Interview: Former Blue's Clues Star Steve Burns Is Alive and Well and On Stage at La MaMa

Depending on who you talk to, former Blue’s Clues host Steve Burns is either dead from a car crash or a heroin overdose, or was fired from the show because of misconduct allegations and has receded into obscurity.

Of course, if you talk to the real Steve Burns, you’ll realize that none of these things are true. He’s alive, for starters. He left the children’s show on his own accord, for a variety of reasons. As for obscurity, that includes making music with the Flaming Lips, doing voiceovers a-plenty, moving to the Catskills, and inadvertently finding a new kind of fame on social media when the “Steve” that kids grew up with popped up to celebrate the Blue’s Clues 25th Anniversary in 2021.

Now, with best pal/writing partner Matthew Freeman (The Ask), Burns is putting all he’s learned over the years to the test in Steve Burns ALIVE, a stage show that dissects a reality where the world things you’re dead, but you’re very much not.

Ahead of its three-performance run at La MaMa July 23-25, Burns and Freeman joined us over Zoom for an extremely candid discussion on the price of fame, and all that follows.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

How long have you two known each other?
Steve Burns: Freeman is my oldest friend. I’ve known him since I was 14 years old.

Matthew Freeman: We’ve known each other since the eighth grade. He was in my mother’s English class, and he and my sister dated each other in middle school. We did The Zoo Story together in high school. I was Peter and he was Jerry.

It must be very strange to watch the guy who stabs you on the park bench act opposite a cartoon dog.
Matt: He’s always been a real serious actor and artist.

Steve: I dropped out of college to be Dustin Hoffman, essentially. I wanted to be the short, dangerous actor from the 1970s. The last thing I ever would have imagined was being on children’s television. I didn’t even know any kids when I auditioned for that role. And I only auditioned because I thought it was a voiceover gig. If I knew that it was to be on camera, I probably wouldn’t have gone to the audition. Not because I was pooh-poohing children’s television in any way, but because it felt like something I would be terrible at. Which, by the way, is why I was good at it.

Were you and Blue a match made in heaven?
Steve: No, I was deeply uncomfortable the entire time. I felt phenomenally unqualified to do that job, and the bigger the show became, the more I felt that way. I was 100 percent certain that it should have been a child development specialist or an educator. There weren’t a lot of theater or narrative TV people involved in the show, so I was kind of on my own, acting the shit out of it, and I felt like I was miscast.

Was it your departure from the show that started all the rumors about you?
Steve: No, no, no. The world decided I died in season two of Blue’s Clues. What made it even more perplexing was that I was actively making new episodes, and there were millions of people invested in this counterfactual narrative that became indelible and unthwartable.

The layer on top that increased the tension was that the character on the show was named Steve and my name is also Steve. And it appeared that one of them had died. It was a 20-year process of figuring out which one that was. It became an identity crisis. It seemed that the world preferred the jazz-handed Steve and wanted Steve Burns to not exist. I always say, after two weeks of people on the internet assuming you’re dead, it’s almost funny. After five years, it feels like a cultural preference. Eventually, after 15 years, you start to wonder if they’re onto something.

So, the people you care about know you’re alive. Matt knows you’re alive. How do you deal with it?
Steve: I dealt with it fairly poorly. The death rumor was made exponentially more difficult because I was simultaneously dealing with untreated, undiagnosed, severe clinical depression the entire time. And I was very young and didn’t really understand what was happening in any way. But when a gajillion people tell you that something you know is false, is true, for 20 years, it starts to have the force of reality.

Matt: The play is very much about that sort of complicated relationship and how people perceive him, being a real person in a world where everyone has a kind of parasocial relationship with you. It’s built out of this idea that he has a relationship with the audience that is primarily on a screen. He spends a lot of time on the screen and then we bring him out at strategic moments to remind us that he’s really here. That he’s a real person.

Steve: One of the reasons we made this show is that this very novel experience of mine is relatable now because we’re all branded on the internet and we’re all presenting an avatar that is us, but not us. Look at this interview. I thought about all of this before I said it, so this is a bit of a performance. But hopefully, it’s also real.

There are obviously people who go in expecting this to be a cozy trip down memory lane.
Steve: The show is not a nostalgia trip in any way. We never say Blue’s Clues even once. I don’t have to. We just call me “The Friend,” and it’s an archetypical childhood television host. I have lots of friends who didn’t grow up watching the show who this really resonated with, because they understood the connection. It allows us to not have to literally play the games from the show, but still have the relationship that was so affecting be present.  And we are really questioning the notion of presence. If the show spent too much time dwelling in nostalgia, that would not be possible.

But I also don’t shy away from it, either. I am deliberately trying to scale up the conversation we used to have. It still is about asking questions and it is still an exploration of the problems around us. It’s about asking for help, and the tension between green, stripey jazz-handed Steve, who I affectionately refer to as “Happy Jackass Boy” and the Steve Burns who couldn’t be more different in so many ways, but who are now merged in a way that I can only now look at as a gift.

How so?
Steve: Steve from Blue’s Clues has become a great teacher of Steve Burns in a lot of unexpected ways. Perhaps the most important way is that he taught me to ask for help. In every single episode of Blue’s Clues, I would stare right into a camera and say, “Will you help me?” It wasn’t until I did that in my actual life that there was a real change for me.