Mark Gagliardi Previews ‘Blood & Treasure’ and Reveals What It’s Like to Narrate ‘Drunk History’ [Exclusive Interview]

The newest drama coming to CBS is here just in time for summer. Blood & Treasure is an action-adventure drama about a brilliant antiquities expert and a cunning art thief who team up to catch a ruthless terrorist who funds his attacks through stolen treasure. 

Mark Gagliardi, who you might also recognize as a frequent narrator on Drunk History, plays Father Chuck on the series, a character who winds up helping with the investigation and offering some comedic relief along the way.

I recently spoke with Gagliardi about what viewers can expect from the new series, which premieres tonight on CBS.

“It’s not trying to pretend to be anything that it isn’t,” he began. He described it as an “adventure show” you can watch with the kids while eating popcorn and yelling at the explosions.  

“This is the kind of show that I would be watching anyway,” Gagliardi said. “I grew up obsessed with Indiana Jones and I have memorized both National Treasure movies, and the Da Vinci Code, and all of these great source materials that we had for this.”

So when he got the audition and first read the script, he knew he had to do everything he could to get the part. “When I auditioned I actually sent in a monologue from the National Treasure movie,” he recalled. “It was just like, guys, the point that I’m making here is I understand the tone of this — which was really fun.”

“It just looked like a great time. To me, the idea of big Hollywood show business, movie making, TV extravaganza came to fruition when I walked onto the set for the first time, and we had a whole town stage in Montreal that was just a giant Egyptian tomb,” he continued. “I was sold from there and was willing to go with anything that they put my character through.”

Gagliardi described the character of Father Chuck a bit and talked about his involvement in the investigation.

“I am the childhood best friend of Danny McNamara who is one of the two lead characters on the show. I prove useful to his cause because I worked as a priest in the Vatican and in the Foreign Affairs office, so I am used to dealing with lots of different countries, and after working in the Vatican used to dealing with a lot of antiques. In fact, while they were shooting, some of the things that we were shooting around were hundreds of years old, and I was terrified to touch any of them,” he admitted.

“But I think Father Chuck is the kind of guy who everyone — because he’s a priest, and because one of the priest’s jobs is to hear confessions, I sort of become a sounding board for a lot of the characters in the show. So when you see them do things on-screen, the conversations that Father Chuck has with them are often the why.”

“It’s a lot of fun. I’m getting into the nitty gritty of character actions and motivations, so it’s fun that Father Chuck is into that too,” he added.

He also said that his character often provides some metacommentary which adds to the comedy. “I love meta comedy and I love getting to play in that world. A little bit of a wink that, ‘Come on CBS audience, we all know what this show is and just grab your popcorn, it’s going to be fun.'”

Gagliardi also took the time to talk a bit about Drunk History and what it’s like to narrate the show. “Being a narrator on Drunk History was, and is — hopefully we get another season — but it is so fun and so weird.”

“We shot the series first Drunk History ever in 2008 on my couch with a camcorder and me, Derek [Waters] and Jeremy [Konner] just in the living room,” he remembered. “I had just watched a great documentary about Alexander Hamilton, so I told the story of Alexander Hamilton and the duel with Aaron Burr. I remember I spent about three weeks studying the story, really digging in, so that when I was drunk, I would be able to, I would know everything well enough that I wouldn’t be searching for the story; I would just be blow-hard rambling it, which is kind of generally what I do anyway in life.”

“I’ve done several of them now and every time it’s kind of the same pattern. I spend a few weeks learning the story. I sit down with the crew, which by this time has now grown exponentially beyond the three of us with a camcorder in my living room. And I sit down, the nurse comes in, I blow 0.0. I start drinking. When I hit my magic number of .17, which I realize is high, then I start telling the story. And then the next day, I call Derek, with a hangover, and I say, ‘Derek, did you get everything you need?’ The Monday morning after recording I’m always petrified that I did not get out all of the details that I wanted to get out about this story. Which, when you are drunk and you have to study the story, there could be a thousand hours worth of details that are all in my brain that I just want to get out. And Derek always sort of patiently nods and says, ‘Yeah, we got it all.’ And then I watch on television with everyone else what I did that night. Most often I do not remember the end of the night,” he laughed.

A LOT of research also goes into each episode of the series. “The show has a great research team; the first couple of seasons was a guy named Seth Weitberg, who’s great, and then Greg Tuculescu who is one of the producers who took over the later seasons,” he said.

Narrators get an assignment or a list of stories to choose from way ahead of time, and then spent time studying it.

“About a week out, I’ll get a phone call from the historians on the show, so either Greg or Seth, and I will talk them through the story for about an hour,” Gagliardi explained. “They will fill in details that I may have missed; I’m giving them details that they had not found. So every story that a drunk historian knows on that show, the historians on the show have spent a month prior making sure that person knows every detail of the story.”

“It’s a lot of fun and they really do a great job of finding these crazy stories. Those just like weird, funny, small stories that you never would’ve thought about and also stories of people who have been marginalized and sort of forgotten by history, whether because they’re people of color or women in a time when they didn’t have a voice.”

“I actually had a history teacher tweet at me once and said, “I unapologetically show Drunk History to my history class. I love it and they learn something.”

“That was always my favorite class growing up, was history, and it sort of bleeds nicely into Blood & Treasure,” he said, noting how much history he learned by working on that series. “I had to learn about Antony and Cleopatra, and you know, I shot in Rome where every five feet you’re touching something that was put there 3000 years ago. So for a history buff, this show is kind of perfect.”

Gagliardi also has a podcast with his friend Hal Lublin called “We Got This w/Mark & Hal.” “We met years ago doing a show called The Thrilling Adventure Hour, which sort of blew up as a podcast. It was a live stage show that we did in the style of old-time radio for ten years in Los Angeles, and in a bigger theater called Largo for five years,” Gagliardi explained.

Once that ended, they wanted to keep working together and build off of the fan base they had gotten from that show. “Hal came up with a pretty great premise that I love,” he said. We are basically the supreme court of dumb things. I like to say we settle arguments. Our pilot was ‘Should You Put Ketchup on a Hot Dog?’ The answer is unequivocally no, by the way.”

“Our second episode was ‘Should You Hang Your Toilet Paper Overhand or Underhand?’ And then we’ll get guests to come on the show. We had a legendary punk musician, Ted Leo, come on the show and we wanted to talk about what is the absolute, all-time best breakfast cereal. Ted said, “Guys, I don’t know. I don’t know if I care that much about breakfast cereal,’ but by the end, he was standing on his chair emphatically stating, ‘No, you don’t understand, that cereal doesn’t have a crunch factor.'”

Having that chance to have some fun and be silly is a big part of why Gagliardi loves the podcast so much. “Hal and I talked a lot about this — we’re both very politically active, we have our opinions, and we let our opinions be known. But this show is, look, there’s already enough people on the internet angry about important things — let’s create a safe space where people can get fun angry about unimportant things.”

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Be sure to catch Mark Gagliardi on Blood & Treasure, premiering tonight at 9/8c on CBS with a two-hour series premiere.

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