Why ‘Justified’ and ‘Kingdom’ are Two of Jonathan Tucker's Favorite Roles

Jonathan Tucker came to the show to promote a series about a man holding a radio station hostage. Within about ninety seconds, he was holding Rich's radio show hostage with Boston sports.

The series is American Hostage, airing Sundays on MGM Plus, with Jon Hamm and Giovanni Ribisi alongside Tucker. It's based on a true story from 1977, when Ribisi's character, Tony Kiritsis, takes someone hostage and demands to be interviewed live on a popular radio station.

Rich explained the premise from a broadcaster's chair. The show has a dump button. Not every station did back then. "So, if you're interviewing somebody who's holding a gun to somebody's head live, you never know what's about to be broadcast to a whole bunch of people."

"I'm sure you guys could use the dump button for lots of things on this show," Tucker said. Rich confirmed it. They'd needed one in hour one, when Ole Miss head coach Pete Golding dropped an S-bomb.

Tucker had a thesis on the drive in, and it was three stories long. First, the Red Sox and what he called an extraordinary, maybe historic comeback. "They lost like 50 of their first 70 games," he said, and now they're in. Rich filled in the details: Boston will be in Yankee Stadium next Tuesday for a best-of-three, just like last year, when the Red Sox didn't get out of it.

Second, a scarier story. The Patriots and Drake Maye. "It's uncertain. I'll just say it's uncertain," Tucker said, which Rich graded as a very good word choice for a team whose first two games had been, in the host's word, not great.

Third, the new era of the Celtics. Rich's answer came with a needle attached. Isn't Jaylen Brown hosting Saturday Night Live this week? Oh, right, he's not on the Celtics anymore. The Knicks won the championship, Brown now plays for the 76ers, and Rich noted Brown will be in Madison Square Garden when the Knicks raise the banner.

Tucker's reaction to the Knicks' title was pure honesty. "It is amazing how unexcited I was. I like just couldn't have cared less." He even turned the lens on himself, admitting that when he hears other people talk passionately about their teams, he thinks they sound ridiculous, and then he talks exactly the same way about his own. He added Bruins head coach Marco Sturm to the list, praising the former longtime Bruin as "a really great team leader."

Rich reminded viewers that Tucker is a friend of the program going way back. There is photographic evidence of Tucker holding a Yankees hat over the toilet in Rich's bathroom.

Back to the show. American Hostage was shot in Winnipeg, a place Tucker called "one of the most underrated places." The reputation is the cold. The reality, he said, is "an A-list crew," great locations, and terrific local actors. They shot during hockey season, and while Tucker never made it to a game, Hamm did, and was "exceptionally supportive of the team."

Tucker had met Hamm a few times before, and his favorite Hamm story came from home. Hamm remembered the name of a woman at Tucker's local pub in Charlestown, the Warren Tavern, because she had been so lovely to him. Tucker called her up and told her to put her husband on the line. "It helps make a marriage more exciting," he said. Rich's take: "Like Cheers. A very different episode of Cheers."

Tucker called Hamm a great leader with no entourage. "It's like the guy's got no publicist or agent with him. He just sits down next to anybody."

Rich had a different angle, because Hamm is in a fantasy league with him. On an eight-hour draft clock, Hamm used all eight hours. He's in last place. When Rich gave him grief on the email chain, Hamm replied, "Sorry, I'm busy making prestige television." As Tucker pointed out, it was this very show.

The set itself was the thing Tucker kept coming back to. "It was one of the kind of like wildest experiences to walk onto this set because it was so immersive 1970s," he said. "For a moment I was like am I in a dream here." Everything worked. Phones, reels, radio gear, all from a collector with an extraordinary stash of 1970s radio equipment. You could press a button and talk into a microphone that carried to another studio on the same set.

The clothes, hair and makeup were real too. Nobody was ripping fake mustaches off anyone's face. "Everything just felt so real," he said. He compared the ensemble to a theater company where everybody knew their place, and called his role "a small part of that." Rich compared the look to a Sidney Lumet movie. Tucker plays a special agent, and the series premiered with two free episodes of an eight-episode run.

Rich also floated the theory every Mad Men fan will appreciate. Hamm plays Fred Heckman in 1977. Don Draper gets out of the ashram, goes into witness protection, and gets a whole new identity. "That's the reveal at the end," Rich suggested. "It's possible," Tucker said. "You got to tune in."

That led to a question about Tucker's own past roles. Which character would he want to revisit? "I would love to go back and do some episodes of Kingdom again."

Rich noted the show was on the cutting edge of combat sports as that world was taking off. For Tucker, it was about freedom. "There's only so many characters that are presented to you as an actor that give you a sort of opportunity to like have as much freedom as I had with that character," he said. "It's like having a great car. It's like a car that can drive anywhere."

His American Hostage character, by contrast, is a car that only drives one place, and that's fun too. But Kingdom offered "the opportunity to like explode at any point, to take your clothes off at any point, to cut weight, to have all these different wild volatile relationships. It was really scary and really thrilling."

Then there was Justified. Tucker played the last bad guy of the final season, and he felt the weight of it. "You feel an extraordinary sense of responsibility to like not screw up," he said, "and then also to do something that makes the fans of the show who have been tuning in for six years feel satisfied."

He took a big risk. He showed up with a Japanese perm and jewelry he bought for the character's hands. At the first rehearsal, Timothy Olyphant looked over at scene partner Kaitlyn Dever and gave a flat "uh-huh." Tucker went back to his trailer thinking it was either Raylan Givens giving him attitude or Olyphant sending him home.

He had reason to worry. Tucker said he'd been fired from a short stint on the show years earlier for making a big choice. So he figured, if it happens again, he'll be fine. It didn't. It was Olyphant playing his character's honest reaction to "a weird dude," and it worked out well.

Walton Goggins, whom Tucker has known for a while and looks up to "as an actor, and as a person," seemed excited to see another version of the combustible character he'd built on the show. Tucker said that's what made Justified work: Olyphant and Goggins, "these two great actors playing kind of against type."

Rich tried one more time to get a rise out of him on the Red Sox. Tucker declined. He grew up when New England teams didn't win, then watched everything take off in the early 2000s. "I don't need to rub anything in," he said. He found common ground with Rich at Michigan instead, where a friend's son wrestles for coach Sean Bormet. "I'm a friend of the program at the University of Michigan."

Before leaving, Tucker revealed he's been acting since he was 11. His first job was a national commercial for Fruit Roll-Ups. He still remembers the smell of that studio, the wood and construction, from 33 years ago. "I smell it and now I'm even more excited to smell it when I walk into stages than I ever have in my whole life. I feel so lucky."

A few years later came Sleepers, where he played a kid in a reform school. The guards included Kevin Bacon and Jeffrey Donovan, whom Tucker just did a play reading with in Boston 30 years later. He also worked with Bacon on City on a Hill, which Rich said should still be on the air, and the two just did another pilot together.

"I'm your Kevin Bacon connect," Tucker offered.

Rich declined the degrees of separation. Tucker is already a friend of the program.