Charles Esten’s chemistry with Connie Britton is felt full-force when they’re on stage. (ABC)
Everyone agrees that one of the best things of the new ABC series “Nashville” is the music. The songs poignantly express the entangled romances of the characters in ways no dialogue could match. At their best, they take your breath away, as when Connie Britton and Charles Esten sat side by side at the Bluebird Café and sang “No One Will Ever Love You.”
It was a performance so understated yet electric that you’d swear these two were pros, conveying everything you needed to know about the longing between their characters, country music queen Rayna James and her lead guitarist, Deacon Claybourne. Ex-lovers, they are still in love.
It’s easy to understand why Deacon would get hung up on Rayna. When he got the job on the show, Esten, 47, told Britton, “There are a million reasons I want to be on this show and you’re a couple hundred of them.” Singing with her was an amazing experience. “We had not spent a whole lot of time singing to each other. It was totally new on the set,” says Esten, who goes by the nickname Chip. “We sang over separately recorded tracks.”
“I built the episode around the song,” says creator Callie Khouri. “This is the perfect song that you write toward.”
Esten talks more like a musician than an actor, in succinct phrases that sound like song lyrics. He describes his character as “Rayna’s soundtrack, the guitar under her voice.” And “It’s hard to get Deacon to talk about himself, but you put him behind a guitar and he’ll tell you every secret he has.”
Maybe all the time he’s spending in Nashville is rubbing off on him — or he’s rubbing off on Nashville. In nearly every episode he plays with some of the finest musicians in the city; Pam Tillis sang harmony and played guitar with him on one number. But Esten knows his place.
“So far, I’ve been able to play what they’re playing. But theirs has more tone and control than mine does. Deacon is a much better guitarist than Chip is,” he says.
He has co-written a song for the show, “Pretend It Isn’t There,” with Steve Mandile that we’ll hear soon.
“I had a title. Steve started playing some chords. I did all the lyrics and he started off on this chord pattern which makes sense. It’s plaintive, low and twangy.”
On November 10, Esten was invited to make his debut at the Grand Ole Opry, where he sang two numbers, “Sideshow,” which he did on the show, and “Act Naturally.” Several co-stars, including Britton, cheered him on. His wife, Patty, flew in from LA, where their three children, Taylor, Addie and Chase, go to school.
“It’s like these guys who go to fantasy baseball camps. This is like fantasy country camp for me. I get to come here and live out my wildest dreams,” he says.
Music has been part of Esten’s career since the early 1990s, when he played the lead role in the musical “Buddy” in London’s West End and improved his playing by “leaps and bounds,” he says. “I wasn’t good enough to play electric guitar when that show started.”
Esten’s credits include “Big Love” and “The Mentalist,” but “Nashville” is the job that best brings together his talents in a role that puts him in the middle of the show’s two central characters — Rayna and her tin-foil rival, Juliette Barnes (Hayden Panettiere). Plenty of hearts will be broken before the season is over, one senses.
“It’s not by accident that Rayna didn’t end up with him,” Esten says.
When he auditioned for the show, Khouri was won over by his “beautiful, deep voice” and that she could see him as Deacon “when he walked in the room.” He left on a high and said to Panettiere, who was waiting to meet with producers, “ ‘I’ll see you on the set.’ Absolutely false bravado. It’s something you say when you’re nowhere near a job.”
But now that “Nashville” has received a full-season order, the bravado wasn’t false at all.
“ ‘Nashville’s’ going to be part of my life for the rest of my life,” he says.
NASHVILLE
Wednesday, 10 p.m., ABC