With Trial & Error , Nicholas D'Agosto makes his strongest case
Your introduction to Nicholas D’Agosto could have come from any number of sources: Two-faced Harvey Dent on Gotham, perhaps; Dr. Haas on Masters of Sex, probably; Claire’s boyfriend on Heroes, if you think back far enough; or, why not, the protagonist prognosticator on Final Destination 5. On paper, all that looks great — meaty, memorable roles throughout the past 16 years to elevate him to “That Guy” adulation — but it’s D’Agosto himself who would also gleefully remind you of the projects that didn’t quite make it onto the IMDb. Exciting, promising things with names like Eden and Orpheus and How I Met Your Dad.
“I think I’ve done eight failed pilots? Nine? And after a while, you really begin to understand what it’s like to be in a pilot that’s not working, but I’ve not had many experiences being on a pilot that was working, so this is my first time ever being a part of something that felt like it’s worked the whole way through,” says D’Agosto, referring to his successful new gig as an amateur litigator in NBC’s mockumentary Trial & Error, a nascent sitcom gem on the network’s Tuesday night schedule. “I’ve had very few projects in my career that I would say are charmed, but this was a charmed experience from the beginning,” he continues. “In fact, I’m still hesitant to believe it.”
That cautious optimism and history of humility is a large reason why D’Agosto meshes so well with his character on Jeff Astrof and Matthew Miller’s genius mock-doc. He plays a slick (or, slick-adjacent) city lawyer named Josh Segal who’s sent southward to crack his very first murder case in one-horse East Peck, South Carolina, a lazy time-warped town that makes Parks and Recreation look like The Jetsons. To say D’Agosto simply identifies with Josh would underserve the magnitude of the connection the actor says he felt towards the role, as it first arrived in his hands like all the others — in 12-point Courier.
“I’ve probably only had this happen on maybe two or three roles before, but sometimes a part comes across your plate and you just know when it’s yours,” says the 36-year-old. “From the minute that I read it, I knew all of this guy’s strengths and I knew all of his insecurities. There’s just something I really get about Josh internally. So I’m really thankful that that impulse was right.” (To that point, Astrof corroborates: “Nick is a unicorn. He’s passionate and funny, but if you think of all the character traits of Nick, his earnestness is the first thing to come to mind. He’s hilarious just because he’s so nice. This really is his perfect role.”)
Part of D’Agosto’s intense instant connection to the series, which gingerly celebrates a certain kind of parochial innocence, is that the actor grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, where he was nurtured in comedy by Steve Martin and The Kids in the Hall and in humanity by a “very pure” Catholic upbringing. “My parents are generous and hard-working people who have a genuine belief that they make a difference in the world — and they really do — and so my siblings and I were raised with that same feeling, which I think is the core of everything Josh does,” says the middle child of a “very chatty, very funny” five. “If Trial & Error is working, it’s because the audience trusts in that aspect of Josh, despite the fact that he’s running into failure at every turn, and that’s one of the gifts my parents gave me: A sort of genuine faith that, ‘We’re down nine to nothing in a game to 10, but damn it, we could score 10 in a row.'”
Optimism aside, the best comedy writers will tell you that failure is funny, and D’Agosto’s unlucky Josh is subject to scores of comically charmed set-backs that offer real character-defining opportunities for the actor. “One of the greatest things about this format is that you get 15 to 20 takes, which allows me to take lots of weird chances, and thankfully the editors are so good at sculpting the performance,” he says of Josh’s endless exasperation. If you’re keeping score via mockumentary measures, Josh is more Leslie Knope than Michael Scott, to be sure, but his constant ire is deeply informed by the eccentricities of the members of his defense team: Multimorbid assistant Anne (Sherri Shepherd), jubilantly unpolished investigator Dwayne (Steven Boyer), and the wholesome murder suspect himself, poetry professor Larry Henderson (played with delirious ditz by John Lithgow).
“The most fun person to watch crack is John, who’s undoubtedly the most fun because he’s just so comfortable in his own skin at this point,” D’Agosto says. “They give him the most absurd lines to say seriously, so the real delight is watching him say it all with a straight face, and inevitably there are so many moments when the whole room just can’t get past it. Nobody can stop laughing. I think the show is so funny because if you do break, it’s not because you’re chickening out on the scene, but because genuinely what you’re doing is so right.”
Between the laughter, D’Agosto miraculously maintained his sense of humor even with a rocky surprise during production in November: The baby he and his wife had been expecting arrived six weeks early and spent weeks in neonatal intensive care while D’Agosto was still filming the back half of the season. “It was a pretty big shock and actually really rough to balance in the middle of shooting,” he recalls. “But he’s doing great now, and my wife, who’s a food photographer, is working quite a bit now that she’s back on her feet, and so I get to stay home and write and read and rest and raise this little baby boy. It’s wonderful.”
D’Agosto’s hope is that Trial & Error — which airs back-to-back on Tuesdays and will conclude its brief run on April 18 — manages to seize upon that same curious nationwide interest in true-crime which was memorably captured by Serial and Making a Murderer (which, if you can believe it, hit the zeitgeist long after Astrof and Miller first conceived the show). But, eschewing the nerves of running an entire season in one make-or-break month, D’Agosto isn’t sweating the verdict either way. “This working experience was truly singular and such a great joy, and I’m happy that the show is doing well, but what I’ve learned more than anything is to be thankful for just the work alone,” he concedes. “It’s a certain perspective that unfortunately comes from disappointments and losses, but I think it’s a healthy perspective, and one where you don’t worry as much about the result as much as you relish every day of the work. That’s where I’ve learned to put my focus now.” Through Trial & Error, a solution.