The star also teased his musical performances, including opera and a boy band song.
When it comes to musicals, Skylar Astin is a veteran. Along with his musical theater background, previous work includes the Pitch Perfect franchise, Glee and more. He's now starring in NBC's television musical Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, alongside Jane Levy, Lauren Graham and Peter Gallagher.
The series follows Zoey Clark (Levy), who starts to hear the innermost thoughts of people around her as songs and musical numbers, following a crazy mishap involving an MRI and an earthquake.
Astin, who stars as her best friend, Max, sat down with The Hollywood Reporter In Studio to discuss his new role, and how the NBC series compares with his previous musical work.
"This is even more different than other TV or movie musicals that I've done," he said.
"A lot of time when I've done stage musicals, it's obviously performed out for the entire audience, whereas this, we're trying to adjust it to camera and see what works. With this, we tend to do these really long, steady cam shots that are basically oners. So, there's a fun thing where we don't cut away from the scenes and there's just a song happening, and then I sit back down and we're back in the scene again. And it needs to have that seamless, ethereal transition for our tone to work musically."
Astin teased his musical numbers throughout the first season, saying, "I probably am not allowed to say certain songs but I got to sing a boy band song, which was exciting. I got to sing an opera song, which was also very exciting."
As far as what's to come with the rest of the season, expect the show to go out with a bang in the season finale.
"We're done with season one and we actually did a very ambitious sequence to end the season," Astin teased. "That is a very, very long take. And it's an entire musical number with, I think, pretty much the whole cast."
Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on NBC.
Watch more in the video above.
