The character played by James Marsden as Dead to Me comes to its end in Season 3 is a completely different person from the character he started out playing in the first season. No, it’s not that the character has evolved and grown over the course of the show’s run. It’s that he literally plays two completely different characters, whose only similarity, as fans know, is their looks. 

Ahead of production on Season 1, Marsden signed on to play Steve Wood, the arrogant and brutish ex-fiancé of Judy Hale (Linda Cardellini). “I thought he was a fun D-bag character,” the actor tells Tudum. “I’m kind of drawn to characters who are way different than who I am in real life, I guess. I think they allow you a departure, and there’s a lot of humor to Steve, not because he’s funny but because he’s fun to laugh at. He’s a bit of a buffoon.” Jen Harding (Christina Applegate) kills off the toxic Steve in the Season 1 finale — but Marsden wasn’t done working on the show. To Jen and the audience’s great shock, he returns in Season 2 as Ben, Steve’s “semi-identical” twin brother. 

Dead to Me creator Liz Feldman says the introduction of Ben Wood stands out even to her as one of the most surprising twists of the entire series. “I felt that I was definitely taking a risk and perhaps not a good one by introducing another James Marsden onto the show,” she says. “But it also made me laugh so much, the thought of bringing in a twin after we’ve very clearly murdered this guy.”

Marsden says his head was spinning when Feldman came to him with the idea, and he initially worried that he wouldn’t be able to pull off playing two distinct roles in one show. But eventually, as production began, the transformation from Steve to Ben started to feel organic. Marsden credits the writing. “The nature of the characters just on the page is so different,” he says. “That was the real help for me. His vulnerability and his self-doubt really informed and helped create specific differences between Ben and Steve.” The actor explains that the writing allowed him to discover each character and translate their essences into differences that went deeper than the surface. He points out the obvious physical distinctions of each brother: Ben is much less polished than Steve, and he dresses “nerdier.” But he also has a more closed-off posture, which speaks to Ben’s sensitive personality.

The softer of the twins is much closer to whom Marsden says he is in real life, and he began seeing even more of himself reflected in Ben as he and Feldman got to know each other. Though he was a fan of Feldman’s work when he signed on for Season 1 of Dead to Me, the two hadn’t met. Producer Jessica Elbaum, who had worked with Marsden on the movie Bachelorette, in which he played what he refers to as a “Steve-type role,” recommended him for the series. Because of his penchant for portraying pompous men, Marsden suspects that Feldman thought that’s what he was really like. That perception changed, though. 

“I remember being on set with Liz, and I was sharing something that I was going through, sort of a private thing. We both got emotional and we sat there and held each other,” he says. “I think that surprised Liz. I think she was like, ‘Oh, this guy, James, is just a lot more sensitive and speaks that emotional language a lot more than I maybe thought he did.’ I think once she saw that, I started seeing it reflected even more in the writing for Ben.”

In particular, Season 3 of Dead to Me uses one vivid element of the real James Marsden. In Episode 5, “We Didn’t Think This Through,” after finding out disturbing new details of his brother’s murder, a very drunk Ben sings Willie Nelson’s “Always on My Mind” at a karaoke party. “Singing has always been a fun hobby of mine,” Marsden says. “I know it’s a different thing with Ben because obviously he’s not a professional singer, but he does enjoy it. It was another creative instrument to display Ben’s sensitivity and his vulnerability.” Fittingly, given the multiple sides of Marsden explored in Dead to Me, the actor had played around with this specific “instrument” before. Over 20 years ago, the actor sang Elvis’ version of “Always on My Mind” in an episode of Ally McBeal. “It was under completely different circumstances, in a completely different character, so this interpretation was very different from that one. But I guess this is the song I’m supposed to sing in TV shows,” he says.

As Steve and Ben, Marsden plays romantic interests for both of the show’s leads, an experience the seasoned singer likens to interpreting a piece of sheet music: “Allegro to adagio, right?” he says, referring to the tempo markings that indicate whether notes should be played quickly and brightly or slowly and expressively. Such a fundamental transition was made much more manageable by playing off Cardellini as Judy and Applegate as Jen. “How other people react to you can sell so much of a character,” he says. 

When Marsden first stepped foot on set as Ben, he and Cardellini shared a funny realization. “Linda’s character was maybe not infatuated with Steve, but she couldn’t let the guy go. Even though he was abusive and not a nice guy, there’s something about him that’s very, very attractive to her,” he explains. “And now you have the same physical guy with a different nature about him, and Linda’s like, ‘Ben just sort of blends into the walls for Judy.’” Not for Jen, though. Ben’s gentle demeanor, which is so different from her own, is exactly what draws Jen to him. With this show, the “opposites attract” rule stands firm. It is, after all, what brought Marsden to work on Dead to Me in the first place.

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