Gary Mendez will spiral deeper down his emotional rabbit hole on “A Million Little Things.”
Call it the winter of his discontent.
“It’s been a pretty dark second half of the season for Gary,” says James Roday, 43, who plays the bearded bad boy on ABC’s Thursday-night drama. “In order to balance the trajectory some of the other characters are having, Gary went downward — and you’ll see it get worse over the next few weeks.”
In last week’s episode, the hot-tempered Gary was arrested for slugging a bystander who racially profiled Rome (Romany Malco) at Sophie’s (Lizzie Greene) softball game. In the Jan. 23 episode, a motorist pulled a gun on Gary in a road-rage incident. It doesn’t get much better on this week’s episode.
Of all the shows characters, it’s Gary — a selfish hedonist when the series began — who matured the most in Season 1 as he helped his girlfriend Maggie (Allison Miller) battle cancer. Their breakup in the Season 1 finale set the stage for Gary’s emotional backslide this season, which wasn’t helped by Maggie’s new relationship with the sketchy Eric (Jason Ritter), who claims to have the transplanted heart of Maggie’s dead brother. He was killed in a car accident while driving Maggie (viewers now know Eric is lying).
“Gary is struggling with the direction his life is headed, and I think the breakup was harder on him than perhaps he thought it was,” says Roday. “He’s watching his friends slowly but surely put their lives back together and all get on some kind of positive track and he’s looking at them going, ‘What about me?’ What am I doing? What should I be doing?’ He just feels a little bit lost. Before he had this drive to keep Maggie alive — this herculean task kept his eyes on the horizon — and how he’s floundering a bit.
“And there’s the other dude in Maggie’s life who kind of came in and flipped everything upside down and Gary doesn’t think he’s on the level … like, ‘Who is this dude trying to get his mitts on my girl? What the hell?’ I think right now, since they’re not together, probably more than anything Gary is still in protector mode. That’s how he’s come to identify himself in that relationship.”
Roday says series creator DJ Nash likes to work episode to episode, without divulging too much to his cast about their characters’ arcs, but he does know that guest star Marcia Gay Harden, who will play Gary’s mother, Alice, will figure prominently as “A Million Little Things” finishes the second half of the season (she makes her first appearance in Thursday night’s episode). “It’s all headed toward a reckoning of sorts that involves Gary’s mother,” Roday says. “Things are just going to keep getting worse for Gary and then something is going to happen on the mom front. That’s sort of where we’re headed with this dude.”
Roday, meanwhile, is headed for a reunion with his “Psych” co-star Dule Hill on “Psych 2: Lassie Come Home,” streaming this spring on Peacock, NBC’s new platform premiering April 15. The movie marks Roday’s second reunion with Hill following “Psych: The Movie,” which aired on USA in December 2017 three years after the show ended its eight-season run. The “Lassie” title is a reference to “Psych” character Det. Carleton “Lassie” Lassiter, played by Timothy Omundson (“This Is Us”), who suffered a serious stroke in April 2017.
“That was the engine behind this movie, for sure,” says Roday. “[Omundson] reached a place in his rehabilitation where he could travel and dip his toe back in the water, proverbially, and we wanted to provide that opportunity for him so we structured the story around Lassiter and married it to what Tim was going through in real life in that Lassiter suffers a stroke after getting shot on the job.
“We were all able to get on the ride with Tim and figure out where he was and what he needed in this process and it was a really safe, warm, nurturing environment for him to get back up on the horse,” he says. “When he started work on ‘This Is Us’ he already had that experience so he knew what to expect. He used the ‘Psych’ movie to oil the joints a little bit.”