director for our show, Jason La Podura, I met him in a casting director workshop a couple of years ago. He called me for a very small role on the show The Event, which did not go beyond the first season. I booked that role, it was very tiny. I’ve never been in a position where I’ve felt comfortable enough trusting my whole career to a management team or an agent or anything like that, because it’s been so on-again, off-again, and I’ve always been one who’s sort of stepped up, I took it upon myself to constantly keep in contact with casting directors that I’ve met and send e-mails

"So Charming, He Doesn't NEED to Use His Jedi Mind Trick Powers"

and postcards and newsletters, letting people know, and posting video of things that I was booking and things that I was working on myself. Really, it’s a horrible, thankless job that you feel like you’re wasting your time for years.”

“And then, one casting director just remembers you and pays attention and decides for whatever reason to give you a shot, at something like a pilot,” Gregory adds, “I really did not expect any pilot auditions that entire pilot season. I showed up and I saw the e-mail, I loved the script right away and I loved the role and I was really into it and it went on from there. When I found out after the initial audition, they wanted to take me to the studio to test for the role, I had to hire a lawyer that day basically. I got the phone call Friday night, they wanted me to test on Tuesday morning, so basically, someone had to negotiate the contract Monday, and I didn’t have any time, because it was the weekend to interview managers or agents or anyone like that to jump on my team, and also, I had that little weird sense of superiority of ‘Well, I got this without you, so why should I let you on board. There’s an “M”and an “E”, me.’ So I called a lot of friends, actors who had been through the pilot experience more than I had, the pilot season, the testing experience, friends of mine who had worked in representation, not with me, just people I knew, and we decided that I should just get a lawyer at that point to just handle that contract and he’s great and he’s been great and actually, I didn’t end up even hiring a manager until after I got back from shooting a pilot, and I still don’t have an agent and I’m holding out as long as I can.”

We asked Gregory if he is

"So Charming, He Doesn't NEED to Use His Jedi Mind Trick Powers"

worried about an agent taking the 15% from him.

“Agents take 10, but it all starts to add up, it’s crazy,” Marcel says, “Business managers and lawyers and publicists, there’s just a lot of numbers flying around. I’m focused on doing as few lifestyle changes as possible the first year, no new cars, no coke habits. I can’t afford it. I’m still as cheap as I was before, which is really great. I parked at a meter for this interview. I have the timer on my phone on just in case. I’m not paying that ticket.”

Marcel talks about the process of first getting the part versus holding onto it through the pilot shooting and the series actually getting picked up by a network.

“This entire process has been very educational,” he says, “It’s its own masters program going from zero to pilot. What’s been really interesting is it doesn’t stop. Every step of the way, it’s all just about whether it’s going to crumble at the next step. I left my initial audition for Mind Games feeling fantastic. I was like, ‘That was it! I nailed that,’ like I really felt good and it became all about like, ‘Now, let’s just see if they’re going to let me studio test.’ And then when they did it, then it became all of hinging, like it was an accomplishment and you celebrated for a split-second, and then, it’s all about what’s the network going to say. And then, when you book it and you show up to that first table read and you just heard about how Christina Ricci just got fired from a a table read, and you’re like, ‘Damn, I’m not Christina Ricci, I don’t have that many Twitter followers.”

“And you just cross your fingers that after the read-through, the executives do not replace you, and then, you shoot the pilot and you wait to see what happens with it and it gets picked up and they

"So Charming, He Doesn't NEED to Use His Jedi Mind Trick Powers"

don’t replace you again, because that’s the thing,” Gregory continues, “And now it’s waiting to see how people respond and then, we get a second season. It’s just that every step of the way, it’s nothing but potential for ruin. So it’s a wonderful zen exercise, because it’s very much about, ‘Just enjoy making the show today, because we have no idea what’s going to happen, there’s no way of knowing.’ So yeah, right now, I’m used to the waiting now and now we just wait and see what happens with that, now that it’s in the can. It’s real soon and around the corner, so we’ll see what happens.”

We asked Gregory how many episodes were filmed for Mind Games.

“Thirteen, pilot plus twelve,” Marcel says, “We shot the pilot last March in Chicago. We were told by all the Chicagoans that it was unseasonably cold for March while we were shooting the pilot, which was good boot camp for us. Because when we went back to shoot the series, it was a polar vortex and we were there for about 5 1/2 months and it was just as cold as everyone says.”

“It was painful, everything hurts, you don’t go outside,” he adds, “I think I counted like three days without seeing daylight. I would leave my building at like 5:30AM, it’s still dark out, it’s the middle of winter, get to the studio, I’m on the soundstage all day. Because it was so cold, they actually moved our trailers into an empty soundstage, so our trailers were inside the building. And by the time we were done, the sun had been down for hours and back up. If I had three days of full shooting in a row, I would not see sunlight for that time.”

We asked Marcel if there was any on-location filming.

“There was a good amount,” Gregory says, We had an eight day shooting schedule and roughly each episode was four days location,

"So Charming, He Doesn't NEED to Use His Jedi Mind Trick Powers"

four days on stage. And of course, there was a mixture, some locations were built in a stage next door, but we got to do a lot of fun exteriors and fun locations in Chicago.”

“I was very new to Chicago,” he continues, “I had never been there until the pilot, so it was really great to just be in these cool places. We shot in Union Station and we shot all over downtown. I loved it, the field trips.”

We asked Gregory if there were any pinch-me moments working alongside Steve Zahn and Christian Slater.

“That was definitely a thing,” he replies, “What sort of worked nicely for my role is that Steve is this master genius scientist and I am his sidekick, I’m his apprentice. I was his grad student and I followed him to this new company that we’re all doing together. Because of that, whenever and Christian are out in the field, very often, I’m with them, and it’s just the three of us. And also, because I’m taller than they are, I’m always in the middle.”

“We’re in this sort of pyramid framing, which is wonderful for viewership,” Marcel adds, “So there were a lot of walking and talking street scenes, which is just the three of us and they’ve got roads blocked off and there’s all these people, people literally pulling over and getting out of their cars, because they did see Christian Slater on the street, and just thinking, ‘What are these people making of me?’ ‘That’s the guy from Wimpy Kid and that’s the guy from Heathers and everything, and who’s the tall schmuck in the middle that we’ve never seen before?’ It was fun, but oddly enough, it was never distracting from work. But now, next season, it will, now that you’ve brought it up.”

We asked Marcel of the similarities and differences between himself and his character Miles Hood.

“Well, I really like the character of Miles even when he was

"So Charming, He Doesn't NEED to Use His Jedi Mind Trick Powers"

just on the page when I read the original breakdown for him,” Gregory says, “The character has definitely changed a lot from the pilot in a lot of crazy different ways. I know some of them have to do with the fact that I’m playing him now. The writers did a great job of really paying attention, especially as this season went and our voices and working off what we gave them. I really appreciated the directors that gave us a chance to find stuff that wasn’t on the page and what no one had thought of and give us the freedom to play a little bit more.”

“I think even if some of that stuff didn’t make it to the episodes, the writers that are watching the dailies, they still get an idea,” he adds, “I was given a lot more physical humor as the season went, because they just felt that I showed a little bit of aptitude for that. It was the formulas for my character is that at the end of a lot of scenes, I have the snarky, sarcastic button. And once we had one solid take of that, it’s like, now say something else. I love when I see the cuts of the episodes and I actually get to see it, they made it in, and that’s pretty gratifying.”

Gregory talked about how he got to improv on episodes as the filming went on.

“And that’s something that definitely as the season went, I also had, it was a big educational arc,” he recalls, “The expression that kept coming to mind is I really had to learn how to grow my balls on set. I’m the agreeable one on set. I feel like you’re one of the staples of the show, you’re one of the guys on the show, the directors, they’re new every week, they don’t know everything that we’ve been doing. We want you to feel that if you don’t

"So Charming, He Doesn't NEED to Use His Jedi Mind Trick Powers"

feel you got the take you wanted, then I know lunch is coming up, but no, I really need to do another one, and you learn to pick your battles. There’s scenes where you’re like, ‘Oh, I understand. This scene is to get us from A to B.’ I’d be like, ‘Oh, I got this great idea if we did a crane shot and…No, not today, everyone’s really hungry and it’s really cold. Let’s do the scene,’ but even our last exterior. It was the last Friday night shooting outside. We had to reschedule and we had rewritten every exterior that week to be an interior because it was so cold. The equipment couldn’t go outside. It was this last location. It was the way the whole episode was written, it needed to be outside. I just didn’t care how cold it was, I wanted to do it. Some people were like, ‘We shouldn’t do this outside.’ I’m like, ‘No, I’m doing it.’”

“During that scene actually, they’d set up everything,” Marcel continues, “They never even brought us outside for the rehearsal, it was like, ‘It’s too cold. Let second team do it. You guys are not going to move. We’re going to mark each of you. We’re doing one set-up, three cameras,’ and it was just very clear, ‘We’re not messing around, like two takes, punch in, three takes, closeups, and we’re out of here.’ And what was great though was that when we got out there, and they’re all ready to go, they’re ready to roll, and Jaime Ray Newman, who’s on the show with me, she and I had a lot of dialogue with each other in that scene. We’re really confronting a lot of stuff that’s happened throughout the season at that point. We both independently were like, ‘I can’t. You’re so far away from me,’ and learning really that that’s the kind of stuff that really is the actor’s job on

"So Charming, He Doesn't NEED to Use His Jedi Mind Trick Powers"

set to look for, because you’re not always going to have a writer, a director, a cameraman, and a director of photography who are looking for that. So it was great that even in the cold and everything’s ready to go, we still were like, ‘We can shoot the scene this way, but when we get to the conversation between us, we got to get closer. It just doesn’t feel right, the way we’re set up,’ and they were great about it and everybody jumped onboard and we got it done and it wasn’t that bad.”

We commented to Marcel that his work on Mind Games will last forever on digital film.

“Anything I’ve ever done on camera is technically that,” Gregory says, “And now, I’m going back to student films I did years ago that I’m like, ‘Oh, God, I don’t want that to resurface.’ That was back when it was like, what are the chances I’ll ever get any notoriety. Why, sure I’ll do it. This will never come back to bite me in the ass. It’s never really going to happen. I felt so safe. Hopefully, people will see it, knock on wood, fingers crossed.”

“I think it’s a really smart show,” he adds, “I’m too far inside it to objectively say what it is or what it’s like, but we had a great time making it. The crew and everyone loved everyone. We all just got along so well and it was just really a pleasure to go everyday. I choose to believe that the way the universe works is that your show is going to be good because you really enjoyed making it and you were all in it together. I would hate to find that it’s when you’re all cynical and you hate each other, that that’s when you make the good work.”

We had Gregory share with us on-set stories about his co-stars Steve Zahn and Christian Slater.

“They get along super-well,” Marcel

"So Charming, He Doesn't NEED to Use His Jedi Mind Trick Powers"

says, “They are such good buddies. No one can understand how they’ve not played brothers before. Even looking at them together, they’re like the same height and it just makes sense. It’s such great casting and a testament to whoever made that decision. They play off each other well and they’re both so consistent. They’re both so seasoned. They’ve been doing it for so long. They’ve been on so many sets that there’s never a moment I don’t believe from either of them and they are so technically clued in. They don’t miss a beat. You can be in acting classes as long as you want for years and years, you will not learn that stuff until you’re on a set. You will not practice it enough and have it become second nature until then. Christian works from the outside in, Steve works more from the inside out. They are such drastically different characters. One of my favorite moments with almost everyone in the cast was when we were shooting the pilot, as part of our caper, there was a part where we end up in a bread truck and we’re following our mark, sort of spying on someone. So for one of the wide shots, the guy were spying on is all the way across an outdoor lobby area and we’re all in the van. And basically, we just had to be there. It’s on him, we’re in the background, we’re peeking through the windows, so we had a lot of time sitting through the van, and we started having sing-alongs, and we’re all mic’d. I don’t remember who started, Cedric Sanders, who’s on my show, he’s incredible, he grew up singing and has a great voice, he and Wynn Everett, who was also in our pilot, she and Cedric were very good friends from L.A. I jumped in and started harmonizing, because I was in choirs, why not? And then, of course, instantly,

"So Charming, He Doesn't NEED to Use His Jedi Mind Trick Powers"

I’m like, ‘Is Christian Slater going to think that I’m a dork? Am I totally annoying the hell out of him?’”

“And he grabbed his phone and started rifling through his phone and he’s like, ‘Yep, he’s e-mailing his manager right now. I’m getting replaced. I’m out of here.’” he continues, “Steve jumped in and everyone was singing. I could not read Christian’s expression at all. He’s just staring at his phone and I’m like, ‘Oh, there’s an axe and what’s going to happen?’ And as soon as we finished, he’s like, ‘OK, guys, I just found the lyrics to “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, I want to sing this one next. Let’s do this one.’ He was searching for lyrics to the next song we were all going to sing together, after already singing for a half hour in the cold in this bread truck there. That’s the stuff that you’re so lucky when you get to start with a pilot, because you have so much more time. You’ve got a month or 3 1/2 weeks to shoot an episode, whereas normally, you would have eight days. So when you have time for read-throughs and you have time for running things just a little bit more and getting to know each other and we’re all staying in the same hotels also. There were dinners together. It was really good team-building.”

We asked Marcel if there were any practical jokes on set.

“I don’t know if we really had a practical joker on set,” he replies, “We have like little in-jokes, like this thing that we say called, ‘Bing bong,’ that came from Christian on set. We’ll be sitting there for rehearsal, put it in our tape marks, and we’re like, ‘OK, that’s great. We’ll bring in second team.’ We’re like, ‘Alright, bing bong!’ We just say that and we say it a lot.”

“We say it in different voices and different pitches,” Gregory continues, “The assistant directors will have

"So Charming, He Doesn't NEED to Use His Jedi Mind Trick Powers"

certain songs that they will play. Like they play “Total Eclipse Of The Heart” on the loudspeaker, with the ‘turn around…’ every time they’re turning around angles. I feel like it’s the perfect blend. Everyone’s working. There’s nothing that’s so much that it’s distracting from the work and keeping us from getting to work, but it’s still an up feeling on set the whole time.”

We asked Gregory if any outtakes that may show up on a season home video set will have the use of the words “Bing Bong”.

“We’ll see,” he replies, “I hope so. I don’t even know what some of the outtakes will be. Probably us saying things we shouldn’t be saying while we are not realizing that the cameras are rolling and the sound is rolling. That’s something that when I was watching dailies, I was like, ‘Oh, I got to shut the hell up…a lot more when I’m on set.’ Nothing too damning, but even noticing that I had no idea, because I actually was proud of this moment.”

“I actually had some background people moved one day, because there was this guy and he was a little bit taller than me and kind of looked like me and had glasses just like mine and he was standing right behind me,” Marcel adds, “And I’m like, ‘No, no, no, no. This guy has to be moved.’ And it’s my first series and Megalyn [Echikunwoke] is like, ‘This is like our fourth series.’ She’s like, ‘You’re learning quickly, are you?’ She’s like, ‘I can’t have it. He can stay, but he can’t here, not in my frame. We’ll frame him out,’ so he’s cut out across the eyes or something, diminish him!’”

We asked Marcel if he got to employ any “Jedi mind tricks” during filming.

“There’s many Jedi mind tricks involved in the show,” Gregory says, “We are a hybrid between an episodic and a procedural, we have the thing where every week,

"So Charming, He Doesn't NEED to Use His Jedi Mind Trick Powers"

we have a new client, but there’s still so much storyline about what’s going on with the office and the people in the office, so that stuff’s pretty awesome. All of the science is real. I talk to all the writers every week about it, they’ve all researched about it, these are all actual things, put through a dramatic twist, of course. So the concepts all make sense and I’ve retained them.”

“For sure, I see them as things that happen everyday,” he adds, “I don’t necessarily remember all the terminology for them, because my brain can only handle so much. Kyle Killen, our writer, is amazing and brilliant and pretty cerebral and verbose, which I love. I love words, but there’s a lot of techno speak and there’s a lot of science jargon. There’s a lot of evenings where I’m like, ‘My goal is to go to bed being able to say these four words, as if I know what they mean. They’ve actually been a part of my education.’ As soon as we got them in the can, they had to be stricken from my mind, so I have room for the new ones that they were doing the next day.”

We also asked Gregory if he ever would employ them on people in real life if he had the power.

“I absolutely could,” Marcel replies, “But the good news is it’ll never be necessary, because I’m so damn charming that I don’t really need to employ those kind of tricks. They’re more for people who struggle with how charming and personable they are, people who really suffer.”

Marcel told us about what happened as the season filming finally wrapped up.

“I gave great parting gifts at the end of the season, I had to.” Gregory says, “I had such a crush on everyone, on the crew, on everyone on the show. We’re talking production office, UPM, transportation, everything. It’s amazing anything ever gets made, they’re so many

"So Charming, He Doesn't NEED to Use His Jedi Mind Trick Powers"

moving parts, there are so many unions.”

“There’s just so much that can go wrong, there’s weather, and even when you’re inside, there’s still weather, there are structures that are powerless against the weather, come rain or cold or sleet or sound,” he adds, “The word ‘soundstage’ is so deceptive, because it would make you think that it keeps sound out, but it doesn’t.”

We asked Gregory if he has any viewing plans for the show’s premiere.

“I’ve never had a viewing party,” Marcel says, “I’ve only done relatively small TV roles and it just seemed silly to say, ‘Come over and watch my two lines on Criminal Minds,’ even though I’m proud of the accomplishment and it took a while to climb the ladder and all that. But a viewing party wasn’t quite necessary. So I will, in fact, be having a number of friends over. A friend of mine lives in an amenity building, they have a screening room that you can sign out, so just a handful of people in the screening room. I think Megalyn Echikunwoke, from our show is going to be there, too. Jaime Ray Newman is also going to be there. And we’re going to be live tweeting, too, because that’s a thing. I’ve never been on Twitter until now. I joined Twitter solely for the purposes of towing the company line and doing my part to participate. I’m excited to do it, but I don’t know how. I e-mailed the PR people at ABC, I was like, ‘Can we have a meeting where you teach me how to Tweet?’ And it was just the best example of being selectively helpless that I’ve ever had.”

“And I have a lot of them,” he continues, “It was just wonderful to be like, ‘You can’t say no, because it’s our job to make sure these Tweets work right.’ So, yeah, this actor’s going to come in, you got to validate my parking, and I

"So Charming, He Doesn't NEED to Use His Jedi Mind Trick Powers"

need you to teach me how to Tweet, what’s the difference between the @ symbol and the hashtag. What does it all mean and why? Why are we doing this? I need all this explained. But I accept it. It’s a part of the job and I’m down. I’m all on board, but as I was saying earlier, that is the kind of thing that you don’t really hear about in theater school, when you’re learning phonetics and you’re taking movement class and you’re working on Checkov. No one ever mentions to you that when all that is said and done, after you’ve taken your bow, you have to go back to your dressing room and start Tweeting.”

Gregory told us about how Twitter has changed the way Hollywood actors promote their wares.

“Granted, I know a lot of people, a lot of struggling actors and comedians who are really trying to use Twitter as their thing, as their platform, and really build their fan base,” Marcel says, “And I know that casting and producers and networks, they do pay attention to that stuff now. If it’s between these two guys and no one’s ever heard of this guy and this guy has 200,000 followers already, they’re going to factor that in.”

“Budget makes decisions, learned that this year, too,” he adds, “Anytime someone’s like, ‘Why did they move that over there?’ ‘Budget, for some reason, that vase is more expensive on that side of the room.’ And that’s the only reason anything ever, it’s all budget. None of it’s personal, it’s all budget. Don’t get too comfy, nothing is precious.”