‘Last Man Standing’ Star Jet Jurgensmeyer Talks Playing Young Jason Bateman in Netflix’s ‘Ozark’ Season 3 (Exclusive)

Fans of Ozark have been anticipating Season 3’s arrival and now that it has officially premiered Friday morning, viewers will get to know a little more about lead character, Marty Byrde played by actor, Jason Bateman. Fulfilling that honor with a background story highlighting the character’s youth is Last Man Standing star, Jet Jurgensmeyer who details to PopCulture.com exclusively that the role of a younger Marty calls to great attention the origins of the lead character’s ambitions and behaviors.

“I am young Marty Byrde, so I’m Jason Bateman’s character when he was younger — that’s kind of all I can really say about that,” Jurgensmeyer said to PopCulture.com. “[The role] kind of explains why he is the way he is as an adult [and] that was really cool to be able to do on set.”

While Jurgensmeyer was thrilled for the new opportunity, he had a challenge to overcome. Since he’s 15 years old, some of the content and language in the fan-favorite Netflix series is for an older audience, which means he wasn’t able to watch every episode. But while he has seen a lot of the show, there’s still bits and pieces he was forced to miss out on due to its MA content rating. However, with the help of his parents, the teenager went into the role as prepared as anyone could be to get the job done.

“When [my parents] found out that I got the role, they binge watched the entire show because I can’t exactly watch everything that happened … they were able to go through and pick out parts that they thought I could watch and study,” he shared. “I was able to try and get down some of his mannerisms and how he talks — in run-on sentences, things like that.”

He added that while having this opportunity “was really cool,” it wasn’t as big of a challenge to get familiar with the character as it normally would be because of the help of his “his team.” “Normally, I would say yes, but in this case I think that it was easy to say I was lucky enough to have a good team, a.k.a my parents,” he explained.

Although Jurgensmeyer is known for being a child actor, him getting older is inevitable, and because of that, he and his parents are mentally preparing for him to step into bigger, more mature roles.

“Once I turned 13, there’s certain roles or auditions that’ll have you say a few cuss words and things like that,” he explained. “I use to not like to do it at all … because our thing was, ‘If my grandmother can’t watch the show, then I shouldn’t do it.’ But my parents told me, ‘As you get older, there’s going to be characters that are more mature’ [and] I think that that’s part of being an actor and adapting to that.”

While Jurgensmeyer is thrilled for the new season of Ozark that is out now on Netflix, he’s also looking forward to starting Season 2 of Disney’s T.O.T.S — which was put on hold due to the coronavirus pandemic. In the meantime, he’s also been very busy writing new music and will be ready to hit the road for a tour soon. The young actor and musician will have those dates for his performances up on his website soon.

Ozark Season 3 is now available on Netflix.