Chi McBride digs Hawaii, not ‘Five-0’

Chi McBride will be the first to admit that his hit series, “Hawaii Five-0” has pretty much taken over Oahu. “Literally you can’t swing a dead cat on the island without hitting our production somewhere.,” he says. “People literally look for us at the airport — because we shoot at the airport. Hawaii’s quite beautiful in and of itself. They certainly don’t need ‘Hawaii Five-0’ to have a booming and successful business for tourism. But it don’t hurt!”

And he wouldn’t have it any other way, dead cats or none. “I do love Hawaii, I love my place there,” McBride says. “And I do love to play golf, which I do a lot in Hawaii. We’re going to have Michelle Wei on the show [this seasons] and she’s going to take a couple of us out to play golf. I’m personally looking forward to that because [series star] Alex [O’Laughlin] is a terrible golfer, and he’s going to have to play. So one thing I know I’m going to say to him is, ‘I bet you don’t want to do your own stunts now, do you?'”

McBride has been having fun playing Capt. Lou Grover on the hit series, currently in its fifth series, though he keeps looking for some connection to the same character from the original 1970s version. “I heard that this character was on the original show, and the only one I saw was the guy who had one line on a megaphone. There was somebody standing on a ledge, and Grover picked up a megaphone and said, ‘Hold it right there!’ And that’s the only thing he ever did in the whole series,” he says. “And every week I’ve been looking in the script for me with a megaphone saying, ‘Hold it right there!’ but it never happens, so I guess that’s just a carrot that they’re holding in front of me to stay on the show.”

And speaking of the original series, McBride has some pretty strong feelings about bringing old properties back to life, despite the success of his own show. “You can’t remake ‘The Three Stooges.’ Nobody should ever try to remake ‘The Honeymooners.’ There’s several of these vehicles like this that are iconic that you could get lucky with or you could fail, like, on an epic level,” he says, possibly unaware that his network, CBS, is launching a new ‘The Odd Couple’ next year. ‘You’re never going to be able to do ‘Gilligan’s Island’ or ‘The Andy Griffith Show’ or ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’ again.”

While he may have such fervent opinions about television history, at the end of the day, though, his job is just a job — one that he’s happy to have, sure — but let’s not take it too seriously. Or, as McBride puts it: “I don’t see myself arguing with somebody over a line that’s going to be said on a television show that’s going to be forgotten about like a mustard burp in a hundred years. This whole thing is just a pimple on a very hairy ass, so you have to look at it as such,” he says. “The most boring thing in the world is actors talking about politics. The second most boring thing in the world is actors talking about acting. Look, I realize it’s a skill because I’ve been on screen with people who don’t know how to do it, but at the end of the day I have one acting note, and that’s this: ‘OK, so pretend like … .’ That’s it. It’s all just pretend. Something you did as a kid, only they pay you a lot of money for it now.” And sometimes you get to do it in Hawaii, even.

Follow Ned Ehrbar on Twitter: @nedrick