All eyes on rising star from Canada
Stephan James takes the lead on TV’s Shots Fired
Keep an eye on Stephan James.
The 23-year-old rising star hails from Scarborough, Ont., the starmaking area of Toronto that was also home to Mike Myers, Eric McCormack, Barenaked Ladies and the Weeknd.
Five years ago, he was just another Canadian teen actor trying to make it on Degrassi: The Next Generation. After Degrassi (“a Canadian rite of passage,” he says), he worked his way up the local series ladder on How to Be Indie, The Listener and The L.A. Complex.
He was nominated for a Canadian Screen Award in director Sudz Sutherland’s 2012 feature Home Again and then made a big step up playing civil rights activist John Lewis in Oscar-nominated Selma (2014).
The Book of Negroes followed and then last year, James was cast as American Olympic sprinter Jesse Owens in Race, which earned him another Canadian Screen Award nomination.
Now he’s the guy you can’t take your eyes off of opposite Helen Hunt, Richard Dreyfuss, Stephen Moyer and Jill Hennessy in Shots Fired, a 10-part series premièring Wednesday on Fox and City.
James plays special prosecutor Preston Terry, a hotshot Yale grad parachuted into a potentially explosive murder investigation. He’s paired with a seen-it-all police veteran, Ashe Akino (played by Sanaa Lathan, The Perfect Guy).
The case they’re investigating: an unarmed white college student has been shot in broad daylight by a black police deputy (Tristan Wilds). This brings to light the neglected murder, days earlier, of a young African-American.
Officials with the Department of Justice, along with the governor (Hunt), are counting on coolheaded Akino and Terry to defuse a racial time bomb.
There are echoes of real-life police shootings and as Dreyfuss — who plays a local real estate mogul — told TV critics in Pasadena, Calif., earlier this year: “We shot probably the most current show you’ll ever see ... This is America.”
Husband and wife showrunners Reggie Rock Bythewood and Gina Prince-Bythewood looked at hundreds of actors for the key role of Preston Terry.
The writer/producers needed someone who would not get blown off the screen by Lathan, the commanding film and TV veteran they hand-picked to play Terry’s seasoned police partner.
“Chemistry is hard, you can’t really manufacture it,” says Rock Bythewood.
“The chemistry that he had with Sanaa was just so clear cut. “You know it when you see it.”
The producers were also looking for a young actor who could seem like he was prep-school educated and athletic but also had an edge.
“Sometimes it’s very hard to get all three of those in one. Stephan just kind of walked in the door and just owned it basically.”
James was impressed with the Shots Fired script, as was fellow Canadian Hennessy, who plays the mother of a student gunned down in the pilot.
“You can’t predict anything about the plot, about the characters, which I love,” says the former Crossing Jordan star.