‘Ted’ star was stressed taking over for Mark Wahlberg in series: I made sure ‘no Bostonians got angry’

nypost.com:

“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.