Christopher Titus On Being A ‘Big Shots’ Good Guy & Pranking His Co-Stars

It’s been hard to miss promos for ABC’s new Thursday night man-drama “Big Shots.” There’s even one tonight on the “Countdown Show” to Monday night football (a clip of which can be seen below).

Starring Dylan McDermott, Michael Vartan, Joshua Malina and Christopher Titus, “Big Shots,” which follows four sexy, professionally successful (but otherwise dysfunctional) gents, has been touted as “Sex and The City” for guys.

Christopher Titus’ character, Brody Johns, is the good-guy of the group — happily obeying his wife’s wishes and gleefully gushing to his boys about how he relishes being under her thumb.

Playing Mr. All Together wasn’t what Titus expected when he signed up for the role however he’s thrilled at how Brody turned out as AccessHollywood.com found out when we caught up with the self-proclaimed night owl.

Access: Strangely, your character, is probably the least messed up of the bunch.
Christopher: It’s weird. When I first read it, I thought this guy’s an A-hole. He’s this loud and obnoxious guy and the reason he is so loud and obnoxious is because he has a lot of integrity. He keeps his life real straight so he can do what he wants and no one can really call him on anything.

And he loves his wife!
Yeah, he loves his wife and she henpecks him a bit, and he’s OK with it because he realizes what he has. There’s an episode coming up where Josh Malina gets into some trouble — a bully starts messing with him and Brody jumps in and pretty much destroys the guy. I guess that’s my character. In real life, I have two little kids and I am that guy. My nickname used to be Batman, because I have a tendency to step in whenever there’s an injustice, so I ended up being that guy that I really am. That’s kind of neat.

So being on an ABC show, have you had a chance to experience the luxuries that come with that?
If I knew the show was gonna run for five years, yeah, but this early in the season, you’re competing against so many other shows. The funniest thing is to watch on Friday morning when Dylan McDermott and Josh Malina have their PDAs out and they’re just going at it. They’re trying to analyze the ratings.

OMG! They’re nerds.
Molina is such a nerd. Molina will come in, literally, everyday with a new article. We’re gonna start premiering in Australia and Malina will come in and go on about how we’re gonna do in Australia, what the demographics are in Australia (laughs). I’m like, ‘Is my check getting any bigger? No? Then I don’t really care about it.’

I wanna do well in Australia, but I’m not gonna spend a lot of time looking at it.

Shouldn’t artists be creating and letting the network worry about the other stuff?
That’s kind of my idea ‘cause I executive produced “Titus” and I was crazy about it for the first year. Insane! I would call the ratings lawyer like ten times . . . and then I made the network president mad and the show got cancelled. The ratings were still really high. . . . so at the end of the day it doesn’t matter.

Some shows have horrible ratings; like Dylan was telling us about “The Practice.” “The Practice” had horrible ratings when it started, but the network kept it on until it was a number one show. Now, I don’t know if that’s gonna happen with “Big Shots,” but we did pick up last week.

It seems like a number of straight, single guys are digging the show.
That was kind of a revelation for me. My brother in San Diego — the first week he was like ripping me. He was like, ‘Man! I don’t get this!’ The second week he calls me and he goes, ‘I don’t know.’ After the third episode he was like, ‘Dude! Everybody loves the show!’ The critics kind of went after us [but] I’m finding people on the street like it… I don’t know how it’s happening. The one thing we always said – me, Dylan, Mike and Josh, we get along so well.

Liar.
I swear to God. [Have you] ever been around guys that get along? They constantly rip each other — it’s non-stop. I’m a comic and I had a pretty damaged childhood. At first I was really sensitive about it and I’d just start ripping them back and thank God I’m funny ‘cause it didn’t come across angry.

Who is the worst?
Josh is the worst. If you screw up in front of Josh Malina, you’re dead. It’s over. You’re gonna hear about it for the rest of the day. So, Michael Vartan every once in a while will have a sweating problem.

If Michael Vartan will screw up a line or two, he’ll start to get nervous, so here’s Malina, they’ll go “Sound! Rolling!” and Josh goes, “Cue slob sweat! Action!”

Oh no!
Oh yeah! Brutal. It doesn’t stop. I screwed up a line and he goes, “It was good ‘til there,” in front of the whole crew. He just constantly will rip you.

Found a way to pay him back?
We’ve started. I went into his trailer. Josh has a huge [amount of stuff in there]. He brings blankets and pillows and he’s got a crock-pot. I took all of it and I stuffed it in the shower and I closed the door and he walked into a perfectly clean trailer and he went into the shower and it was all stacked up.

And he probably had a little mini-panic.
He did! He’s got OCD, so he hates his stuff touched, so I’m sure he disinfected it all.

Ha! So, other than pranking, you spend a lot of time filming on golf courses, driving golf carts.
Dylan McDermott’s out of his mind. McDermott will literally launch a golf cart into a lake. I won’t ride with him anymore. We had a scene where we had to come down a hill through these bushes one day and I’m sitting next to him and he tries to take me out of the golf cart with the bushes. He knocked me off the golf cart!

And he was laughing hysterically the whole time?
Oh yeah! Hysterically. It’s fun and the lacerations healed.

Ow! Seems like you’re a rowdy little group!
At the end of the day, it’s four real guys. What happened with Dylan and I, I’ve been working out really hard because I knew they were gonna start filming me without my shirt and I didn’t want to look like a turd. The first time we did our scene with our shirts off with McDermott it got really competitive. Probably before they stopped shooting that scene, we had done 300 push-ups apiece. We couldn’t lift our arms. It’s very competitive and I’ve never had more fun.