Role Recall: Scott Bakula Talks ‘Murphy Brown,’ ‘Quantum Leap,’ ‘Star Trek: Enterprise,’ ‘NCIS: New Orleans,’ and More
Scott Bakula’s TV career has spanned 30 years, and when the NCIS: New Orleans star stopped by our studio recently, we asked him to reminisce about some of our favorite roles.
We begin with his guest appearance as Mary Jo’s womanizing ex-husband in the Designing Women pilot, which aired 30 years ago this week. “After about five or six episodes that I’d done, [creator] Linda Bloodworth-Thomason came to me and said, ‘We have to let you go.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ And she said, ‘Because the audience likes you too much, and we need to hate you. And we’re gonna let you go so we can talk about you.’ So then they proceeded to talk about my character off-camera,” he says.
From there, we jump to 1989 and the premiere of Quantum Leap, the show that would earn him four consecutive Emmy nominations for Lead Actor in a Drama Series. He recalls it debuting on Easter Sunday, against an airing of The Ten Commandments. “In my naiveté at the time, I said, ‘The Ten Commandments has been on for a hundred years. It’s a new show. We’re gonna beat Moses.’ No. The Bible thumped us,” he says, laughing.
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In 1993, it was time for another memorable guest turn on a comedy, Murphy Brown. He recurred as Peter Hunt, a colleague who traded barbs and then kisses with Candice Bergen’s Murphy — in front of a live studio audience. “Obviously the audience for Murphy Brown was so happy to be there, to be that close to that show, which was such a big hit. If the show is well-written, the audience won’t let [jokes] go, they love stuff and they laugh, and that happened in that scene particularly,” he says about the two making out in Murphy’s office. “That just went on and on and on. That was a funny night.”
Of course, we had to talk about Star Trek: Enterprise, which premiered in 2001. He remembers having a meeting with execs at Paramount Television in which he was actually pitching another science fiction show, and they passed. “They said, ‘The reason we passed is, we’re getting ready to do another Star Trek and we want you to be the captain.’ And in my mind, I went, ‘Oh, I don’t want to do that.’ And then [their] next words were, ‘And it’s 100 years before Kirk and Spock.’ And in my mind, I was like, ‘I’m in. I’ll do this right now.’ But I didn’t say it out loud because then my agent would kill me,” he says. “I just thought, ‘Whew, I don’t have to follow any of those wonderful people. I get to do my own thing. There are no rules, and we’re the first starship to go out, and I’m the first captain.”
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In 2009, he teamed with Ray Romano and Andre Braugher to co-star in TNT’s Men of a Certain Age. “The three of us getting colonoscopies together is one of my favorite episodes, kind of a genius idea,” Bakula says. “I think Ray, and Billy Crystal, and somebody else had all done a field trip and done that, and so he borrowed that idea.”
There was also lots of laughter when Bakula filmed his Emmy-nominated supporting role in Steven Soderbergh’s 2013 HBO Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra. Watch the interview above to hear the crew’s reaction to seeing Bakula and Matt Damon in costume for the first time and improvising their characters’ first meeting.
And finally, Bakula shares the story behind the bar hangout on NCIS: New Orleans.
NCIS: New Orleans airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on CBS.
