'Chicago Fire' actor Jesse Spencer finds home after 'House'

BEVERLY HILLS, California — They say that some actors are spellbinding, but Australian Jesse Spencer may be bewitched. As an actor, he’s the odd-man-out in his medical family: His dad is a general practitioner, his two older brothers are surgeons and his younger sister is an anesthesiologist.

Acting wasn’t even on his radar. It was music that excited him when he was a kid practicing the drums. And it was the drum set that may have bewitched him.

“We used to experience this sort of strange, like, poltergeist activity in our house when we were young,” he recalls in a hotel coffee lounge here.

“It wasn’t bad, like it wasn’t threatening, but it was certainly present. And we’re all very logical-minded people, scientific — so it’s very strange to be faced with a conclusion when you’ve ruled everything else out.”

The star of NBC’s popular “Chicago Fire” left his home for the United Kingdom when he was 20 and spent two years sleeping in a closet, which he dubbed “the cell.”

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Even though he’d been acting since he was 15, it wasn’t the role of an aristocrat on a British costume drama that sparked his career. It was the part of the pragmatic Dr. Robert Chase in “House, M.D.” that helped to liberate him from that closet. Even so, Spencer didn’t want to try out for it.

“I was 24. And the character originally was in his late 30s, American. I said, ‘What’s the point of this?’ They were spreading their net wide. So they saw my audition and said, ‘We’d like to see you again.’”

He added, “I loved the script. It was dark and weird and very cerebral, and I come from a medical family, so it was like, ‘This is great.’ But they didn’t want to fly me out for the audition, so I just bought a ticket and flew out to LA and auditioned with another Australian guy and they had an English guy there. I got the part. Then I had to fly back to London, clear my stuff out.” He didn’t have much, only a few clothes and a guitar.

Since “House,” Spencer has been putting out fires as Matthew Casey on “Chicago Fire” for four years now. And he’s happy to be settled.

“When you do a show like this it’s hard to tell how much it’s you that’s changed, and how much your character’s changed, and where the line is,” he says.

“Casey’s definitely different from me ... He’s a wholesome good guy, very strong, tries to do the right thing, but not afraid to throw down. He’s got this side to him as well, you don’t (expletive) with him or his friends or family. They (firemen) are very community driven. As an actor, I’m transient. I am going from place to place. They really build their homes on solid rock."

Spencer still returns home to Australia once a year. But it’s not the same, he says, and there is no poltergeist to greet him.

“Now going home and realizing it’s not really home. It is, it’s familiar, but it doesn’t really feel like home all the time. Now it’s the opposite. I’m just passing through Melbourne and Sydney, then I come back home, here. It’s kind of odd.”

"Chicago Fire" airs at 10 p.m. Tuesdays on NBC, including WCMH-TV (Channel 4)