“Ted” star Max Burkholder’s association with series creator Seth MacFarlane dates back to Burkholder’s childhood.
“I did voiceover work for [MacFarlane’s series] ‘Family Guy,’ ‘American Dad,’ ‘The Cleveland Show,’ so in a weird way I’ve been working with Seth in some capacity for 20 years,” Burkholder, 25, told The Post.
“And just because I was a little kid hanging around the ‘Family Guy’ offices, when it came time for the table read for the first ‘”Ted” movie, they needed someone to play the creepy little kid character — and so I did that when I was probably around 10.”
“Ted,” streaming on Peacock, is a prequel to the 2012 and 2015 movies (“Ted” and “Ted 2“) in which a foul-mouthed talking teddy bear, Ted (MacFarlane), is brought to life by his pal, 30-year-old John Bennett (Mark Wahlberg in both movies) — and eventually interferes with John’s love life.
Burkholder plays 16-year-old John in the TV adaptation, set in 1993 in Framingham, Mass., as John adapts to high school — helped (or hindered) by Ted (voiced by MacFarlane and brought to life via sophisticated computer animation).
Scott Grimes and Alanna Ubach play John’s Archie Bunker-type father, Matty, and good-natured mother, Susan; his older, liberal cousin, Blaire (Giorgia Whigam), attends Emerson College and lives with the family due to a sketchy situation with her parents.
Burkholder said he was very conscientious about nailing John’s Boston accent.
“I worked very hard on that,” he said. “I had a fantastic dialect coach the studio set me up with … I wanted to make sure no Bostonians got angry at a bad accent and tried to kick my ass.”
John interacts with Ted more than the other series characters, which posed something of a challenge for Burkholder — since “Ted” is reliant on special effects vis-a-vis the little teddy bear.
“I would have been so grateful to have an apple or a pencil or a tennis ball with a stick to interact with, but, no, it was just an empty space,” said Burkholder, born and raised in LA.
“They had a little bear doll there while lining up the shot, but then once it came time to shoot there was nothing there — I really just had to imagine Ted was there and I was talking to him and he was moving around.
“Seth directed every episode so he was on the set every day and he could do the dialogue live,” he said. “He re-recorded some lines afterward but it meant that we were able to find our timing and we could improvise when we wanted to and bounce off of each other.
“It was super-annoying the first couple of weeks because I’d deliver my line and then Seth was off to my right and he’d say the line and then I’d look over to where he was and deliver my next line — I ruined a few takes like that.”
There are f-bombs aplenty in “Ted,” and while Burkholder said that’s a bit different from his other roles, it wasn’t much of a stretch for him.
“I curse a tremendous amount in my real life in casual conversation … and my mom curses like a sailor and has since I was little,” he said. “There are stories of me and my brother cursing at the age of 3 in very inappropriate situations, so I come by it honestly.”
And, he said, viewers should not expect John to grow as a person this season.
“He really tries to, and he probably should progress, but by virtue of the fact that this is a prequel and we know where he ends up at 30 in the movies, we know that he remains a degenerate stoner idiot,” he said. “So there’s a limit to how much we can show him being enlightened.
“It’s a sitcom with that ’90s vibe, so there should be a ‘Very Special Episode’ where he learns a lesson — but absolutely not.”
Burkholder has another link to the Boston area; he attended Harvard University for two-and-a-half years but did not graduate.
“I ended up taking, at first, an extended leave of absence and now I’ve just fully left with no intention of returning,” he said. “The graduation thing was never super-important to me. The college experience didn’t work well with my system. No matter where I went I think I would have ended up leaving at some point.”
“Ted” has generated heavy social media buzz since its Jan. 11 premiere.
“I saw that Israel Adesanya, one of my favorite MMA fighters — he’s from New Zealand and they call him ‘The Style Bender’ — is binging the show,” he said. “And there’s a standup comedian on Tik Tok and Instagram, Keegan Tindall … I’ve been a fan of his for a while and he reached out and said, ‘Funny stuff, man.’
“I”m just flabbergasted by the response.”
