The Voyagers, Male Model, these have been the primary places for viewers to see Jon-Erik Hexum until now. The tall, handsome, blue-eyed blond stars with Jennifer O'Neill in the new CBS-TV series Cover-Up. Despite his image as a sex-symbol he is well-prepared to assume the starring role. In the two years since he arrived on the television scene to star in The Voyagers, Jon-Erik's career has grown at an amazing pace.
"Before that I was doing musicals and plays and things in school or community theatre or summer stock," says the actor in his rich, mellifluous voice.
"Ever since I was little I did a lot of theatre and things. I took dancing lessons and singing lessons, piano lessons, violin lessons and baritone horn lessons, all that stuff," he elaborates during our interview in Boston, where he had just taped an appearance on the local WCVB-TV Good Day show. The visit to Boston provided him with the added bonus of seeing his brother, Gunnar, an Emergency Services Instructor at The University of Massachusetts. The Hexum borthers are tall, attractive, charming young men whose direct eye contact and easy warmth make them a delightful duo.
"It's good in one way because you get a real broad background of things, but of course, it's not good in that you don't really concentrate on things," Jon-Erik says of his varied lessons as a child in Tenafly, New Jersey. "At least not until I got to high school and I really did a lot of theatre then and in college and summer stock and never full-time until I got out of college."
At Michigan State Jon-Erik majored in Philosophy and Economics.
"I like philosophy. I was going to unlock the questions of the world: kind of purpose of life and if there's a God or not and all that kind of thing. After four years I didn't really care much more; I got a little fed up with it all," he admits. So much of it's very ambiguous and there's a lot of verbose philosophizing. It was interesting," he comments.
"I just did it because I wanted to do it, I didn't ever plan to make it a career, I mean, you can't really make it a career unless you go to law school. You can use it a lot to just live your life and kind of understand your world, get some analytical skills. I had a good time. And economics I took because I was done early and I didn't really want to leave. I was trying to play football so I just took more economics classes and things like that. I was real interested in that. It was very practical, though most of it was macroeconomics. How to run the Federal Reserve doesn't teach you a whole lot about personal investment, just a little bit," he amends. "I basically studied in school just what I was interested in, not for what I could use it for. I took theatre classes but didn't want to major in theatre...I think it's better to major in literature if you're going to go into theatre, or even philosophy or history. A diverse background helps and it helps nowhere more than in the arts, especially in acting and writing, unless you can go to Juilliard or Yale or Northwestern, then a Theatre major comes in real handy because I think they're more specific and they move along much quicker and you get past the mundane fundamentals. I mean, they're very important, technique and that sort of thing, but you have to get into it before it really becomes useful.
"Certainly the best thing is to go to work, to do lots of plays and to learn while you're performing," says the actor. "It's so much more incumbent upon you to really pay attention. I know when we started doing Voyagers, it really kicked me into gear because I said, 'My God, this goes on national TV!' And you only get one take, two takes, three takes if the camera falls over and the director's always wathching the clock and you've got to get it down right the first time. It's wildly embarrassing and very unsatisfying if it isn't good so you really want to get it right the first time.
"As soon as I got out of school I started doing theatre all the time, going to classes, looking for agents, seeing the casting directors, the producers, the networks, and anybody I could get in to see and then doing small plays at night off-off-Broadway and then some. Anything."
Jon-Erik studied in New York with Williard Young, Mervyn Nelson, Uta Hagen and attended some of Sandy Meisner's seminars. He was only in New York for eight months before moving to California, the base of his manager, Bob Le Mond. He was in Los Angeles only four months before starting Voyagers.
"It happened really quick. I was real fortunate with that. I had been doing a few plays. I was Johnny Brown in The Unsinkable Molly Brown, the Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance and Billy Bigelow in Carousel." He was seen in these shows by people from the networks. "I got jobs basically from that, development deals at first and I didn't take those. They're so ambiguous," he says of development deals. "You sign-up and maybe they find something, maybe they don't and if they do find something you get three choices and you've got to take one of them. It really cuts down on your choice." He was going to take one but was advised not to. Jon-Erik was offered soaps and replacements in Broadway shows but still he waited. And then Voyagers came along. According to Jon-Erik his manager had a sense of what the networks might offer and advised Jon-Erik to wait and spend his time going to class and doing plays. Bob Le Mond's managerial expertise paid off.
Jon-Erik studies in L.A. with Peggy Feury, Joan Darling, Jeff Corey and Candy Hurst.
His background in school has stood him in good stead. It has broadened his scope. In college he played football and worked at the readio station among other things, experiences he can draw upon for his acting roles.
When asked who influenced his life the most, he says he has no theatre idols but ask who influenced him other than theatre people and his answer is: "Probably my mother -- a lot. I kind of did what I wanted when I was growing up and my mother always kind of helped me do whatever I wanted. It was a real kind of open atmosphere." The men he and Gunnar have become are a credit to their mother.
Jon-Erik has always enjoyed acting and that led him to his career.
"I just think you should do what you want in life that you enjoy the very most and I never had more fun than when we were doing plays." He also enjoyed going to see plays when he was little: "I used to love to go and see things."
He enjoyed the closeness of the people he worked with on productions in high school and summer stock, that special cameraderie that would develop while working on a play. He doesn't find it quite the same at his current level.
"This is kind of big business now and it's not quite the same. It's not as pure. It's not as close to the people you work with. You have contracts and you have contract squabbles. When we were doing Voyagers I was the only adult on the show and the kid only worked three hours a day because of child labor laws: he'd go to class three hours, an hour of recreation and an hour lunch, eight hours and that left three hours to work. He'd be gone by eleven in the morning. He'd still be there but he was in class or something and so we had the guest people come in and I'd meet people for four days." Each guest role was done in three or four days of the eight days shoot required to finish a show, consolidating it as much as possible. "These are the people you work with. I only met them for four days and they're gone! Then we'd start a new show and new people came in. It wasn't the same, we weren't all together, I didn't work with them all the time. And a lot of the crew is so much older than I am, in their forties and fifties and sixties..."
Another thing he discovered on Voyagers was that habit of reading the ratings on Monday morning to see how the show was doing, however, he does enjoy doing a series: "It's great fun!" he says.
He finds doing a movie somewhat different. His first feature film, due for September release, is The Bear in which he plays quarterback Pat Trammell, a departure from other characters he has played. As you might guess, the film is about football coach Bear Bryant.
"We shot that thing for three months," he says of the film. "I was there for a little over a month but everyone else was there for a long time and everybody travels together and stays in the hotel...There's this one scene where I die and we did that scene for nine hours. If it was a TV show we would have done it in two." Trammell was much like Bryant and the two became good friends although Trammell died quite young, at the age of twenty-eight. To further change his image, Jon-Erik cut his hair off for the role.
His new role in Cover-Up has all the earmarks of a star-making character. He plays a tough, incorrigible soldier, a Green Beret type who leaves the service and becomes a male model, seemingly because he's promised free trips to locations and the phone numbers of gorgeous female models! While in Europe on assignment he's approached to become a foreign agent. Being a model is a perfect cover for a spy. Jennifer O'Neill plays his boss.
"It's wildly commercial," he says. "I think it'll be very successful. What you've got to try and do in TV is be very commercial but try and make a good show at the same time, so that's what we try and do. I don't apologize for it being commercial because it's necessitated by the business. If you're not commercial, you're not going to be successful." The character is very flippant and very funny, according to Jon-Erik. The show, created by Glen Larson, should prove to be one of the big hits of the new season.
He's doing some improvisation in his role. As long as everyone agrees with what he suggests, Jon-Erik does have some input into his character on the show. He finds it fun and is really enjoying it.
When asked what has been his biggest break so far, he didn't list his beefcake poster or his TV movie Male Model, saying instead: "I suppose real early-on when I started to get things. I mean Male Model was a big break as far as popular notoriety was concerned but things were going real well already in-house, in the business, I already had offers from the network and things right after Voyagers, even before Voyagers. I'd say real early on in Voyagers; that started everything. Male Model helped a lot. It hurt a lot, too," he adds. "It was so exploitive I have somewhat of a hole I've got to dig out of now but I knew that when I did it," he explains. "That's why we did The Bear. It was a great opportunity. I cut all my hair off. To be a Southern redneck and be cursing all the time and be a little overbearing and chauvinistic, it's a great departure."
"I would have done it anyway, it's a great character, but it was a great opportunity," he says of the role of the quarterback.
Needless to say, he'd like to do more feature films in the future.
He has time for little else but work. He studies all day when he isn't working and, of course, he takes time to work out in order to stay in shape.
He is determined to be "really good" and so he works hard, studying consistently.
"Every morning, when I don't go to work, from nine to three I'm in class, Monday through Saturday. And then we have meetings from four to six everyday. There's always something: the publicist, the manager, my agent or interviews or something," he emphasizes.
"I get up in the morning, I either run or ride the bike, and every other day I go to the gym. I have a very, very routine schedule. I get up, I go running, I go to class and I go to meetings then I go watch a moview or rehearse, and then looking at contracts and try to do a little bit of business," he enumerates.
"There's so many people that are so good and you've really got to work at it. It's really not that different -- I've got friends that are in law school, that's all they do, they only do law school, they get a little time to eat and to exercise; and medical school," he cites as another example. "And I have friends that are accountants, that's all they do," he adds. "I think to get really good at something there's not really much of a choice," he says of single-minded perserverance.
If dedication is any indication, then Jon-Erik Hexum has a long career ahead of him. There's more to this man than just a pretty face and a great body. He's smart enough to back it up with hard work.