Training anchors Shalita Grant role
LOS ANGELES — While you’ve been making bad sourdough and binge-watching “Tiger King,” Shalita Grant has used her time indoors to develop a more distinctive pastime.
“One of the rooms in my house is a pole-dancing studio. I take advantage of my right as a Californian, and I smoke some weed, and I go in there and I dance it out. I have all these lights in there,” Grant says by phone from her home in Los Angeles. “I just have a blast,” she says, squealing with delight.
Grant has brought the same exuberance to her role in the third season of “Search Party,” the bitingly funny, genre-bending dark comedy-noir about a clique of Brooklyn hipsters who wind up semi-accidentally killing a private investigator. She plays Cassidy Diamond, the rookie lawyer representing accused killer Dory (Alia Shawkat) in a high-profile trial. She’s working pro bono in exchange for the media exposure. The one catch? It’s also Cassidy’s first case.
With vocal fry to rival the Kardashians, Cassidy struts around the courtroom in corsets, sky-high heels and neon pink nails. As overconfident as she is inexperienced, she treats Dory more like a celebrity than an accused killer.
After waiting nearly three years for the return of “Search Party,” which moved from TBS to HBO Max, fans cheered Cassidy’s addition to the ensemble of self-involved millennials. Even opposite comedy veterans such as Michaela Watkins and Louie Anderson, Grant, 31, is a chronic scenestealer, taking a character that might have been an easy punchline and turning her into something sharper, more idiosyncratic and, in the end, funnier.
Cassidy’s distinctive manner of speaking was always part of the character, envisioned by showrunners Charles Rogers and Sarah-Violet Bliss as “the ‘girl boss’ CEO of a company you’ve never heard of — somebody that had, like, a cutthroat ambition but is always trying to hide their vulnerability,” says Rogers. The part proved surprisingly difficult to cast. “People wanted to just play to the vapid side of the character,” Bliss adds, “but Shalita brought in the depth and the vulnerability of Cassidy — and then some.”
As contemporary as Grant’s performance in “Search Party” feels, its brilliance is rooted in her classical training. The actress attended the Juilliard School, where among other things she learned about “the larynx and the pharynx, the vocal folds and how they make sounds.”
While Cassidy, with her lavishly girlie outfits and lessthan-authoritative demeanor, could have easily been cast with an Elle Woods clone, that Grant is a woman of color — and gay — added more dimension to Cassidy.
“We didn’t want to fall into too familiar territory with (the character),” says Rogers. “A lot of what makes Shalita the perfect Cassidy is that she isn’t somebody who has vocal fry. She’s also gay, and she’s playing a hyper-feminine person, and she innately has this outside viewpoint into this type of character that was able to bring nuance that other people would take for granted. We leaned on her a ton to bring that to its full potential.”