CRYING HIS WAY TO FANS’ HEARTS
Sterling K Brown talks about how he became Hollywood’s ‘crying guy’ and why ‘Frozen 2’ needed fixing
Standing outside a Mayfair hotel suite waiting to interview the American actor Sterling K Brown, I hear what sounds like some kind of sports event going on inside: grunting, laughing, cheering. Do I have the wrong door?
No, it turns out that Brown, 43, and Kelvin Harrison, Jr — the 25-year-old who plays his sporty son in the forthcoming indie film Waves — have been talked into doing a shirtless press-up contest by the previous interviewer. Brown wins (narrowly), managing 51 to his co-star’s 50.
About 6-foot tall, he has a way of making everyone around him feel a foot shorter. It’s partly to do with his voice — a hearty, companionable baritone, which he’s lending to the role of a king’s lieutenant in the longanticipated sequel to Frozen.
On its release in 2013, Disney’s animated reworking of The Snow Queen triggered both a box office avalanche (taking more than £1 billion [Dh4.7 billion]) and a touch of frostiness about the fact that all its characters were, as Brown puts it, “a little bit Anglicised” — even those meant to be of indigenous Sami ethnicity.
“It was,” he says, “pretty white the first time around.” In Frozen 2, which is out now, he helps Disney iron out that particular wrinkle by taking the new role of Lieutenant Matthias: he is a soldier who has spent 30 years trapped in a magical forest and,
Brown grins, “the black guy!”.
For now, though, the thing Brown is best known for is welling up on screen. He’s become the master of the slow-burning, tearjerking soliloquy. If you’ve seen any of his performances — which also include his turn as N’Jobu, the assassinated father of Michael B Jordan’s Killmonger in Black Panther — chances are you’ve seen the waterworks in action.
“It has become a bit of a thing,” he concedes. “By and large, people aren’t used to seeing men be emotional ... I don’t have any qualms letting it out.”
Brown took a long while to reach the level of household recognition he now has in the States. After taking an acting degree from Stanford and an MA in performing arts from NYU, he started out in regional theatre, then moved on to recurring TV roles as a vampire hunter in Supernatural, and as an NYPD narcotics cop in Person of Interest.
Everything changed in January 2015 when Brown auditioned for the part of Christopher Darden, the much-reviled assistant prosecutor in the OJ Simpson murder trial, in the first season of Ryan Murphy’s
American Crime Story .Itwasa gift of a role — one of the show’s most shaded and sympathetic, because of the accusations of “race traitor” levelled at Darden when he was simply doing his job.
LIFE CHANGING ROLE
Brown’s beautifully nuanced performance would go on to snag him 2016’s Emmy for Best Supporting Actor — beating his co-stars, John Travolta and David Schwimmer. A voracious TV watcher and long-standing Emmys geek, he couldn’t believe it. “My soul flew out of my body for a second,” Brown says. “And the doors that it opened were crazy. Life changed.”
The very next year, he’d win a second Emmy — and, a year after that, a Golden Globe — this time, for the lead role of anxietyprone councilman Randall Pearson in This Is Us, a then-brandnew show now halfway into its fourth series.
Brown wants to see Hollywood’s storytellers become more diverse, so that “roles become more plentiful for more kinds of people”. And he’s doing his bit to nudge the situation forward.