A performer who’s just as comfortable on stage in Shakespeare plays as he is in front of the camera, Castle’s Seamus Dever is preparing himself for a busy summer. Maybe too busy.

Before the craziness really hits, Dever touches on finally playing a nice guy after a veritable cornucopia of TV guest shots as the antithesis of salt-of-the-earth material, as well as his affinity for shows of his childhood and how they compare to Castle.

What Rick Castle and Jonathan Hart Have in Common

AH: Would you consider this a throwback show in some respects, because there’s such a buoyancy to it with the moments of levity and snappy dialogue?

SD: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve always maintained that our show is a lot like the TV that I watched growing up in the ’70s and the ’80s, before everything became very serious with the Law and Orders and the CSIs. There were shows that were allowed to mix genres and people didn’t excoriate them for it. People wanted to laugh at the same time they wanted to be surprised or thrilled or scared. I think there was a lot more leniency for that back in the ‘80s, and those were the shows I grew up watching.

I loved shows like Hart to Hart, shows like Kolchak: The Night Stalker, where there’d be a mystery combined with a crime combined with a lot of comedy. I’ve always maintained that it was a throwback show.

AH: The thing I particularly enjoy every week is how Esposito and Ryan look up to Rick in a way, and how they treat him like one of the guys in the department.

SD: That’s a fun dynamic. Here’s my prediction: Next season, there’s going to be a lot more of that. Every time it’s a scene with just the three of us, we get some great feedback about how hilarious that scene was.

There was a scene where we’re breaking into Demming’s locker. We ended up calling it the Three Stooges scene, not because there was slapstick, but because there was no talking. It was all just about coming in there and physical stuff we were doing and being on a caper together.

Advising Kevin Ryan

AH: We saw an Esposito-themed episode in Season 2. Will we see a similar episode for Kevin Ryan in Season 3?

SD: Yeah, there’s a lot of talk about it. And it will happen. Because we’re all itching to do a little bit more, and I think the show has sort of found its legs now that we can expand beyond that. It’s in the works.

Andrew Marlowe, who is the series creator and one of our executive producers, he has a great mind. He is a good organizer of thoughts as far as creativity. He’s actually sort of rallied all his writers around the idea of choosing one character from the show – and it’s a great idea, because I’ve never heard of a show doing that – basically having an advisor or a guidance counselor where each writer is taking a different character.

I met with my advisor, and we talked about some ideas. And it’s also like getting-to-know-you, what we can do, secret talents that we have that have yet to be exposed that we might be able to exploit on the show.

And it’s getting familiar with past work, because I did nothing but drama before I came to Castle. It seems that a lot of my stuff [on the show] turns towards comedy. Andrew Marlowe maintains an incredulous look when I tell him I used to play nothing but bad guys. And he says, “Really? You’re such a nice guy. Really?” Yeah, I played heroin addicts, I played rapists, I played murderers on all those crime shows. I did nothing but that.

I was like, you’ve seen my past work, right? You’ve seen my reel before you hired me? No, no, we hired you based on your audition. I’m like, Oh my God! [laughs] I used to do all those things. I think things are gonna pick up on some of our ranges. It’s interesting, because we’ve all done a lot of different stuff. Jon did a ton of stuff before this that was very serious, and all of our stuff turns towards comedy with Jon, but it’s nice to expand the palette.

Appearing in King Lear

AH: What play are you currently rehearsing?

SD: I’m doing King Lear right now. I’m playing Edmund, the bastard son of Gloucester. I’m in a company called the Antaeus Company, and we open in June, so I’m in the midst of rehearsals for that.

AH: Is that going to occupy the majority of the summer?

SD: Yeah, it will. I get regular phone calls from theatre directors around town, some of my favorite directors that I’ve ever worked with, who are always calling me about doing a play, and I’ve turned down eight or nine plays in the last two years. It’s been hard, because some of the plays are ones I really wanted to do, and I haven’t been able to do it.

Now, the opportunity came around from the theatre company I belong to – Susan Sullivan’s [Castle’s mom, Martha] actually a member of my theatre company as well, and Arye Gross who plays [M.E. Sidney] Perlmutter on the show, so I’ve known them for a little while – and it’s a good production of King Lear. The two leads have played King Lear. My show double-cast it. They’re amazing.

It was one of those things I couldn’t pass up, even though I’m in the midst of remodeling a house. My wife is gonna kill me because I’ve volunteered to tile and put in floors and things like that. And I’m also going to be rehearsing a show and doing it at the same time as Castle comes back in July [for shooting], but that’s just until the middle of August.

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This season will be remembered for how Castle found its groove, with Nathan Fillion as the always-engaging mystery writer Rick Castle and Stana Katic as his detective muse, Kate Beckett. But it’s not just these two will-they-or-won’t-they crimefighters who make the show work.

Veteran theater actor Seamus Dever is just as genial as his character on the show, Det. Kevin Ryan. In an interview just after the second-season finale, Dever assesses the immediate (and a tad hostile) reaction to Castle and Beckett going their separate ways, and lays out the ingredients that make Castle a satisfying Monday night recipe.

Will Castle and Beckett Be an Item?

AH: People were hostile? Why would that be?

SD: Well, a lot of people I think really thought they were going to get together. I thought the writers did a nice job of balancing it. You know, I think they’ll eventually get together, but I think at this point they’re trying to suss out if they can have a good working relationship as well as a personal relationship. And they keep missing each other along those lines. They were being adult about it and moving on.

A lot of people are mad at Castle, which is hilarious to me. That they choose to be upset at Castle, as if he was the one who did her wrong! It’s sort of funny. I thought it was a great way to do it, because it was a very adult, realistic way.

AH: So are you a proponent of them getting together?

SD: Oh, I don’t know! I guess so. I don’t know how that would work. It’s sort of funny, because it’s like personally they’ve always been hostile to each other that I can’t even see what that would be like. I can’t even see her being sort of nice to him. I don’t know if that would ever happen. It would be interesting.

My wife is a big proponent of it. She says no, that would be neat. They’re a crime-fighting couple, they’re very much like that Thin Man series, where they’re in a relationship but they solve crimes together and they feed off each other personally and professionally. I can see it happening. I think that the show would be a little different though if that were to happen. But who knows. I’m sure it will at some point!

Looking Back at Season 2, Looking Ahead to Season 3

AH: Thankfully we have another season to figure out what happens from here. Obviously a lot of shows have been put on the chopping block lately. What’s the best thing about being renewed for another season?

SD: The best thing is that we have time off to plan and we have time off to rest. There’s not a fear that I have to find a new job now. So we all have some time off to rest up, because it was a long season. We had 24 episodes.

A lot of shows they have little breaks they’ll go on, like a mini-hiatus for a week or something like that. Our show never had that, because we had always been trying to catch up. We had a very long season. I know it’s especially grueling for Nathan and Stana, because they’re there every day. A lot of the episodes I was there every day.

A lot of stuff happened. We all bought houses, so we were trying to negotiate those things at the same time as we were shooting. I had to put my dog down at the beginning of the season. That was really tough. I had to do it at a lunch break, actually, back in Episode 1 of Season 2. It was so hard.

I broke my ankle back in January [laughs a bit], so a lot of stuff happened to me. People constantly getting sick, and then getting better, getting other people sick, and all those things. But the best thing about it is being able to rest and plan ahead a little bit more. Whereas last season we didn’t know we were coming back, so we couldn’t plan ahead as much. So it’s nice to have that cushion.

AH: From looking at the ratings week to week, the show has really picked up momentum in Season 2 and the audience is growing. What do you think changed from Season 1 to Season 2 as far as more people tuning in?

SD: Well, I think people wrote our show off in the beginning as a copy of a lot of other shows. Maybe that’s why they didn’t tune in necessarily, because they thought we were another Bones. I can see that, but I think people started tuning in, and the ratings from week to week – the fact that we were getting higher ratings for our reruns than almost any scripted show on ABC, in fact – it really showed we were getting new audience members.

What was the change? I don’t know. I think the writing really blossomed this season. Things started developing a bit more, and our writers were given a little bit more freedom. In the beginning, Rob Bowman was talking about this, one of our executive producers. He was talking about how, in the beginning, we were locked into a genre. We were a crime genre.

And then we started expanding a little bit more with things like our Halloween episode, where there was a bit of mystery in there of a supernatural sort. It wasn’t just someone shot someone. There might be some supernatural spirit at work, or maybe a vampire, or maybe the Wolf Man did it, you know?

Someone called our show a mysteramedy, like a mystery-drama-comedy all wrapped up in one. There’s not many shows that can do that. I think that’s what started happening with Castle this season. It’s very interesting to watch.

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