Hampton ‘Found’ her way to starring role in drama series
While she probably wouldn’t describe herself that way, actor Shanola Hampton is a gambler.
When she and her husband trekked to Los Angeles hoping to launch a career, they had little to go on. “We had $1,000 in our pocket and got an apartment that was $900 a month, and then we just hustled our way through,” she says.
By “hustling” Hampton means she leaned on her experience as a server. All through her struggling years she had been a waiter or a bartender, starting at Applebee’s when she was still in high school. “That’s where the service industry comes in,” she says, “because once you have that talent, you can be a waitress anywhere.”
Choosing to be an actor was also a gamble for Hampton, though she says, “I wish I could say it’s something I chose, but it’s something that really chose me from a very young girl. It was really ordained in my life. It’s a feeling I had when I was 5 years old that this is all I want to do. And what makes me love it now is I feel like I am living my purpose. So all the stuff that comes with it you take because you know you’re doing it for all the right reasons because it’s all you want to do.”
Several years of auditioning or, as she says, “crying in your car,” has brought Hampton the role of her life. She’s starring as Gabrielle “Gabi” Mosley the tough chief of a team who searches for missing people who have been forgotten by society in NBC’s popular series, “Found.”
Though sometimes the going was tough, she never wanted to quit, she says. “There were a lot of disappointments, but I knew this is what I was meant to do. I would ask the universe, ‘God, am I doing the right thing? Am I on the right track? Am I just making this up in my mind?’ And it’s never failed that I would get a Dr. Pepper commercial or something little that I could say, ‘No, no, keep going. Keep moving. This is the right way.’ ”
Arriving where she is today wasn’t easy. Her mother died of breast cancer when Hampton was 16. And her father insisted that his daughters pursue a graduate degree. “My dad is very big on education,” she sighs. “So all my sisters (there are three) they have their doctorates and are in education,” she says.
“It’s very linear. That’s how he sees it: ‘You go to school. You get your doctorate.’ So when you have a child who’s an actress, the only thing he could think was ‘theater bum.’ He thought my husband and I were going to go and be theater bums, and that was going to be my life.”
In spite of the environment at the University of Illinois, which she found difficult, Hampton earned her master’s degree there. And later she proved her father wrong when she snagged the juicy role of the sexy Veronica in “Shameless,” which ran for 11 seasons and established Hampton as an enviable thespian.
The mother of a daughter, 9, and a son, 7, Hampton says the agreement to star in “Found” was a family decision. “We sat down and had a family conversation before I even took the job about what it would look like . ... Once the family agreed on it, I went ahead. If they’d said no, I would’ve said no.”
Hampton manages her demanding jobs as both a mother and actor with the help of her husband, Daren Dukes, who hosts the YouTube series, “The Dallas Cowboy Show.” She’s also keenly organized, she confesses.
“I’m very Type A, which means you could come into my house and run it because everything is on a schedule. As a mom, I shoot in Atlanta, and we live in Los Angeles, so I flew home every weekend to set up for the week for the five months we were shooting. And on their vacations, the children come to Atlanta with me,” she says. “My husband describes me as ‘Shanola is a hands-off parent. Which means: Everybody handsoff. I got it!’ ”