Stars of ‘The Finder’ enjoy their bromantic entanglements

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Michael Clarke Duncan (left) and Geoff Stults kid each other during a press tour earlier this month. | Danny Moloshok~AP

Updated: February 21, 2012 8:18AM

Like any true friend, Michael Clarke Duncan looks out for Geoff Stults’ fitness. It just so happens he’s also always trying to get one over on his co-star in new Fox series “The Finder.”

The actors had a bet during football season, and when Duncan’s Chicago Bears dominated Stults’ Detroit Lions in November, Stults had to do 100 push-ups a day, 20 at a time, for a week and whenever Duncan felt the urge.

“I’d say, ‘Hey, Geoff, you know what, I don’t like the shirt you’ve got on. Give me 20 push-ups,’” Duncan says, with a deep laugh.

While romance is at the heart of David Boreanaz and Emily Deschanel’s hit Fox series “Bones,” its spin-off “The Finder” ­— also created by “Bones” boss Hart Hanson — brings the bromance.

An episode of “Bones” last season launched the new series, with Stults guest-starring as Walter Sherman, an eccentric former soldier with a gift for tracking down missing people and objects, and Duncan as Leo Knox, a bar owner in the Florida Keys who’s Walter’s lawyer, bodyguard and pal. They take on any and all cases, from finding John Fogerty’s missing guitar to tracking down a former Air Force pilot when his teen son worries he might be dead.

“The Finder” (8 p.m. Thursdays on WFLD-Channel 32) marks different challenges for both men. For Duncan, it’s his first regular TV gig after a career spent mostly on the big screen, including an Oscar-nominated turn in “The Green Mile.” “I looked at a few actors like George Clooney, who did TV and movies, who balanced both of them years before it was popular to do, and I wondered how he did that,” Duncan says. “It was really a no-brainer, between Hart and knowing Geoff was going to be on board.”

And after 10 years of playing assorted straight men, jerks and boyfriends on TV, Stults gets the chance to play the main guy of a show, a role he’s relished so far mainly because he can act as nutty as he wants playing Walter. “He is a goof,” Stults says. “He’s seldom right, he’s seldom tough, he gets beat up, he trips. [But] at the end of the day, he’s like a bloodhound.”

His chemistry with Duncan dates back eight years, when they met on the set of the indie movie “D.E.B.S.” Filming late one night, they kept flubbing lines; Duncan started laughing, which encouraged Stults to keep poking fun and sending him into an uncontrollable giggle.

“I wouldn’t stop messing with him,” Stults recalls. “We literally, like kids, got separated by the director.”

Duncan, who grew up on Chicago’s South Side, got the better of his friend with the push-up bet, but Stults finds ways to rib Duncan. He often calls him “a big man with a heart of gold” — “He hates that,” Stults says — and has been known to tweet pictures of Duncan snacking.

But they know when to be serious. Both would love to see more than one season of their show, and working with Deschanel and Boreanaz (who directs an episode of “The Finder” this spring), the actors were able to see up close what makes for a hit series.

“I can’t remember them messing up one time,” Duncan says. “I always call them varsity. They’ve done it, they’ve got their lettermen’s jackets. They’re No. 1. We’re like eighth graders going into ninth grade.

“We walk past Emily and David’s trailers, and they’re like these three-story-tall buildings. Geoff and I just look up and go, ‘Ooooh.’ Then we come back to our trailers and we’re like, ‘One day, we’ll be on varsity.’ ”

Gannett News Service