Similar to Sheila Carrasco, I’ve been lucky enough to have many lovely short group conversations involving Utkarsh Ambudkar, but I’ve been itching for a longer one-on-one sit-down with the Ghosts star to discuss his journey in film and television, and it finally happened with the conclusion of the hit CBS show’s fourth season.
Ambudkar’s Jay has been through a lot since Ghosts kicked off in October 2021. He learned his wife (Rose McIver) could see ghosts and powered through countless ghost-sparked shenanigans with Sam serving as the intermediary until he finally got the chance to see them for himself courtesy of an exorcism hiccup. On top of that, Jay’s also hit a number of key personal milestones. He opened a B&B with Sam, took a significant step forward with his father (Bernard White), and opened his dream restaurant. Trouble is, Jay also inadvertently signs a deal with the devil at the end of Season 4, a deal that will likely have Elias (Matt Walsh) out to kill him in Ghosts’ fifth season.
There’s much to love about Ghosts, but one of the show’s greatest achievements is finding the ideal lead ensemble. Not only does every ghost actor play their role to perfection, but the show is expertly anchored by its living leads – Rose McIver and Utkarsh Ambudkar. In fact, the duo are so successful at making Sam and Jay so uniquely their own, it came as a shock when Ambudkar revealed that, initially, he passed on the project.
We Have Rose McIver to Thank for Utkarsh Ambudkar Being in ‘Ghosts’
“She lovingly badgered me to take that role.”
Lucky for Ambudkar, McIver wasn’t going to take no for an answer. He continued:
“Every two weeks, three weeks, month, multiple times, Rose would hit me up, ‘Dude, you gotta do it. Bro, where are you? You gotta do it.’ And in the meantime, I saw her performance in a show called Woke with Lamorne Morris, a dear friend of ours, and she’s so good on that show. She’s so effortlessly charming that woman. I’ve worked with her now for four years. I see it every day. I still am in awe of it, but I was blown away the first time I saw her work. And so finally, pandemic, pandemic, pandemic, COVID, COVID, COVID, and I’m like, ‘I think I blew it on Ghosts. I think we should go back and ask them for another chance.’ And so we did, and this is months later, and they hadn’t cast it yet. Well, the story I’m saying is they hadn’t cast it yet. Let’s just keep it at that. Rose and I did a quick chemistry read for the big wigs, and the rest is history. But she lovingly badgered me to take that role. She was not gonna take no for an answer.”
Jay Was Almost a Very Different Character
“Sam, as Rose plays her, has turned Jay into much more of a dreamer.”
Not only do we have McIver to thank for ultimately convincing Ambudkar to take his role, but we also partially have her to thank for who Jay’s become. The love, warmth and sincerity Sam and Jay share and the purity with which they go after their goals is a mighty powerful anchor for the series. But, as Ambudkar described it, he only found those qualities in Jay by sharing the character with McIver. Initially, Ambudkar pictured Jay quite differently.
“I thought Jay was going to be a lot more sarcastic and a lot more sardonic, more cynical, dry, which I think he is to a certain degree, but Sam, as Rose plays her, has turned Jay into much more of a dreamer. He’s way more unconditionally loving. He’s a lot more curious and silly. There’s a certain Joey Tribbiani aspect to him where he can get really giddy, which I did not see happening. He’s a lot lighter than I thought he would be. I thought a lot of the humor from Jay would come from dead pan, and it’s almost the opposite. He’s a very animated guy.”
He continued, “For her, she’s the story engine. First couple of seasons, she needs to know where everyone is at all times.” For McIver, “at all times” means two versions of nearly every scene. After completing a scene with the actors playing the ghosts, she needs to complete a “ghostless pass,” where she still needs to know where everyone is even though they’re no longer physically on set. Ambudkar noted, “She is constantly aware of where we are in the script, and that is a lot of work mentally.”
While Ambudkar’s Jay can’t see the ghosts in those “ghostless” takes, they still demand a keen attention to detail. He explained, “My work is very time consuming as well, and can be quite tedious.” When McIver’s Sam is talking to the ghosts, Jay is often busying himself with other things and that means Ambudkar has to be extremely aware of continuity in a scene.
“I’ll unscrew this, do that, then I’ll reach for my phone, so everything is hyper-technical physically for me, which is the hardest part. So, if I’m cooking and somebody misses a line and we have to reset, that means I have to reset eight things before I can start again, which I can imagine could be very tedious, if you’re like, ‘I just want to do my line before I forget it.’ I’m like, ‘I know dude, but I’m making pasta. I don’t know what to tell you. It is what it is.’ We are managing a lot of different things together, so finding the common ground took a little while.”
Not only did they find the common ground in that respect, but throughout the show’s first four seasons, Ambudkar stressed his enthusiasm for seeing McIver embrace her abilities as a natural improviser. He began, “I love to improvise, and Rose is very script-driven. That’s not true anymore though. She has a lot of fun. She’s a very, I think, natural improviser. She’s really funny, especially in Season 4.”
In an ensemble packed with comedy aces, Ambudkar revealed that it’s McIver who’s become the one who makes him break the most. He continued:
“I love that she feels comfortable enough to mess with me now. We’re on my coverage, she’s not even on camera, and she’s trying to break me. And for me, I’m like, that’s awesome. You feel happy enough and joyful enough in your expression that you’re trying to mess me up lovingly. I love those kinds of games. And now I know too, when I’m planning something that is gonna go off, I won’t tell anyone else, but I’ll always tell Rose. I’ll go, ‘I’m gonna do this when I do that, okay? Don’t tell anyone.’ And she’ll go, ‘Okay, mate. Okay.’ I’ll be like, ‘Right after this, I’m gonna do that, so just give me some space.'”
The Episode Utkarsh Ambudkar Really Had to Talk Through with Rose McIver
“I really did not like shooting that.”
Yet another thing Ghosts has excelled with since day one? Infusing its laugh-out-loud comedy with grounded human truths and heart, and a big test in that department in Season 4 came in the form of Ben Feldman’s Kyle, another living with the ability to see ghosts.
Finding self-worth in a house where Jay can’t see or directly interact with the majority of the residents has always been a challenge for the character, so when his wife meets someone else who can and strikes up a connection with him that Jay simply cannot have, it’s a mighty complex situation. And, it turns out, it was also a challenging storyline for Ambudkar to wrap his head around. He explained:
“Personally, I really did not like shooting that. It didn’t feel very good. There’s only one cuck in the house and it’s Pete, so I was like, what am I doing here? In no world would I allow this to go unchecked. And also, you feel bad because Jay goes about it the wrong way. It’s so dishonorable to go sneaking around and stalking. I know Bela had some part to play in that, but Rose and I talked a lot about that. Like, what does it mean? Trust has been broken. If Sam hadn’t, at the last second, made a different choice, that could have been really bad for the couple. Jay had no part of that, right? There’s no agency. It’s essentially like, ‘Okay, so you either were gonna cheat or you weren’t,’ and I still had no part of it because I can’t be connected to it. So I think there’s a lot of self-worth stuff there. We’re a comedy, it’s not The Bear, so we are trying to tread lightly around it.”
Looking ahead, Ambudkar sees a scenario where this particular experience could tie into why Jay signed that contract with Elias. “I think that that will lead into, if there’s an avenue into this whole idea of why he signed with a publicist, why he’s trying to get the restaurant going, why he inadvertently sold his soul to the devil.”
