‘Chuck’ star hopes role gets some more heroics

The character’s brain was imprinted with secret data when he opened an e-mail.

By KINNEY LITTLEFIELD

ASSOCIATED PRESS

BURBANK, Calif. — Zachary Levi is embracing his inner nerd.

“I’m more Chuck than I’m not Chuck,” says Levi on the set of NBC newcomer “Chuck,” in which he plays a computer geek-turned-clueless secret agent. “Pretty much my whole life, actually, I’ve felt like a nerd. Growing up I was always the best friend to the girls, never the boyfriend.”

The tall, dark-haired actor admits to a fondness for Chuck’s geek-chic couture — cheap pants and shirt, complete with a pocket protector that he wears for his day job as a “Nerd Herd” technician in a Buy More Electronics store.

“I love the wardrobe,” Levi says. “The show is about the underdog, about the unwitting, reluctant hero. It’s a Clark Kent-Superman kind of thing.”

But Chuck never acquires the physical powers of a superhero on the new hourlong, action-comedy series airing 8 p.m. Mondays. Instead, his brain has become a priceless file of secret intelligence data since he opened an e-mail that imprinted his mind.

Besides, Chuck is a klutz at spycraft. His government watchers — humorless Maj. John Casey of the National Security Agency (Adam Baldwin) and sexy CIA agent Sarah Walker (Yvonne Strahovski) — tell Chuck to wait in the car when assassins are afoot.

“Chuck’s just so innocent,” Strahovski says on a recent production day on the Warner Bros. lot. “Not only does Sarah have to protect the government secrets in Chuck’s head, but she also has to protect that innocence.”

In between martial-arts moves, Sarah does develop a thing for Chuck as she plays out her cover story of being his girlfriend.

“Sarah has been trained not to trust anyone,” Strahovski says. “But Chuck and Sarah do bond because they go through so many near-death experiences.”

And Chuck’s pocket-protector look? Well, Sarah “finds it adorable,” Strahovski says.

Created by executive producer Josh Schwartz (“Gossip Girl,” “The O.C.”) and co-executive producer Chris Fedak, “Chuck” is rooted in 20-something angst.

Expelled fromv Stanford for murky reasons, Chuck is having what Schwartz, Fedak and executive producer McG call a “quarterlife crisis.”

“From the get-go, Josh and I talked about a mash-up of ideas, a fusion of a character-based comedy and hard-core action,” says Fedak, an action-movie maven who was Schwartz’s film school buddy at the University of Southern California.

Indeed, on “Chuck,” the scheming workers of big-box Buy More seem as menacing as the secret-agent types.

“The notion was, what if Sydney Bristow on ‘Alias’ or Jack Bauer on ‘24’ wandered into ‘The Office’?” Fedak says. “How terrifying that would be, because Sydney’s friends and family all usually got killed. And Jack Bauer usually wants to torture somebody.”