Sirens sounds like a good career move
Having launched her acting career with dramatic roles on Home and Away, Packed to the Rafters and more recently The Time of Our Lives, Jessica McNamee had little idea what to expect when she landed a plum role on the highly anticipated US comedy series Sirens.
And with American comedy king Denis Leary at the helm, it wasn't just any run-of- the-mill comedy show.
"A lot of the feedback we were getting is that it's nothing like people have seen before," McNamee explains by phone from Los Angeles.
"I find it tough myself to even describe the show to people but it certainly does have a Scrubs feel to it. It's very Denis Leary.
"He's very hands-on; he was there every day of shooting. He's very good at dealing with actors and he's just a really fun energy to be around."
Working with Leary has been a huge learning curve for the Sydney-born actress who admits, at first, she felt out of her comfort zone.
"It was a crash course in learning comedy as well, and there is a lot of improv involved, which is nothing I've ever done on shows back home," she says. "But I kind of figured it out, it's been a blast, and it's been a learning curve but certainly working on comedy is so much fun, there are so many times where we crack up laughing when we shouldn't be laughing.
"That's one thing I had to learn, to be able to stop laughing."
Debuting on Aussie screens almost a year after it premiered in the US, Sirens - adapted from the UK series of the same name - has had critics and fans raving about its "delightfully crass" humour and is in its second season in the US.
Filmed in Chicago, the series centres on the trials and tribulations of three Chicago paramedics, Johnny (Michael Mosley), Hank (Kevin Daniels) and Brian (Kevin Bigley), who regularly cross paths with Johnny's on/off police officer girlfriend, Theresa Kelly (McNamee).
To get a grasp of the day in the life of a cop, McNamee joined two local officers as they patrolled Chicago's busy city streets.
"I sat in the back of a cop car and basically just spent the day with these two awesome guys who have been cops in Chicago for 20 years," she says. "Meeting these guys and hearing their stories, a lot of their dealings on a day-to-day basis is helping the homeless and panhandlers on the street and they actually have a really lovely relationship with a lot of these people."
