Bluff City Law's Stony Blyden claims his quirky law intern character is just like him 'with a little bit of extra spice'
Picking from a multitude of interests in the entertainment industry can be a difficult thing to do, but not for Icelandic actor Stony Blyden, who has dabbled in rapping and singing before he made his big TV debut with NBC's 'Bluff City Law'. The legal drama debuted just three weeks ago and follows an elite Memphis-based law firm headed by Elijah Strait, who is played by the acclaimed TV lawyer, Jimmy Smits. Blyden joins the cast as Emerson, the geeky intern at the law firm, who also happens to be Elijah's illegitimate child from an affair in the past. And in the wake of Elijah recently reconciling with his long-estranged daughter, Sydney (Caitlin McGee), Emerson's little addition to the tale only makes things more complicated for the father-daughter duo. But if you ask Blyden, stepping into Emerson's shoes was as easy a job as any.
"Emerson is entering Elijah and Sydney's relationship at the worst time. They're starting to get back on good terms at the end of the (first) episode and he sort of comes in and just kind of ruins that right off the bat", Blyden told MEA Worldwide exclusively, about his character's significance in the pilot. "He's like a very interesting element to a kind of rocky relationship already. So, not to give too much away, but in the coming episodes, it could be Sydney and him, trying to to be siblings, and trying to figure all that stuff out because she's also figuring out stuff with her dad and now Emerson is kind of this extra package that's been added to that storyline."
As the new intern in the law firm, who is still trying to figure out how to be functional around his big sister, Emerson is quite perceptive. In that, he picks up on the tension between his father and Sydney right from the get-go and tries to avoid her as much as he can. When he does slip up and ends up calling Elijah 'dad' in front of Sydney, in the aftermath, his demeanor changes to that of guilt. He doesn't want to come between the two and offers to even resign if that would help the situation. Luckily, Sydney isn't that cold or unreasonable, and for fans, that means more to come from the whizkid played by Blyden.
"Emerson is a very brilliant kid", Blyden tells us about his character. "He might not be the most social individual in the world, but he's very smart, very loving, and caring. There's a lot that we do have in common, which makes it (playing the role) pretty easy, but I don't have to do that much of a reach when I'm acting being him. When I'm playing a character, I cannot figure out how much of myself is in them, so then I add a little bit on top of that - like bits of characteristics here and there. And that's kind of what I've been doing. You like to travel the world, and you see different people and you get different experiences and you see what people have gone through and that sort of gets stuck in your mind and you often apply that to the characters that you're playing. That kind of what I'm doing. It's just me with a little bit of extra spice to it, if that makes any sense, but he's a great guy to play. It's a lot of fun."
Apart from being a legal drama about hope, bordering on the Biblical David and Goliath situation, where the little good guys triumph over the bigger, bad ones, what also drew Blyden to the show was, "This whole other family tension that's going on at the same time, that felt very beautiful to me. It introduces itself very interestingly into the show so you can watch it even if you necessarily aren't that into legal dramas because there's so much else going on that ties into it. And NBC has been very good at figuring out new ways to do that."
'Bluff city Law' airs on Mondays at 9 pm, only on NBC.