Kedrick Brown stays grounded in Houston while Hollywood calls
Houston actor Kedrick Brown is having his Hollywood moment over the next two weeks.
Viewers will be able to see him in three projects, including two movies and one hit TV series. Hitting theaters and videoon-demand last Friday was “Bayou Caviar,” a drama about a former boxer in which he stars opposite Richard Dreyfuss and Cuba Gooding Jr., who is also making his directorial debut with the film.
On Oct. 16, he’s a guest star on the second episode of the new season of The CW’s hit superhero show, “Black Lightning.” These were preceded by last Tuesday’s DVD release of “Tales From the Hood 2,” the Spike Lee executive-produced sequel to the 1995 horror film “Tales From the Hood.”
“This is the first time I’ve actually ever had this many projects coming out at once,” said Brown, 32, by phone. “It’s kind of a media extravaganza.”
Brown, who has appeared in the TV movie “Surviving Compton: Dre, Suge & Michel’le” and such series as “American Crime,” “Underground,” “Greenleaf,” and “Friday Night Lights,” says these projects are proof that he didn’t need to leave his hometown for presumably greener pastures in Los Angeles.
“One of the things I remember when I was starting, and people were saying, ‘If you don’t move to LA, it’s really not going to happen for you,’ ” said Brown, who studied theater at the University of North Texas in Denton and the University of Houston and is now the theater arts director for the newly built Audrey H. Lawson Performing Arts Magnet Middle School in southwest Houston. “That might work for some people but, I
think, if they want me bad enough, they’ll make sure that it happens.”
He concedes, though, at first he had doubts. “I honestly thought about packing up my stuff and doing like everybody else and moving out to LA. But there was something that just stopped me in my spirit. Something just said, ‘No, you don’t have to do that.’ I recall saying, ‘Well, if I don’t have to do that then something is going to have to pop here because I’m looking around at the film and TV business in Texas and it ain’t poppin’.’ ”
What convinced him to stay was an opportunity to work at the Ensemble Theater in Midtown while he was in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Houston.
“That became my theater home here in Houston, and Eileen Morris, who is the artistic director over the Ensemble, took me under her wing. Eileen was like a second mother to me … in conversations that we would have, it made me more comfortable, and I remember her telling me, ‘Your talents will make room for you. You just have to be patient.’ ”
Now, it seems the patience may be paying off.
“I get the question, ‘Are you going to move out of Houston soon?’ and I tell people all the time, ‘When they stop calling me, I guess I’m going to have to move,’ ” he said. “But, for the moment, it’s working out.”