Norbert Leo Butz on Playing a ‘Messed Up’ Guy in Netflix's Bloodline & Petting Dolphins with Aaron Tveit

Tony winner Norbert Leo Butz is unleashing his inner party animal in Bloodline, a gripping new Netflix drama premiering March 20 for your binge-watching convenience. But he’s also got a dark side—the Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Catch Me If You Can favorite plays Kevin Rayburn, a hotheaded Florida boatyard owner whose deep family secrets are revealed when his older brother Danny unexpectedly comes home. Broadway.com caught up with Butz to find out if he’ll be doing any singing (fingers crossed!) in the new series, his unexpected co-star Katie Finneran and beating Aaron Tveit on the tennis court.

You’re playing the life of the party in Bloodline. How fun is it to let loose and be crazy?
It was a lot of fun. The whole cast got to be really close, so there was a great freedom and comfort on the set. But in some ways, the class clown identity that Kevin takes on is a front. They all have fronts. That’s what’s interesting about the show. What people are presenting and what’s going on with them are very different things.

Do you tend to pick characters who are—for lack of a better word—messed up?
That's a good description! I want a character that has dimension and layers, and writing that allows me to really use my imagination, and that’s exactly what these guys have created.

What was shooting in the Florida Keys like? Did your family come and visit?
It was an extremely strange experience—one that I loved, though. My family was with me most of the time and the schedule worked out really well. We were down there for seven months but we had weeks off here and there.

What kind of fun stuff did you guys do?
I’m definitely a water person, so I was really in my element down there. I’ve been swimming recreationally about five times a week for years just at the Y. I’m sort of addicted to swimming so that was a dream job. I could just get up every morning and jump into the bay.

Do you get to show off any of your swimming skills on Bloodline?
I wouldn’t call them skills, more compulsions [laughs]. I don’t think I do any swimming, but I’m on a lot of boats, which I love. I did a lot of snorkeling there, and I’m getting certified for scuba as well. Something about being surrounded by water has a really calming effect on me.

Katie Finneran plays your wife, Sam Shepard’s your dad, Steven Pasquale’s on it—was it a fun bonding time for you theater guys?
It was amazing. I was so thrilled when Katie got hired, and I didn’t know that until the day before we shot our first scene. We’ve been friends a long time and she’s the smartest, funniest, coolest girl. We all laughed a lot—it’s pretty dark material, but Linda Cardellini, Kyle Chandler, Ben Mendelsohn, they’re all hilarious people. So I know it seems like it should have been a heavy fête, but it was extremely lighthearted and a lot of fun, which was a great antidote, because we go to pretty radically unpleasant places by the end of the season.

There’s no doubt people will be binge-watching this—have you ever watched a season of a TV show straight through?
Only a couple of times, and one was Friday Night Lights with Kyle Chandler! I was such a fan of that show, and I came to it really late. This is such a catchword, isn’t it? Binge-watching. I hear it all the time. There’s something a little scary about it! [Laughs.] It sounds more like addiction terminology than anything.

So you aren't much of a TV watcher?
I seem to have missed whole decades of it. Unbelievably I’ve never seen The Sopranos or Breaking Bad. I’ve always been drawn more to film. But Bloodline, to me, feels like a 13-hour piece of cinema. And the great thing about Netflix is you get to be almost like an editor. You choose how much of the narrative you want to watch at a time, which makes you complicit in the story.

Bloodline looks dark and mysterious, but is there any chance you’ll be singing in a future episode?
We joked about it on set, especially when they cast Steven Pasquale. Come on, that guy is a stunning singer! I don’t know how they would work it in. Maybe I’ll get drunk at a karaoke bar and belt out something, who knows.

You and Aaron Tveit were filming in Florida at the same time—did you guys get to meet up?
We did! We were only about an hour and a half away and it was awesome because every other week, he would come down to the Keys or I would go up. We’d have epic tennis matches, that became our thing.

Who’s the better tennis player?
Even if I beat him it doesn’t really matter because he looks so much better than I do on the tennis court [laughs].

Did you guys get into any other trouble down there?
When I first got to Florida, Aaron came and met me, and we got on some jet skis and were hotdogging around the Gulf of Mexico. It was amazing—we idled our skis and we were just talking, and a school of baby dolphins came right up. We could reach out and touch their dorsal fin. I had only been in the Keys a couple of days, and it was the most magical thing I’ve ever seen. I thought, “I think I’m gonna like it here.”