PSYCH Finale Interview – James Roday And Ally Sheedy

You probably know that I'm a PSYCH fan, but the season finale coming up tonight is an especially fun episode. Written and directed by the show's star James Roday, we return to Mr. Yang for thrills, and the entire episode is an homage to Hitchcock. If you missed it, check in for my PSYCH giveaway before time runs out. James and Ally Sheedy recently took part in a conference call interview to promote the finale, and it was really a great interview, but if you know James Roday, you already know that.

Also, I have to remind you to check out some of the other appearances James Roday has made at Are You Screening?, including the time I got to put him through the ScreenTime ringer and found out about some of his favorite shows and movies.

Let's get to it-

Frederic Germay, from Media Boulevard Magazine

F. Germay My first question is what are some of your favorite episodes in Psych’s four seasons?

J. Roday I assume you’re asking me that question, Frederic?

F. Germay Sure, well, if Ally wants to answer as well…

J. Roday That’s a lot of pressure to put on Ally –

A. Sheedy That’s okay. I love the episodes that have Yang in them.

J. Roday Yes. Ally likes the Yang episodes. I too, like the Yang episodes. I would toss in just a random sampling of – let’s see, I’ve always been really fond of the tele-novella episode where we spoofed a Spanish soap opera that was called “Lights, Camera, Homicidio.” I think like half of season one is very dear to me just because we were sort of flying by the seat of our pants and every week was truly a new adventure. I look back at some of those episodes and even though they may not be the greatest episodes they’ll always have – they’ll be very near and dear to me because it was just so much love happening to get this show off the ground.

Then more recently they let me direct for the first time in season three and I’ll always remember that very fondly. That was the “Tuesday the 17th” episode and the first time John Landis came up to work with us on an episode called “Scary Sherry,” that also was one heck of an experience. But mostly the episodes with Mr. Yang.

A. Sheedy See why I like doing this show? There you go.

J. Roday Yes.

F. Germay Okay. Where do you get the creative inspiration for your character to be so bizarre and different? Do you get all that from the script or is there someone in your life that you modeled the character after?

A. Sheedy I’m not sure, who are you asking?

F. Germay Oh, James.

A. Sheedy Oh, okay.

J. Roday It’s a really great character because he kind of lives by his own set of rules and he’s Peter Pan. He’s Puck, I don’t know real people like him. To approach any situation first and ask questions later that’s just Shawn, and I think I’ve sort of found it along the way. Like I said if you go back and watch early episodes and compare them to the stuff that we’re doing now I think the evolution of the character is – you can see a lot of differences. I’ve always sort of trusted in the fact that this guy doesn’t think a whole lot before he does stuff, so I try not to think too much before I do stuff, and I think it’s worked out okay.

Travis Tidmore from CineManiac

T. Tidmore Hi guys, thanks for joining us today.

J. Roday Yes, thanks, Travis.

A. Sheedy Hi, yes.

T. Tidmore Clearly in this episode there is a lot of Hitchcock references. James I was wondering if there is anyone else you drew inspiration from – influences from when you were directing this episode?

J. Roday You know, I really do try to stay as faithful to Hitchcock as I could both aesthetically and in pacing and I just shamelessly ripped off four or five shots straight out of his films, quite frankly. It was an homage episode and I’m a Hitchcock fan, and Andy Berman who wrote the episode with me, is a Hitchcock fan. As much as we could get away with doing Hitchcock in a Psych episode that’s definitely what we set out to do.

T. Tidmore As a Hitchcock fan I really enjoyed it.

J. Roday Thanks, man.

T. Tidmore No problem. And Ally, from the season finale it looks like we may be seeing more of you. Do you know when that might be, how long we’ll have to wait to see you again?

A. Sheedy I don’t know. I think there is a strange secretive sort of story going on here and so I’m not going to answer that unless James says I can.

J. Roday I think it’s fair to say we have not seen the last of her and we’ll leave it at that.

A. Sheedy Okay, there we go.

T. Tidmore All right, thank you guys very much.

J. Roday Thank you, man.

A. Sheedy Thanks.

Lauren Becker with Shooting Stars

L. Becker I guess it’s obvious now that “Mr. Yin Presents” was always kind of being formed since the first episode but how did the whole story line come together and how long have you been working on writing it, James?

J. Roday Well, we sort of – we kind of had to ... that it would be fun to do a trilogy within the landscape of Psych. For a while it was just me and Andy that thought that was cool and then we did the first one and it kind of went over like gangbusters. And Ally was a huge part of our campaign to keep going because I think she did such a marvelous job with that character that it’s like how can you not want more of that? I’ve got to give credit to Jimmi Simpson, too, who also came in and –

A. Sheedy Oh my God!

J. Roday -- and created this unbelievable sort of character that we didn’t want to see the end of yet either. A lot of things came together to sort of give us a boost and then from there it was sort of like a no-brainer. We started thinking about the second Yang, I think a day after the first one aired and everybody was so pumped about it. We have not stopped thinking about it since because we still have more work to do.

A. Sheedy Thank you for saying all that, James, –

J. Roday It’s so true, though.

A. Sheedy Thank you. That made my day, definitely made my day.

L. Becker I’m really excited. I really loved the second part and it definitely leaves you on a cliffhanger, but I enjoyed the Hitchcock references and I was wondering for either of you if there was any particular movie that you wanted to reference in that or what your favorite Hitchcock movie is in general.

J. Roday What do you think, Ally, what’s your favorite Hitchcock?

A. Sheedy What’s my favorite one? What’s the name of the Kim Novak one?

J. Roday Vertigo.

A. Sheedy See, she’s the boss in this and I can’t remember anything anymore. Vertigo, yes, I love Vertigo, absolutely. I didn’t frigging reference anything for that character. I was like, whatever, you know?

J. Roday Yes, you were just Yang-ing it in the cell there.

A. Sheedy Yes, I just, you know, yes.

J. Roday Most of the references were happening outside.

A. Sheedy Yes.

J. Roday I personally am a huge Psycho fan. I have always been a Psycho fan. I’m a horror buff, which is why not only did I get Ally Sheedy in a John Hughes tribute, I got a horror film tribute in the same Oscar telecast and I don’t think it gets better than it did last night for me. I just think Hitchcock sort of revolutionized the idea of the chiller twist that horror films kind of attempted to be predicated on since Psycho came out. That is the original jaw dropping twist that sort of set everything else in motion. I love that movie, and Anthony Perkins is fantastic in it and it’s shot amazingly and yes, that would be my number one.

Isis Hernandez with USA Fan’s Character

I. Hernandez Well I super, super loved this episode. I’m a huge Hitchcock fan and I was just counting every Hitchcock reference and I’ve got to go back and see it a third time to keep counting because –

A. Sheedy Oh, that’s great.

I. Hernandez -- it’s fabulous. My first question is for Mr. James Roday. I know that Hitchcock loved to kind of do most of his directing in preproduction in the fact that he kind of knew how he would be directing before the first day of shooting. Did you approach it this way, the same way that Hitchcock approached it?

J. Roday No. Hitchcock, God love him, he’s one of the great masters of all time, but he did used to stick to that whole idea that the entire movie was in his head before he stepped on set for the first day and that never once in his entire career did anything ever change. That’s like the most impossible thing in the world for me to believe if for no other reason than something must have fallen over at some point or exploded or something.

We’re a TV show on a seven day schedule so it’s like you want to make people laugh, come in with a plan. Ha, ha that’s very funny. You learn very quickly that if you can get two or three or maybe four of the things right or at least close to what you had in your head over the course of a seven day shoot then you’ve succeeded. That’s a lot to be happy about. The same goes for this episode. I sort of chose my battles and I picked the things that I really, really, really wanted to look like the way that they were storyboarded or the way that they were conceived and everything else you’re just rolling with the punches and collaborating like crazy and hoping that other people will step up and make you look good because you simply haven’t had time to think about some stuff as much as others.

For this episode the Hitchcock stuff was obviously very important. We wanted to service that as best as we could and it was a lot. It was a very ambitious episode. Andy and I had sort of looked at each other several times and we were like, gosh, why did we think we could do this? It’s a game and you’ve kind of got to be ready for anything at any time and that’s the fun of it also.

I. Hernandez Awesome. Now my follow up question for Miss Sheedy, this is amazing

that I even get to ask you a question, this is my life work.

A. Sheedy Oh, listen to that. It’s not that amazing.

I. Hernandez Tell me about the conversation, somebody had to have come to you and said, hey, do you want to play a serial killer? I mean, who gets to play a serial killer for fun.

A. Sheedy Right? Exactly. That was my reaction. No. I heard okay, so there is a show called Psych and they want you to do a character called Mr. Yang, and could you take a look at the script? I read it. I didn’t know how on earth anybody had me in mind for that part either, not a clue. But as soon as I read it, I thought, okay. This is going to be really, really, really fun so absolutely and jump in. That’s how it went.

I. Hernandez And you were creepy good in it, creepy good.

A. Sheedy Thank you. It was fun.

I. Hernandez Thanks.

Troy Rogers with DeadBolt.com

T. Rogers James, since the show likes to reference the 80s so much, what was it like for you working opposite Ally?

J. Roday It kind of goes back to that last question, I’ve been a huge Ally Sheedy fan for a long time and she’s been on our board of people that absolutely must come on the show since the very beginning. It’s surreal. It really is. You grow up and you have dreams of doing this for a living and you have people that inspired you and then you get lucky enough to do it and one day you’re sitting across from them and it’s crazy, but it’s also – it’s unbelievable. All you can do is – you just kind of want to capture these moments in little time capsules because –

A. Sheedy It’s so cool. James, what’s really funny is when we were sitting in the car for the first scene in the first episode, I was sitting there and was just okay, ready, jump off the cliff here and just do my thing; but I was also thinking please let me do a good job for him. You don’t know what goes on, on the other side, too. It’s like both of us, you know?

J. Roday Yes, I haven’t been nervous many times on our show, I have to be honest, but I had the butterflies going with Ally.

A. Sheedy Aw, you know, I did not know. Cool.

T. Rogers Ally, what’s the best part about playing Mr. Yang?

A. Sheedy Everything. Everything about Mr. Yang is fun for me, everything. When I read this one and – I wish somebody could read what I read for the first one. Mr. Yang is on a bungee cord like banging off walls. You know what I mean? I read that and then I gave it to my kid to read and I said, “I don’t have a clue how they’re going to do this.” She thought it was just hilarious. I also said to Rebecca, “I’ve done a lot of stuff in my career as you know, my darling girl, but I have never been on a bungee cord.”

T. Rogers Great.

J. Roday Ally was a very, very good sport.

A. Sheedy It was fun. It was really fun. It was craziness.

Sammi Turano with TV Grape Vine

S. Turano My first question is, Ally, how did you prepare for this role for Mr. Yang?

A. Sheedy I just told myself not to get – just to not plan anything ahead of time. It was so funny and wacky so I decided to completely dispense with the creepy dark, very serious and brooding serial killer thing and just like I thought the whole thing was hysterically funny. I thought that whole monologue in the car in the first one was hysterically funny. So I decided I was going to do that and if somebody thinks it should be not funny then they’ll come and tell me.

S. Turano Oh you were fantastic, though. You had me on the edge of my seat.

A. Sheedy Oh good. Thanks. It was really, really fun.

S. Turano James, what was it like doing a more dramatic episode of Psych. Usually you guys are more comedic and funny. What was it like doing such a dramatic episode?

J. Roday We as the cast dig those. We don’t get to do them very often. As much as we love our show and as lucky as we are to do it and still be doing it, any time we can mix things up it’s fun for us because we get to work different muscles and even if it’s just for a week it’s fun to mix things up. Once or twice a year we know that we’ll have these episodes coming up and everybody gets pumped and everybody gets a little extra sleep. We don’t go out as much and we recognize it as an opportunity to do something that we don’t always get to do.

Lena Lamoray with Lena Lamoray.com

L. Lamoray James, how do you think the fans are going to react to the finale and some of the choices that were made by the characters?

J. Roday How are they going to react – I’m sorry to what is the second part there?

L. Lamoray To the finale and some of the choices that were made by the characters?

J. Roday I hope they dig it. There is not a lot of build up to it and I think our publicity guys have done a really good j ob of sort of getting everybody’s anticipation up and like I said I think we’ll get away with it partially because it’s a finale and everybody gets a few months off to sort of process and water cooler talk and you don’t have to sort of adjust yourself to come right back next week and watch us save a sea mammal of some sort.

I think the fact that it’s the end of the season buys us a little bit of latitude and the fact that it’s a little darker and a little scarier and the stakes are pretty high is fun I hope for fans. It’s a nice sort of curve ball that we don’t throw very often. Also, I think it’s a treat to watch good actors doing good work on a show that you’re a fan of. I think that’s what Ally and Jimmi and the rest of the cast sort of delivered in spades in this episode. They certainly all made me look good.

L. Lamoray Ally, can you share with us any funny stories about your time on the set of Psych?

A. Sheedy Oh my gosh, do you have like all day? It was the whole thing was really funny, but I have to say it’s very difficult to work with Jimmi and not break because he is so friggin’ funny. I just basically decided if I started laughing it actually would work and as soon as I did that then it wasn’t difficult. Do you know what I mean? I wasn’t thinking like, don’t laugh because it’s impossible. Besides I think I would find him funny.

On this one there was an entire contraption set up which was a metal cord that was pulling me backwards so a certain part of the scene was just about the cord for me because I just didn’t know when I was going to get pulled backwards, which kind of made it work even better.

J. Roday Yes, you did.

A. Sheedy What?

A. Sheedy I didn’t know when it was going to go back.

J. Roday Yes, that played every time.

A. Sheedy Yes, I didn’t. That was completely human response. The guys were behind the wall and they were going to pull it like when they felt like it was the right time so I never knew when it was going to happen.

Martin Sternberg with Small Screen Scoop

M. Sternberg Not much. This question is for James actually. In this episode you’re acting and directing. I was just wondering what’s the biggest challenge for you for doing both at the same time in a scene?

J. Roday The acting part is more challenging because I just don’t want to think about it. I think I might have gotten marginally better from my first time out when I wasn’t thinking about it at all and my set of eyes on the set, Andy Berman, had to keep running up to me going everything is great except for you. You need to go again.

This time I think I was a little more aware of it, but truthfully there are so many things that you’re sort of in charge of and there are so many questions that you have to answer after any given take from the director’s perspective that that’s kind of all you’re thinking about, at least me anyway. I’m just lucky that on the acting side I’m playing a character that I’ve played for many, many years, that certainly helps. Staying in the moment as an actor is definitely the biggest challenge while you’re directing.

Mike Spring with DVD Snapshots

M. Spring James, my question is for you first. I was pretty surprised when I was watching the movie Gamer and you and Maggie Lawson popped up together on screen. How did that come about?

J. Roday Oh man. We’re buddies with the filmmakers. I’ve known Mark and Brian for a while and they just called and said, “Hey do you guys want to come to New Mexico for a day and do some silly stuff?” We were on our way across country to visit Maggie’s family anyway so we just made a quick pit stop and did that silly stuff.

M. Spring Was the mustache your idea or theirs?

J. Roday The mustache is always my idea, man. Any time I can exploit that thing I do because it’s serious and it’s real.

M. Spring Ally, was it tough when you first played the character to come into the show with this really tight knit ensemble cast or did they make you feel welcome from the get-go?

A. Sheedy They made me feel welcome and it was not difficult because this is just a whacked character. You could drop this character anywhere and I don’t think that she particularly pays any attention to what’s going on around her. She lives inside this crazy ass mind. I felt really welcome and I didn’t feel like an intruder at all. I felt like the killer has shown up.

J. Roday We were ready to cater to Ally’s every whim and need the first time she came. She was shooting in the middle of a rain storm in a drive-in movie theater and the trailers were way far away and she showed up and was just like, “I’m not going back. I’m not going back to the trailer.”

A. Sheedy No, no. No way, it was fun there. How surreal was that? We were in a drive-in movie theater in the middle of the night with that crazy man who was worried about his car, you know the entire time. I just thought this is just nuts.

J. Roday She was awesome. We just all got to hang out with Ally Sheedy for a night. That’s pretty much how it worked out.

A. Sheedy You’re so funny.

M. Spring Great, thank you.

A. Sheedy So funny.

Moderator The next question –

A. Sheedy James, that guy was obsessed with the belt buckle, the whole night that he was going to get a scratch on that car. I felt like, so don’t give your car to a movie set.

J. Roday Exactly. Why, was he there?

A. Sheedy He didn’t want a scratch on his car. It was like, he had to have read the script like you get thrown on the car and it’s – he kept coming up to me and he was like, “Don’t scratch the car.”

J. Roday Dude, are you kidding? I’m a serial killer. Why do think you even think you can reach me right now.

A. Sheedy Huh?

J. Roday Why do think you can reach me right now, I’m a serial killer. I don’t even understand what you’re saying to me.

A. Sheedy Oh my God. Oh my God, yes –

That's it. Do not miss the season finale tonight!

Are You Screening?

© 2010, Are You Screening?. All rights reserved. Reprinting without express permission of the author is prohibited.

Show