Jane Seymour has said that she likes to take comedic roles not only because it’s “something different” and allows her to stretch but also simply because people have underestimated her and thought she couldn’t do them. But anyone who saw her in Wedding Crashers knows she has the comedy chops to go up against even the most quirky characters on television right now, and that is exactly what she is doing in her guest starring role on Franklin & Bash as Colleen Bash, Peter’s (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) free-spirited “Earth mom.”
“I am completely over the top. I’m sort of hippie, Earth mother-y, totally seductive of everyone– of Franklin, of Damien, of everyone. I end up sitting in the office discussing real estate but doing my Kegels at the same time,” Seymour laughed to LA TV Insider Examiner during a conference call to discuss her role in an episode entitled “Viper.”
“It’s sort of a Wedding Crashers plus. It’s very comedic, and she’s the sort of mother who has no boundaries– none whatsoever.”
Peter, after all, is the lawyer who’s so laid-back no one even bats an eye when he drops trou at his parties– because he does it so often it doesn’t warrant a reaction anymore– so now at least we see from where he gets it, right? But apparently the apple does roll away from the tree when the tree is this wacky because next to Colleen, Peter may end up looking quite reserved.
Colleen comes into Peter’s life now because she needs his help with a real estate deal, but her impetuous, indecisive nature may end up causing him the majority of the problems– in his professional and his personal life.
“I come in with a real estate issue: I’ve decided to sell the family home that Peter had grown up in. And then I have buyer’s remorse immediately, and of course he’s a lawyer, so I say ‘Help me; help me; I’ve got to get this back’,” Seymour previewed.
“Now I’m homeless, and now I have to go and live with him, which is embarrassing and curtails his romantic possibilities.”
For an actor with as long and reputable a career as Seymour’s, she shared the main factor in her wanting to “play” with the Franklin & Bash guys was how much she enjoyed the show personally and how much fun they appeared to have doing it.
“I thought it was a terrific show, and I love the way the two of them are together,” she said. “[Of course] I thought this would be a really fun character: a woman with no boundaries who’s really way too old to be doing some of the stuff she does, but she’s charmingly ignorant of the whole thing…[But] it was a lot of fun. I loved being there, and if they asked me to come back and do more, I’d be happy to do [it]. I had the best time working with them; they’re really talented, everybody there, and Tim Busfield, who of course is a great actor himself directed the episode. There was a lot of freedom to really improvise– to take what they’d written and then go and take it to another level– and that was really fun for me. Most shows I’ve been on, they never allow you to do that!”
Hopefully we will get to see Seymour and Colleen pop up again in season three!
















