Driving home from a morning of shooting, Zachary Levi – star of NBC’s romance-comedy-drama-aspirational nerd hit Chuck – sounds like the happiest guy on the planet.
Levi, for instance, has a golf card for negotiating the expanse of the Warner Bros. Studio lot. “Everybody’s got their own golf card, and i was like, ‘I’m not going to be the only one without one’“, says Levi, who won the role after his part on a sitcom called Less Than Perfect ended with the show’s cancellation. “The finances were kind of coming to an end, and I was like, I have a lot of bills to pay, and I’m going to run through my money,” he says. “A, I needed a job; B, I needed a paycheck; and C, I’m an actor, and I wanted to do good work.”
Along came Chuck – bringing with it the promise of a better life not just for Levi but for the millions of World of Warcraft-playing guys who wouldn’t entirely mind if they were suddenly drafted into action by the CIA – or provided with the opportunity to flight evil alongside Yvonne Strahovski’s Sarah, one of a recent wave of assassin-defying female TV characters. “I can do a one-handed cartwheel now,” says Strahovski, who promises “double the romance, double the funniness” in the new season. “There’s a sense of wanting to make it bigger and better.” This – and the promise of, at last, a new work uniform for Sarah – should please her fan base endlessly. “I do get some interesting mail from people who are quite complimentary,” she says. “It’s different, but I guess it comes with the job“.
Nylon Magazine, 2008