‘This Is Us’ performers Ryan Michelle Bathe and Sterling K. Brown return to Stanford.
Where it all started for married actors Sterling K. Brown, Ryan Michelle Bathe
Sterling K. Brown has said a lot of public “thank yous” recently. In acceptance speeches for the Emmy, Golden Globe and SAG awards he’s won for his portrayal of the lovably earnest Randall Pearson on NBC’s megahit family drama “This Is Us,” Brown has thanked his wife, actress Ryan Michelle Bathe (Yvette on “This Is Us”), whom he met when they were both Stanford University freshmen. He’s He’s praised paid tribute his costars. to Andre Braugher, the last African American to win the Emmy for best actor in a drama 19 years ago. And, with his Golden Globe in hand in January, Brown commended “This Is Us” creator and showrunner Dan Fogelman for bucking the tradition of color-blind casting by writing “a role for a black man that could only be played by a black man.” Brown, 41, visited his alma mater on Friday night, Feb. 9, with another important piece of gratitude to get off his chest. “Harry, you really have no idea what you did. If it weren’t for you coming to find me, I don’t know if I’d even be doing this. I probably would have stuck with the (economics major) thing and gone into investment banking,” Brown told Harry Elam Jr., the Stanford senior vice provost for education who cast Brown and Bathe as freshmen in their first student play, during an onstage conversation in a packed auditorium in the Graduate School of Business. After a nostalgic afternoon on campus with their two sons, 6-year-old Andrew (named after a classmate who died a year after graduation) and Amare, 2, Brown and Bathe clearly enjoyed the nearly two-hour event. They reminisced with Elam and fielded questions from students — who cheered when Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne announced that Brown would be Stanford’s 2018 commencement speaker on June 17. Bathe and Brown, who joked about their on-and-off romance about in 2007, everything before spoke they thoughtfully from got married discovering their shared love of acting to the #MeToo movement and Hollywood’s longoverdue progress on its “diversity problem.”
In 1994, Elam, then a drama professor, came to visit Brown and Bathe’s black culturethemed Ujamaa dorm looking for students to audition for August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.”
“I thought, I did a little acting in high school, I’ll give it a shot,” said Brown.
He was cast as troubled ex-slave Herald Loomis, a part that has vexed older, more experienced actors, but a role Elam said Brown slayed.
“I snuck into the theater to watch him audition,” said Bathe. “I remember thinking, How is this 17-year-old kid transforming into these men? I’d never seen anything like it.”
“I could see right away how gifted they both were,” said Elam. He urged Brown to keep auditioning (much as he later encouraged Issa Rae, creator and star of HBO’s “Insecure”).
Echoing a note he struck in his Golden Globes speech, Brown said, “This was the first time I got to be a character who was specifically African American, and it felt like home.”
Brown and Bathe both went to New York University after Stanford and landed their first professional roles just weeks after graduating.
After six seasons on “Army Wives,” and numerous small movie parts, Brown’s breakthrough came when he played conflicted prosecutor Christopher Darden in “The People v. O.J. Simpson” (for which Brown won his first Emmy).
Once he came to appreciate what a tricky position the district attorney, a native of Richmond, was in, “being the black face of a very unpopular case in the black community, my earlier judgment of him gave way to empathy.
“You can’t play someone and hold them in judgment at the same time.”
The conversation turned serious when Elam asked Bathe, who will be on “Empire” next season, about the challenges facing black women in Hollywood.
“I do think things are changing, but it’s slow,” Bathe said. She listed career indignities that sound all too familiar in this #MeToo moment: “Being pressured to get a weave.”
“Being told by a guy on the ‘Half & Half ’ set I’d have to put out to get anywhere, so I better start with him.”
“Having my manager (Vincent Cirrincione, who has been accused by nine minority women of sexual harassment) tell me to take Stanford off my resume, that ‘this whole smart-girl thing is a turn-off.’ ”
Brown and Bathe took breaks from the conversation to stand up and perform two powerful scenes from Wilson plays “Fences” and “Two Trains Running.”
The audience was silent watching them slip into the weighty material and then back out to high-five each other and resume taking questions.
A sophomore girl thanked Brown for his Golden Globes speech about inclusion and asked, “Is diversity really increasing in Hollywood?”
“So much television before was about washing away specificity so you don’t offend or alienate anyone, and I think that is starting to change,” he said. “When a story’s well told, you find that everyone finds themselves within a person, whether he’s black or Latino or whatever.
“I am most excited right now for ‘Black Panther,’ ” said Brown to loud applause. He plays N’Jobu in the Marvel blockbuster opening Friday, Feb. 16.
“Being on the set of this $200 million production and seeing 20 trailers lined up, and in each one of them is a black actor, I thought, ‘Are they really going to do this?’
“I can’t wait to see how it performs here and overseas, hopefully smashing that old paradigm (of black films only having domestic success) — and then the floodgates will start to open.”