-Our first guest tonight is an Emmy-winning actor you know
from shows such as "The Office,"
"The Practice," and "Boston Legal."
He's currently starring in NBC's "The Blacklist,"
which returns this Friday.
Let's take a look.
-You think this was a mistake?
-You ask a tactical question.
I see only an ethical one.
No.
It was not a mistake, but it was wrong.
-Because of Elizabeth.
-You've pushed her too far.
♪♪
-I wonder.
-Please welcome back to the show and the studio
our friend James Spader.
♪♪
-[ Laughs ]
♪♪
-[ Laughs ]
Welcome back.
These are the protocols.
-How are you, Seth?
-I'm good, James. -Good.
-Thank you so much for making your trip.
-Is there still a cup of water anywhere?
-Yeah, I think we got one over there.
Hopefully.
Did he find it? [ Laughter ]
Yeah, just wander around. [ Laughter ]
Here, I have a bottle of water.
You want that? There you go.
Well, we're off to a pretty normal start.
[ Laughter ]
-Cheers.
-Go ahead, take a seat.
So, James, I feel like this might be a little weird
to be doing this without an audience, but then,
you strike me as someone who would be exactly the same
whether there was an audience or not.
-I was really much more concerned about the cup of water
than I was the lack of audience.
-I don't think anybody will even notice
that you were concerned about the water.
[ Laughter ] -I'm sure they won't.
No, I -- It probably isn't as strange for me as it is
for the audience that isn't here and has no place to go.
I mean, that's the difficulty, I think.
That's the weird part is that they don't have a place to go.
-Yeah, nobody's able to watch anything live right now.
I know you're a lover of live music.
-I am. -Is that something you look
forward to doing when this is over?
-Very much so.
But also, you know, there was a -- I had a real...
It was quite a revelation when I came back to the city.
I had gone north to Massachusetts on March 12th.
I wasn't working on the Friday, March 13th.
We were filming in Brooklyn on the 12th.
And in the afternoon, I called up Leslie and I said,
"You know, we should run up to Massachusetts
because we need to measure those rugs
for the apartment in the storage unit.
And, you know, I've got a few days now.
I don't know when else we're going to be able to do it."
And she said, "Yeah, great idea.
I'll come home and I'll have the car packed, ready to go."
-So you weren't leaving out of fear.
Because I left the same day, and it was more out of fear.
You left for rug-based reasons.
-I left for the weekend. -Yeah.
-And I was actually wearing a watch of mine --
I'm a watch person.
My glasses and my watch come off at the --
last thing at the end of the night
and they're the first thing that go on after showering.
And my watch -- I'm still sticking with
the sort of, you know, mechanical watches.
And so they tell absolutely horrific time.
-[ Laughs ] -But -- Or this one was running
like 10 minutes fast or slow or whatever the hell it was,
and had been for a week.
And so -- And I was just accounting for it every time.
I didn't even bother to, like, change it.
-[ Laughs ] -I just kept --
I wanted to see how bad it would get.
-Sure.
-So I was so frustrated with it, I said, "Oh, screw it.
I'll just take it --" and I shoved it in my bedside table.
I said, "I'll be fine."
The weekend?
I'll look at my phone like, you know,
my elder sons do, you know. -Yeah.
-And we drove up, got up there 12:30 at night.
-Probably 12:40 or 12:20. [ Laughter ]
I mean, the one thing we know right now is it wasn't 12:30.
-Thank you, glass unicorn. [ Laughter ]
Anyway, so the next day the [bleep] hit the fan.
-Mm-hmm. -Everything started closing.
We shut down. Everything was shutting down.
And the renovation
that the rug measurements were for was shut down.
-[ Laughs ] -But all that aside --
and the joking sort of dissipated very quickly,
and it was a revelation.
I was -- you know, I certainly --
So we were up there until October.
And so I had inklings of how things were in the city.
I was seeing a lot of footage and talking to friends.
But when I came back in -- I don't know -- end of September
or beginning of October, something like that,
I just -- it was so upsetting...
-Mm-hmm.
-...to see the --
just to see the city had been crippled in a way.
-Do you feel better about it now?
Do you have more optimism?
-I feel better by -- It's why I'm coming in to do the show
in studio and why -- besides the fact I don't know
how the hell to work the stuff.
-Yeah, we had very low confidence.
-[ Laughs ] -We said, "Can he Zoom?"
I'm like, "He still wears a watch."
[ Laughter ]
-Which he clearly doesn't wind.
Anyway, yeah, I mean, this is all coming back
to the audience being here or not or me going to live music.
I just -- I want to try and -- I regret the fact that I --
I was very happy in Massachusetts.
It was safe.
You know, it was a place to be able to walk outside
and go for a walk and so on, and that was wonderful.
But I felt badly that the city that I love so much
and have loved ever since I became an adult --
it's been my home and even when I have had time away,
it has always felt like my home to me.
It's the first place I chose to go when I left my parents' home.
-Mm-hmm. -And it went through --
it went through such a terrible, terrible, you know,
once-in-a-century crisis in the summer.
And we got to, you know, try and pull it together here.
And it's one of the important reasons for trying to get
our show back up and running
and try and get those people at work.
-I'm glad it's back up and running,
and I want to talk about some of the interesting choices
your show made to confront the ability --
I should say the inability to film.
We're going to be right back with more from James Spader.