I’m in a cabin in the middle of nowhere eating vegan chili with Steve from “Blue’s Clues.”
He’s been here — in a town in the Catskill Mountains he asks me not to name — for six years. There’s no train station nearby; from Los Angeles, it took me a flight to Albany plus a 90-minute drive south to get to this place. But for Steve, who lives with the odd kind of fame that leads people to think of his last name as “from ‘Blue’s Clues’” rather than Burns, that remoteness is the appeal.
“I’m most often alone up here, but I’m very rarely lonely,” says Steve, 49, who lived in Brooklyn for most of his adult life before retreating upstate. “There’s much more of me to share here than there was in New York City. I was deflecting all of the stimulus at all times.”
“I grew up in the Pennsylvania version of this,” he continues, gesturing to the landscape of shedding trees and country roads surrounding us. “My mother always said that as soon as she turned on a vacuum cleaner, I would be like, ‘Nope, I’m out,’ and go into the woods and build a fort.”
In the late ’90s and early aughts, Steve was a rock star to me and my toddler peers, as big as Fred Rogers (whom he idolizes) or Dora the Explorer (whom he’s less sure of). “Blue’s Clues,” which ran on Nickelodeon’s Nick Jr. from 1996 to 2006, featured him as the eager, ditzy, ageless, sexless best friend to an animated puppy who left him messages via paw prints around their house. As he decoded the prints — constantly asking the viewer for their help and pausing to hear their thoughts — Steve taught a generation of children about the ABCs, types of weather and how to recycle. He signed off each episode with a catchy tune that ended, “With me and you and my dog, Blue, we can do anything that we wanna do.”
Then, in the middle of the show’s run, Steve mysteriously left the kids’ juggernaut, handing over the emceeing duties to another actor, Donovan Patton, who played Joe, Steve’s little brother. He held down the fort while Steve went off to college.
Fans speculated for years about what caused his disappearance, though the answer isn’t as scandalous as people imagined: He was pushing 30, and it was time. But Steve has recently resurfaced as an internet folk hero, and soon he’ll return to his beloved Blue in the movie “Blue’s Big City Adventure.” The film, which drops on Paramount+ on Nov. 18, unites Steve, Patton and new host Josh Dela Cruz.
“I’ve never enjoyed being Steve more than I do now,” Steve says. “I get to wear a trenchcoat. It’s like Grover-meets-Columbo — a clown character. That’s really freeing somehow.”
Steve jokes that his affinity for the wilderness might mean he hasn’t changed since his childhood in Pennsylvania, but it was a profoundly adult experience that brought him to this town: the death of his father in 2015, and the mourning period that followed.