Is there life after “Jury Duty”?
Mekki Leeper stars in "St. Denis Medical," a new NBC series.
For Emmy-nominated writer and performer Mekki Leeper, there is.
The 30-year-old plays a freshly minted nurse in “St. Denis Medical,” a fall comedy that looks at the struggles health care workers face.
Shot in a mockumentary style, the series — which also stars David Alan Grier and Wendy McLendon Covey — covers all aspects of the business, from administration to support staff. St. Denis has more than its share of its problems and, on his first day of work, Leeper’s character isn’t solving many of them.
“Matt has a hunger to learn,” Leeper says. “At first glance you might just think he’s comic fodder, that he’s like the dumb guy, but he’s not. He wants to be a nurse and he wants to grow. That’s what’s so admirable about the character — and it’s a little scary. It’s given me tremendous respect for all healthcare workers every day.”
Mekki Leeper plays Matt, a nurse on his first day of duty at St. Denis Medical.
Before “St. Denis” landed on his resume, Leeper was a writer and performer on “Jury Duty,” the Amazon series that took a similar approach to serving on a jury. The difference? One member of the jury was not an actor and had no idea what was transpiring. The surprise element made a star out of Ronald Gladden, a solar contractor from San Diego, who bought into the courtroom shenanigans.
Leeper played a fellow juror, Noah Price, a rideshare driver who’s upset he’s missing his vacation because he’s on jury duty.
Inside view
Mekki Leeper stars in "St. Denis Medical," a new NBC series.
Because Leeper was also a writer on the series, he could inform producers about conversations in the courtroom. His character asked Ronald if he had any suggestions to get out of jury duty and he said, “Peter Griffin from ‘Family Guy’ tells you to sound racist.”
Leeper shared the aside and said they should use it.
“If I hadn’t been a writer, I might not have felt as empowered,” he says. “That speaks to the that show — they gave the actors a lot of agency to do something.”
The Emmy-nominated “Jury Duty” offered viewers another side of reality television.
“You forget that the cameras are on you,” Leeper says. “There were like 35 hidden cameras on us all the time. With that show, I was just kind of living it.”
Although the entire premise could have been blown if Gladden had discovered the show’s secret, Leeper and the other cast members (including James Marsden playing himself) knew they had to keep it as believable as possible.
“Every morning and every night you were wracked with anxiety that you were going to blow Amazon’s money,” he says.
On the first day, Gladden looked at an encyclopedia in a bookshelf and remarked that it was totally blank inside.
“It was like a heart attack through the whole building,” Leeper says. “He just thought it was a weird blank book and, quickly, (set decorators) replaced it with a real book.”
Early start
At age 12, Leeper started making sketches and posting them on YouTube. Shows like “Jury Duty” and “St. Denis Medical,” he says, “feel like I’m playing around with my friends making a video.”
Because actors don’t know which shots will make it into an episode, “you’ve always got to make sure what you’re doing is worthwhile,” Leeper says.
While “St. Denis” will carry on the tradition that “The Office,” “Parks & Recreation” and other NBC series fostered, the jury’s still out on a second season of “Jury Duty.”
Mekki Leeper stars in "Jury Duty."
“Something in that space can be done again,” Leeper insists. “Sacha Baron Cohen has been doing it for decades. I think it’s a new genre that’s hopefully going to emerge.”
Until that happens, he’s eager to learn more about the nursing business. The set for “St. Denis,” he says, “makes you feel like you’re in a hospital. You totally forget you’re on the Universal lot.”
Once viewers see what Matt’s all about, Leeper hopes they’ll regard him as an asset to the profession.
“I’d like to think if the show works out and anything terrible ever happened to me, (real healthcare workers) would say, ‘You’ve really got to take care of him. He’s that guy from the show,’" he says.
