Author: Joanne Ostrow

September 15, 2016 10:45am PT by Joanne Ostrow

Kristen Bell in ‘The Good Place’

Series creator Mike Schur talks with THR about how the Kristen Bell and Ted Danson starrer will handle its relgious undertones.

At first glance, a viewer could be forgiven for thinking NBC’s The Good Place is a show with a religious undercurrent, maybe even a comedic send-up of religious themes and beliefs.

That viewer would be mistaken, executive producer and creator Michael Schur hastens to note. Schur (Fox’s Brooklyn Nine-Nine and NBC’s gone but not forgotten Parks and Recreation and Netflix breakout Master of None) understands the confusion. But he stresses The Good Place, premiering Sept. 19 on NBC, is a comedy set in the afterlife but that doesn’t make it a religious show.

“It is very important to make clear in the first 30 seconds of pilot, this is not one religion’s concept of the afterlife,” Schur tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I did a lot of research.”

After perusing various theological studies and treatises on holy documents, “I stopped doing research because I realized it’s about versions of ethical behavior, not religious salvation. The show isn’t taking a side, the people who are there are from every country and religion.”

In fact, the pilot goes out of its way to demonstrate a United Nations of characters and belief systems. The idea, Schur said, is that “not only Christians from Europe can make it to heaven.”

He makes the point early on, in dialog between Kristen Bell (House of Lies, Veronica Mars) and Ted Danson (Fargo, Cheers) — as Eleanor Shellstrop and Michael (no last name, just Michael, like the archangel), respectively.

“It is very flatly stated that this is not any one religion,” Schur says. “There’s a line when Kristen says to Ted, ‘Who was right about all this, the Hindus, Buddhist, Muslims? And he says every religion got it about 5% right.” Now, in 1986 that line would have gotten strong pushback. (Today,) no one ever said a world about that line.”

A tip: don’t use the R-word in discussing the show with its creator, and don’t ascribe even quasi-religious underpinnings to its premise. “Spiritual and ethical is how I thought of it,” Schur says.

The premise is that Eleanor is not a kind or virtuous person; she’s mean, selfish and has been sent to “the Good Place” by mistake. Her assigned soulmate will endeavor to teach her to be a better person.

“When Eleanor is working hard to become better, she’s reading more philosophy than religion,” Schur says.

Not that Schur himself hasn’t read and absorbed both philosophy and religion. He’s glad to chat about the individual sects he’s specifically not writing a comedy about. “Jews have a lot of rules for behavior, but you don’t start out in a hole. In Hinduism, with karma, you’re slowly working your way up a chain … That’s all in the background.”

In the first couple of episodes, he said, viewers will see people from every continent and every tradition represented in the afterlife, which is divided into neighborhoods. “A Sikh, Hispanic Christians …

Ted is in charge of this neighborhood. There will be some investigation of the power structure [and] you’ll get to see a sense of where he fits in his own hierarchy.”

The pilot was shot in Pasadena’s Huntington Gardens, which, Schur said, already had the feeling of a pastiche of different cultures.

The Good Place amounts to a colorful neighborhood, with all types of people representing all manner of creeds, faiths and opinions. They have different belief systems and the show finds humor in all and none of them. Just don’t call these neighbors religious.

The Good Place premieres Monday, Sept. 19, at 10 p.m. ET/PT on NBC before moving to its regular time slot on Thursdays at 8:30 p.m. starting Sept. 22.

Mike Schur

September 14, 2016 8:30am PT by Joanne Ostrow

Richard Foreman/FOX

Two decades after getting his start in Hollywood, the ‘Rectify’ favorite steps further into the limelight in the role made famous by Mel Gibson. Here, he talks with THR about his career trajectory and initially passing on the Fox reboot.

When it came time to cast Fox’s forthcoming Lethal Weapon reboot, the executive producers knew the role of Martin Riggs was a crucial piece of the puzzle.

The role, indelibly played by Mel Gibson in the original film franchise, was “unbelievably hard to cast,” executive producer Matt Miller tells The Hollywood Reporter. During auditions, “a lot of people were doing a poor man’s Mel Gibson.” Adds director and executive producer McG: “We saw every actor in town.”

During that search, McG stumbled on an indie film — Baytown Outlaws, a 2012 Southern redneck action flick trashed by critics and starring Clayne Crawford. Before even finishing the screening (he never did), McG says Crawford demonstrated that “he has verbal acuity, he’s masculine, he’s a wild thing, I believe him. He’s got some pain. He satisfied the criterion.”

McG soon met with Crawford. Although he said “all the right things,” as the director recalls, there was one slight problem: “Clayne didn’t want to do it.”

Crawford, as it turned out, was very happy in Alabama working on his family farm. After nearly two decades in Hollywood, the lure of show business had become quite resistible.

“He’s been there,” McG says. “He’s been the hot new shiny thing in Hollywood for a minute. He was very reticent to jump onboard.”

Since he moved to Los Angeles right out of high school in 1996, Crawford estimates he clocked “probably 100 guest roles” on shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, CSI, NCIS and The Glades, as well as films like A Walk to Remember and Swimfan to earn a living.

He won a Young Hollywood Award and was named “One to Watch” back in 2003. However, widespread fame never followed. Instead, Crawford found critical, if not commercial, success with a series regular role on the acclaimed Sundance TV drama Rectify, now in the midst of its fourth and final season.

“I was not in a place to read anything new,” Crawford says of why he initially passed on Lethal Weapon. “I really wanted to give Rectify its final season. I wasn’t interested in a remake.”

From his work as Teddy on Rectify, the producers judged him to be “very soulful,” as Miller puts it, and felt convinced Crawford’s “authenticity” made him the right man for the role.

“He’s a special find,” McG says. “A very earnest actor.”

After Crawford passed, Fox Television Group chairman and CEO Dana Walden urged him to reconsider and the actor excused himself to “go to the mountaintop” and think it over.

“He disappeared for six hours,” McG says. (He assumes the actor climbed Mount Wilson in the San Gabriels above L.A.) “Dana Walden was having a heart attack. He comes back down and says, ‘I’ll do it.'”

“They sold me,” Crawford said.

Once he sat down with Damon Wayans, already cast as Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover’s part in the movie), it felt right. “We got on set, and something just clicked,” Crawford says. “It goes to his willingness to leave his ego at home.”

Crawford also credits Miller with writing an “incredible” script. “All you had to do is show up and give the material its justice,” he says. “Then you have McG, his energy just feels so right in this world. He’s so good at making things go boom but at the same time he can bring it down and really ground it — that was the surprise of the pilot, how emotional we became.”

Similar to the film, the series kicks off with Riggs reeling from the death of his wife, and in this case, also their unborn child.

“I wanted it to be about a guy who is genuinely broken,” Miller says of the series, as opposed to the giddy bromance that famously evolved between the characters in the subsequent sequels.

Crawford stressed that he has not watched the Lethal Weapon films again so as not to be influenced in his performance. Actors are natural mimics, he says.

“It’s been so long since I’ve seen those films … but they still resonate with me. You can’t forget those moments because [Gibson] was so good,” he says. “As an actor, I knew the trap because I watch people in my life … if I watch someone play the role I’m about to play, I’m going to steal everything he’s got.”

His goal is to achieve a fresh take— “only out of 100 percent respect for Mel Gibson. It was lightning in a bottle for godsakes.”

The only way he could take on such an iconic role is to imagine a blank slate: “You have to trick yourself. I read the material as if I’m reading it for the very first time.”

While it aims to be cinematic, the TV version necessarily has a different vibe than the original.

“It was an R-rated 1987 film, when you could clearly push the bar,” Crawford says, in terms of profanity, drugs, sex and violence. “This is primetime. The family is just sitting down to dinner,” he says. “It has to be something my children could watch.”

“I couldn’t go straight to the wall with this badass crazy, lunatic character. I had to slowly build this guy from a place of sadness. We’ll get to that place of complete chaos, but right now we have to see this guy from a very sad, confused place,” Crawford says. “If I go for it off the bat, people are going to be exhausted after six episodes.”

Crawford is taking the same slow-and-steady approach off-screen. He is now moving his family (including his younger kids, ages 9 and 4) from his family’s longtime hometown of Clay (population 9,711) to Los Angeles, where the series films. “We’ll home-school and see how this whole thing goes.” (His 18-year-old daughter, however, is staying in Alabama, minding the farm and tackling medical school.)

“It’s hard to leave the tranquility of farm life,” and his bee boxes, cows, chickens and more. “I can always sit on my farm when I’m in my 60s,” Crawford says.

And so, at 38, he’s about to be the hot, shiny new thing in Hollywood yet again. He leaves behind his hometown, where his family has lived since the late 1800s and where, he says, nobody cares about his career.

“My buddies got a good laugh about me being ‘discovered,'” he says. “In some ways, it is justified.”

So how does he get his head around the idea that he is starring in one of the highest-profile freshman shows of the season, with a presold title, paired by the network on Wednesdays with broadcast TV’s biggest drama in Empire?

His defenses are in place.

“I don’t put too much stock in any of it,” Crawford says. “It’s a ratings game, so if our numbers drop … they’ll kick us off the air pretty quick.”

Crawford laughs at the idea that, after decades in the business, he’s suddenly arrived. He cites the adage, “it takes 20 years to be an overnight success.”

For now, he’s taking it “one scene at a time.”

Lethal Weapon premieres Wednesday, Sept. 21 at 8 p.m. on Fox.

Rectify Lethal Weapon

September 13, 2016 9:30am PT by Joanne Ostrow

Ron Batzdorff/NBC

Brown in ‘This Is Us’

“Yes, I’ve been pulled over a few times. DWB, driving while black, questioned for being in the wrong neighborhood, profiled a few times in New York, it happens. It’s real,” he says.

In his breakout performance as Chris Darden in FX miniseries The People v. O.J. Simpson, veteran actor Sterling K. Brown attracted critical acclaim and significant public notice along with an Emmy nomination. Next up, Brown has NBC’s highly anticipated drama This Is Us, which may (finally) be setting the actor up to become a household name. 

Count him another “overnight sensation” long in the making. “It’s an interesting phenomenon after having done this for 15 years,” Brown tells The Hollywood Reporter.

The actor’s long résumé includes all seven seasons of Lifetime’s Army Wives, recurring roles on The CW’s Supernatural and CBS’ Person of Interest, in addition to guest roles in dozens of primetime dramas. Most recently, he appeared onstage at Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum in the Suzan-Lori Parks play Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) as a Civil War-era slave. But now he has arrived in a bigger way thanks to his performance as Darden in Ryan Murphy’s critical darling anthology.

To hear Brown tell it, nothing previously gave him the opportunity to flex the acting muscles “that Chris Darden allowed me to do on a grand scale.”

He’s the first to note the FX project was a rarity. “Everything is not as sexy and doesn’t catch the zeitgeist the way the O.J. Simpson series did,” he says of the series that has since kicked off a true-crime spree on broadcast, cable and streaming services that has included other O.J. projects.

While Brown says he’s “thankful for the last 15 years,” he’s “eager to see what the next 15 bring.” But first, the future brings a rich role in This Is Us, Dan Fogelman’s (Galavant) family drama in which race is again at the forefront.

The story “can’t help but be about race and socioeconomics,” he says. No spoilers, but his character Randall is “devoid of his culture…something we will focus on throughout the course of the show.”

But just as Darden was regarded by some as disloyal to the black community in prosecuting Simpson, Brown’s Randall in This Is Us is a wealthy, suburban, fancy-car-driving financial professional who is disconnected from black culture. When viewers meet him, he has little sympathy for his drug-addicted black father.

Beyond the drama’s concern with race relations, “what intrigues me about Randall are the parallels with me in my personal life,” Brown says, noting a few key similarities he has with Randall. The character lost his dad as an infant and is hoping for some connection as an adult; and Brown’s father passed away (of a heart attack) when the actor was 10. Randall is married with two young daughters; “I’m currently married with two young boys,” Brown says. “I point to the things within myself that help me into Randall.”

The desire to share one’s children with their grandparents is a primal wish of any parent. “The experience would be that much richer. Randall has so much going for him, but at the same time there’s something missing that drives him,” he continues. “There is something for me, having lost my father, that always gets me at my core. It’s about knowing where you came from and how that informs who you are.”

And taking on the emotional weight of that character “is going to be a very full experience.” Brown believes TV has a responsibility to deal with the issue of race relations, to further the difficult national discussion, beyond offering sheer entertainment: “Any great art is meant to illuminate the human condition. I hope our show is able to both have a realistic conversation about the current state of affairs and suggest a way forward that doesn’t keep us in the status quo.” 

Commenting on this summer’s violence by police against unarmed black men, Brown says, “race is a problem; it has been from the very beginning. You should enjoy what you’re watching but should also be educated by it.”

Simply put, “the humanity that is given to other people isn’t given to us. There is an expendability that comes along with being African American,” he says, citing history from slavery to the characterization of blacks as 3/5 man, to the Jim Crow and miscegenation laws. “The ascent toward equal and full rights is ongoing and will probably be so for quite some time.”

He observed that daily life is more dangerous for him and his sons because of prevailing racism. “Yes, I’ve been pulled over a few times. DWB, driving while black, questioned for being in the wrong neighborhood, profiled a few times in New York, it happens. It’s real,” he says. “For me, this has been this engrained thing, putting people at ease so they can recognize they have nothing to fear. Seeing women cross the street, hold their purses a little tighter, you aren’t given benefit of doubt.” 

He credits his faith with keeping him from becoming bitter about the inequity. “I’m a spiritual person, I do believe in a higher power, I believe God placed me on this planet to be a beneficial presence. You can have righteous indignation, but I have to believe there is a light at end of tunnel. Things can get better,” he says. “I choose to believe there’s something better waiting for me, if not for me, then for my children, if not for my children, then for my children’s children.”

He recognizes the power of television to move the discussion forward and effect social change: “Think how instrumental Norman Lear was in holding that mirror up to society.”

Although it’s early in production, Brown is quick to praise his current auteur, This Is Us creator and showrunner Fogelman. “Fogelman is a beast of a writer. He gives everybody meat and potatoes, you may have parsley in one or two scenes, but then back to the real meat.… The show wears its heart on its sleeve,” Brown continues. “It doesn’t shy away from emotions, at the same time, it has a biting wit.” In the pilot, he notes, Fogelman dares to skewer the inanity of the very medium his show is appearing on: network television.

“Dan is trying to do highbrow cable, like HBO, for network television,” he says of the producer, who also has Fox’s groundbreaking drama Pitch due this month. 

Brown recognizes his career arc is a familiar story, as a long-striving actor the public has only lately discovered. “I feel great. It’s an amazing thing to be in the middle of — the fact that I’ve had this kind of recognition,” he says. “O.J. opened the door for This Is Us, the access to opportunity has widened, doors are becoming open.” 

As he heads toward the Emmys, and the Sept. 20 premiere of This Is Us, the doors are wide open. Brown will appear in two movies in the coming months, Marshall — about young Thurgood Marshall, due later this year — and Split, in 2017, from M. Night Shyamalan.

” ‘Breakout’? It’s a label. I don’t even know how to qualify it. Whether it’s ‘overnight’ after 15 years or whatever, I’m happy to be in this moment, eager to see what happens next,” he says.

When asked about his advice for other veteran actors still searching for their People v. O.J. Simpson-like breakout role, Brown turns back to his faith, and patience — both things the actor is very familiar with.

“I’d say to my journeymen actor friends waiting for their breaks, don’t doubt yourself. It’s the right audition on the right day, the right project at the right time,” he says. “There were so many different factors that conspired for this break-through to transpire. So much of this journey is a self-selecting process.”

“If you believe in yourself, take care of your instrument — not to sound too highfalutin’ — take care of your spiritual self, good things will come.”

This Is Us premieres Tuesday, Sept. 20, at 10 p.m. on NBC.

This Is Us