Dulé Hill sees ambitions become reality on Suits
When he was a teenager, actor Dulé Hill’s plan was to be a corporate lawyer. By a fortuitous turn of events, he got his wish — sort of. Hill plays attorney Alex Williams, an ambitious senior partner at the law firm Pearson Specter Litt in USA’s Suits, which is back for its eighth season.
Hill’s teenage whim soon passed. After all, he had attended dance school at three. By the time he was 10, he was performing in The Tap Dance Kid. “Growing up I’ve done a lot of shows, dancing in theatre and on Broadway a couple times,” he says.
“And I had a desire to expand out and to continue a career. In this day and age it’s hard to have a career as a tap dancer. I really love the art form, but at the age of 15 I made the choice: I wanted to pursue acting. It wasn’t necessarily one over the other, I just wanted to become an actor.”
He landed his first acting role when he was 13. “I played a basketball boy on the show Ghostwriter. I had about two lines. That’s how I got my SAG card and did commercials too.”
When an agent offered to represent him, his parents — Jamaican immigrants — were cool with the idea. “They said as long as I wanted to, I could do it. And whenever I didn’t, I didn’t have to. When I wanted to stay home and play with my friends, I stayed home.”
By the time he was 17 he’d snagged his first feature film,
Sugar Hill, and began to take his career seriously. By then, all thoughts of jurisprudence was gone.
He worked in New York not far from his home in New Jersey, but occasionally he’d trek to Los Angeles for auditions. “If I had to come out and test, my mom would fly out with me … We’d come out all excited, and I’d go back all disappointed. It was just part of the journey. You pick yourself up and keep going toward it,” he shrugs.
“The only time I thought about possibly quitting acting was when I moved to L.A. and I went for about a year without booking a job. It’s not a long time, but when you’re on your own, it is a long time. At that point I made up my mind. I was going to be an actor or spend the rest of my life trying. From there things began to improve,” he says.
Unlike many actors, Hill is savvy to the business end of show biz. “I’ve always liked business,” he says. “It’s always a chess match. As long as you know what’s going on, you have to navigate yourself through it. I don’t take it personally. I understand it was business. It is what it is.”
What it is sometimes is waiting for the chance. And Hill’s big chance came in 1999 when he auditioned for the part of the president’s personal aide in The West Wing.
“I read twice for that role, but had gone a year without working just about,” he recalls.
“Then I read for [executive producers] Aaron Sorkin and Tommy Schlamme once, and came back and read again. I was guaranteed four episodes, so my screen test was my first four episodes.”
By the time the show premièred, the producers had made Hill a regular. “I did seven seasons of the show. It changed the direction of my career,” he says.