Jeffrey Donovan looked a bit weary when we talked last summer. It was morning, and the actor had just flown in to Los Angeles the night before from Vancouver where he was shooting his new noir series “Shut Eye,” which debuts Wednesday on Hulu.
When I told him I had seen the first episode, he looked surprised. “I’ve been in the middle of it, so I’m just catching up to you,” he says, and immediately wants to know what I think.
There are a lot of intriguing elements to “Shut Eye,” described as a dark comedy with the accent on dark. It goes behind the doors of the storefront psychic shops that seem to litter Los Angeles and imagines a criminal world that keeps them in business.
“Shut Eye’” creator Les Bohem (“Extant”) had been thinking of a story about a fake psychic who becomes a real psychic but didn’t know where to set it. So he walked into a psychic parlor in his neighborhood and had his palm read. Then he began to notice that these businesses were “virtually on every block, and I wondered how they could afford the rent on $40 tarot card readings.”
In his research, Bohem found that Romany families, also known as Gypsies, owned many of the parlors. He talked with academics and police and “Shut Eye” worked with a Romany consultant.
“I discovered that the culture was just so rich and exciting,” says Bohem.
Donovan plays Charlie Haverford, who runs a string of the psychic shops with his wife Linda (KaDee Strickland). While they both know how to pull a con, the couple is raising their two children in a fairly conventional fashion, making for something of a schizophrenic life.
For his own research, Donovan went to readers and got in touch with a mentalist who debunks other hypnotists and mentalists. Donovan learned what he calls the “scientific skill” of reading someone in a cold meeting. “I assess who you are from your clothes to your accent to your vernacular,” he says. “That’s what Charlie preys on.”
“It feels like in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ where they pull away the curtain,” he notes. “I feel like we’re doing something like that. We show the pageantry and then pull away to show the seedy side behind it all.”
One of the things he says he learned is that those who go to psychics “have to want to believe. So if I can tell you something that is true about yourself, then you think I must be tapping into something you’re not aware of.”
Donovan says he knows “what’s behind the curtain. But there are people who want to believe in the afterlife, and there are people who want to believe in magic, believe that you can see their soul and tell them what their existence means.”
The story in “Shut Eye,” though, goes beyond psychic parlor tricks to include Bohem’s original idea about a fake psychic who starts having real visions. That is something that begins to happen to Charlie after he has a head injury in the first episode.
That gives the story another dimension, observes Donovan. “Charlie is never sure what to believe or if it’s real. Adding to the question is that the show adds an element of hypnotism to it in a character played by Emmanuelle Chriqui. So Charlie has to wonder if the visions have been planted.
Then there’s Charlie’s Romany bosses, a mother-and-son team played by Isabella Rossellini and Angus Sampson. He’s a bit unhinged, but she ultimately pulls the strings and is willing to apply old-style vengeance upon anyone who crosses her.
For fans who watched Donovan for seven seasons on USA’s “Burn Notice,” in which he played the dashing Michael Westen, a disavowed spy marooned in Miami Beach, Charlie may seem a departure. That is unless they saw him last year in the second season of FX’s “Fargo.” In that show, which was set in 1979 Minnesota, he was an overweight nasty crime boss named Dodd Gerhardt.
The 48-year-old Massachusetts native remembers having a Skype conversation with “Fargo” creator Noah Hawley who told him he thought he could play a “misogynistic, violent gang leader. “And I went,’ Really?!’ as I was holding my little daughter on my knee.”
The actor gained 35 pounds and worked on the Midwest accent for months. “It was one of my most rewarding roles,” he says.
Donovan also found “Shut Eye’s” Charlie a big change. “I’ve done unlikable characters before, but I have never played a husband, dad and a scammer who is trying to put a front on of legitimacy so I can make a living for his family.”
Unlike many of his other roles, though, “Charlie’s not the alpha in the room. Dodd was the alpha in the room. Michael Westen was the alpha in the room. If anything, Charlie’s wife wears the pants in the family. It’s a very different character for me.”
Though “Shut Eye” shoots all it’s interiors in Vancouver, there are enough exterior shots of the City of Angels, including along Ventura Boulevard, to give the series an L.A. feel.
“That’s something Les really wanted, but someone will have to explain tax breaks to me,” jokes Donovan about shooting in two places.
While enthusiastic about “Shut Eye,” the actor — who lives with his wife and two children in Colorado — is reluctant to oversell the show.
“It should work on you the way a psychic works on the client. It should invite you in and seduce you.”
