Role Recall: Jere Burns Talks ‘Angie Tribeca,’ ‘Justified,’ ‘Breaking Bad,’ and His Nae Nae Skills
We know Jere Burns — that’s pronounced “Jerry,” in case you didn’t know — has serious comedy chops from roles on Angie Tribeca and Dear John. We know he’s gifted with the dramatic material via memorable performances on Breaking Bad and Burn Notice. And then there’s one of his signature roles, as Justified’s RV-driving, tanning bed-dwelling Dixie Mafia associate Wynn Duffy, in which he stole many a scene by combining both.
But did you know he’s also something of a gifted Nae Nae-er?
If you happened to miss certain segments of TBS’s 25-hour marathon premiere of Angie Tribeca last January, you might have missed the cast of the TBS police procedural spoof celebrating their launch with a group Whip and Nae Nae session.
“It was Rashida [Jones’s] idea. She was trying to get everybody during the week to come to a rehearsal so everybody would do it right, and then I kept either forgetting or blowing off the rehearsal,” Burns tells Yahoo TV. “And she’s like, ‘Jere, we’re going to do this thing, and you never show up at rehearsal.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’ll be fine. I’ll be fine. I’ll be fine.’ Then I showed up on the day and all the people who were there helping choreograph it said, ‘OK, you didn’t come to any rehearsals, so why don’t you just walk in, and then you can just stand there.’ What they’re really saying is, ‘You’re old. You won’t be able to do it anyway. Why don’t you just come in and you can just stand there and be goofy and make funny faces?’ That’s not what they said, but I’m like, ‘No, no, no. I got to walk up like I’m never going to be able to do it, and then do it good.’
Related: Deon Cole on His Comedy Central Special, ‘Black-ish,’ and his Canine ‘Angie Tribeca’ Co-Star
“I did a musical on Broadway six or seven years ago, Hairspray, and that has the most difficult closing dance number ever, the best and most complicated and long dance number ever. When you get put into a Broadway show, you’ve got, like, eight days to learn the entire show. I’m not a singer. I’m not a dancer. I can do both, but I’m not that, not by trade. So my philosophy all week [with the Angie Tribeca cast] was, ‘If I can learn the finale to Hairspray, I can learn The Nae Nae and The Whip, or whatever it’s called, pretty quickly.’ And it was really fun.”
Burns, who plays Tribeca boss Pritikin “Chet” Atkins, Lieutenant of the LAPD’s RHCU (Really Heinous Crime Unit) squad, is currently winding down the giggle-inducing series’ second season — a third was greenlit by the network earlier this month — and we asked him to wax nostalgic on other highlights from his distinguished time in TV land.
Angie Tribeca (TBS, 2016-present)
I think what we’ve discovered is, it plays best when we take it, as characters, deadly seriously. In other words, when we treat the story with the gravitas of a real procedural, and then let the lunacy play out on screen, it’s good. The jokes, and the side gags, are written. You just have to play the lines with a serious intent… I mean, it’s not like you have to include that there’s a joke. I like to forget that anything I’m doing is funny or that there is a joke involved, and play it as deadly seriously as possible. That’s when it really feels funnest and funniest, when it’s played deadly straight. We learned a lot first season and found the show, because I watch the first season now, and it’s funny, it’s random and all over the place. The second season is tight… we got the tone. I think that we got the specifics of the tone, the lights came down, it ends up looking much more like a procedural. We play it much more seriously, and I think it’s that much goofier for us taking ourselves even more seriously, never acknowledging there’s a joke of any kind.
The Muppets (ABC, 2015-16)
In the too short-lived series, Burns played Carl, the father of Fozzie’s girlfriend, Becky (Riki Lindhome). Carl and his wife did not approve of their daughter dating a bear.
With The Muppets, those guys are so good that you really start to believe that this enormous puppet made of cloth and fake fur across from you is a real actor. They’re that good. The fact that it’s a puppet goes away really quickly. You don’t see the guy, the sets are all elevated so that the operators, I don’t know if I’m supposed to disclose this, so that the operators can be hidden below the stage. Yeah, and they’re watching monitors of us, their scene partners. They’re watching video monitors of us, so that they’re responding from below the stage to exactly what’s going on in the moment, with their characters. They’re looking at a screen that might have a master shot of whoever else is in the scene, and then singles of all the other people in the scene. They can respond in time, in the moment to exactly what we’re doing, even though they’re below us by three to four feet. Oh, it’s incredible. I initially did it as a favor to my friend, [series co-creator] Bill Prady, and I didn’t want to leave the set at the end of the day. It was so much fun.
Bates Motel (A&E, 2013-present)
In the final four episodes of Season 1, Burns played Jake Abernathy, a sex slave business owner who threatened Norma Bates and her family. He was the season’s scariest villain, but then he met the business end of Sheriff Alex Romero’s gun. Still, as has become one of his trademarks, Burns played Abernathy as menacing, but not so much that you didn’t want to see more of the character.
I think it’s really just a matter of these guys having fun being bad. And I think it’s the humor. You just try to find some fun with the character. If you find the fun, the audience will find the fun, and when they’re finding the fun, they’re going to like the guy. They’re going to appreciate the guy for that. I think it also has to do with always playing against the evil intent.
Justified (FX, 2010-15)
Famously, Burns’s Wynn Duffy was supposed to be killed off after just two appearances on the show.
I like to try and get as much out of a character as I possibly can. As a result (here), they made me a recurring character for a couple of years, and then made me a series regular after two or three years. It was really gratifying, and I got to flesh that guy out, or they got to flesh the character of Wynn Duffy out, and I’m grateful to (series creator) Graham Yost and the rest of the amazing writing staff for that journey. There wasn’t a lot of black and white on Justified. Everybody had their good side and their bad side. I think an audience likes a bad guy they can root for in some respect. We found it in Wynn’s cleverness, the way he could turn a phrase, the way he was just doing a job that seemed to be … He never seemed to have a lot of malice. He was just doing a job. It was his job, and that’s the way it was. Things needed to be done. And then they gave him that nice arc with Mikey towards the end of the last season, where you see a friendship. His humanity gets to come through. I think humor is often the thing that hooks an audience. I think if you let your, if you can infuse, if I can infuse my personality into it … if Wynn’s having fun, the audience is going to have fun. I think Wynn had fun. I think Wynn liked what he did, a lot of the time.
On the rumors that FX was interested in spinning Duffy off onto his own series, a la supporting character Saul Goodman from Breaking Bad.
There was no serious discussion. I would do it in a second, but no one has… I have not been approached. I think it would have had to happen right away after Justified ended, but who knows! I love that character, and I miss him, miss those people, miss the show.
Related: ‘Justified’ Showrunner Explains the Fates that Earned the Show Most Satisfying Series Finale
On Duffy’s gem of a scene with Timothy Olyphant’s Raylan Givens, in the Season 3 finale, “Slaughterhouse,” one of the few times Duffy would ever appear rattled in the series.
The Russian roulette scene really came about as a result of… you talk about collaboration… Tim didn’t like the scene the way it was written. It wasn’t a Russian roulette scene initially. It was something else. It was just a pissing contest between Raylan and Wynn that took place in the Winnebago. And then Tim remembered a passage from one of Elmore Leonard’s books. I’m not sure which it was. Tim gave me the broad strokes of that Russian roulette scene in that particular book, and then he and I went into a room and improvised it, and as we improvised it, we wrote down the improvisation, the high points of the improvisation. Then we handed the pages to the writers. They typed them up. We brought them to the director [Dean Parisot], and it was only a two-person scene, so that’s a pretty easy scene to shoot. Also, you’re in the Winnebago, so it’s a pretty easy scene to light. If you’re in a big bar, and you’ve got six guys, it’s a whole complicated thing with lights and cameras and stuff. When you’re in a tiny space that’s pretty simple to light and all you need is two cameras, maybe three to shoot two actors, it makes that kind of thing possible, where Tim and I are giving each other the cues, and there’s not a lot of other people dependent on the words being the same every single time. I think we improv-ed our way through it with the broad strokes that we created together in a room for a couple of hours. That’s how that scene came about, and I think it ended up being a really good scene.
Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008-13)
Burns played Jesse Pinkman’s (Aaron Paul) rehab counselor — known officially only as “Group Leader” –—for four episodes that spanned Seasons 3 and 4. In a devastating reveal that he calmly unfolded for his patients during a therapy session, Group Leader shared he had accidentally run over and killed his six-year-old daughter while drunk and high on vodka and cocaine.
Breaking Bad was so well written that you said exactly what was on the page. There was no room for any kind of improvisation or even fussing with the words. That’s not the way they, I think they were open to it, but there was no need for me to change a thing. I read exactly what was on the page every time I worked. The first scene around the campfire, which is sort of the seminal scene… Bryan Cranston directed that episode of the third season, and I just basically, in rehearsal, I said what I said, did what I did, and Bryan said, “Great,” and that’s what we shot. If the writing is that good, you almost just have to say the words and get out of the way. You know what I mean?
On how BB writers wanted to delve deeper into the Group Leader character.
I would have been a part of it as much as they wrote for me, and I know because [writer and producer] Sam Catlin told me they came up with a few different storylines that would have expanded Group Leader’s character, but they never went anywhere. I think they had bigger fish to fry than to write for my character, definitely. I was happy. I was happy with my input. You can sometimes try to stretch out a character because you like an actor — “Oh, that might be cool to take him…” — and maybe dilute his impact on the arc of the show. Then again, when I did Justified, they said, “Oh, he’s good. Let’s shoot him, but shoot him in the shoulder instead of in the head.” It’s nice when that happens, but it doesn’t happen all the time. It doesn’t happen often at all.
Burn Notice (USA, 2007-13)
A calm, cool psychiatrist who turned out to be one of the series’ ultimate baddies, Burns’s Anson Fullerton not only led the organization that burned spy guy Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan), but he was also the man who ordered the murder of Michael’s father.
I didn’t know that was going to be [his arc] when I started playing him. I think with any of their bad guys, they would write an arc of three or four episodes, see how it plays, and if it plays well, they keep the guy on for awhile. Anson actually went from, I think he was one of the few bad guys to go into another season. It was really fun to play a smart, evil guy who got to manipulate, and twist around the Michael Westen character, who didn’t get twisted very often, was was always coming out on top. I got to twist him around my fingers for a season. It was great, and a lot of fun working with the cast and [series creator] Matt Nix.
Dear John (NBC, 1988-92)
In his first major TV role, Burns was Kirk Morris, a swaggering, un-self-aware ladies man who belonged to a singles support group for New Yorkers, which also include the recently divorced titular John (Judd Hirsch). The series finished its debut season at number 11 in the ratings, but the network moved it around to four different nights, in several different timeslots, and Dear John got its primetime Dead John letter after four seasons.
Yeah, when you’re being moved around to the extent that we were moved around, it’s real hard to stay on the air. I could have learned more. I was so young and inexperienced at the time. I just thought… I wish I had enjoyed it more, too. I had a blast, but I wish I had enjoyed the whole experience more. It was like doing repertory theater. It was a great cast every week. You never know what you have, especially in the beginning. I didn’t appreciate the luxury of doing 22 episodes a year for four years in a row. I really didn’t. I was young, and I just thought, “This is what happens, and now your career takes off.” It was really fun to have the opportunity to be a focal part of that show, and to get challenged in the ways that I would on a weekly basis. I would have a lot to do on a weekly basis. You learned to think quickly and think on your feet, because you’re getting five days to put on 30 minutes of television, and have it be funny, with guest rewrites on a regular basis, and to do all that in the span of five days, and do another one two days later with a completely new script that’s going to be written all week that you digest and absorb and make funny … It was a great learning platform.
It was the old traditional format, where you could have three or four people talking, or two people in a room for eight minutes of television, talking to each other. And you don’t see that anymore. You don’t see people talking at length. It’s lots of cuts and jokes. It’s 30 scenes in an episode. Archie Bunker and Edith used to sit in chairs and talk to each other and talk to each other for 10 minutes.
Angie Tribeca airs Mondays at 9 p.m. on TBS.
