Sterling K. Brown

This Is Us is about the Pearson family: Jack and Rebecca, their twin children, Kate and Kevin, and their adopted African American son, Randall. When Randall is 36, he locates his biological father, William, who is dying of cancer. Randall, played by Sterling K. Brown, must deal with the ensuing onslaught of feelings—anger, resentment, acceptance and love, all the while supporting his own family. Brown, who won an Emmy for best supporting actor for his performance as Christopher Darden in The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, won the best dramatic actor Emmy for his role as Randall.

WS: To what do you attribute the success of This Is Us?
BROWN: I think it unifies people. We can all agree that family and connection are of the greatest importance. While we may differ politically and on many fronts, we all love family. We all recognize the need for community and we all know that we are doing the best that we can with whatever place we are in life. [In the show] we have a bunch of 30-year-olds trying to figure out the next step. Everybody can recognize that it’s a pivotal time; there are big choices that can change the course of your life.

WS: What appealed to you about the character of Randall?
BROWN: First of all, the script was outstanding. The pilot for this show was one of the best pilots for network television that I had read in some 16 years. And Randall has this gigantic heart. Even when he wanted to release 36 years [of pent-up] venom and bile toward William, his biological father who abandoned him, and he ends up doing that, Randall didn’t realize his need for connection. While he wanted to tell this man off, what he really wanted was to know who he was and enfold him into his life. So for me, not having had my father for 30 years now—he passed away when I was 10—the need to connect with fathers has always been strong for me. Stories about fathers and sons resound in my soul in a very real way.

WS: How does Randall feel as an African American being raised by a white family in a white community and being successful in a predominantly white world? Is that something that he struggles with?
BROWN: Absolutely. I think he counts his blessings; he recognizes the love of his mother and father, brother and sister, while simultaneously feeling like a fish out of water. When you look around, and the images that are reflected back at you are not images that resemble you, you can’t help but feel like an outlier. So Randall is always appreciative but also simultaneously searching and thirsty to find where exactly he belongs. He’s had a very fractious relationship with his brother. He goes to a predominantly white school so, culturally speaking, he’s trying to find touchstones. He would push his parents to go to the swimming pool that had the black section so he could see people that looked like him. It’s a tough road to navigate for all people who are the products of transracial adoption. But it’s one that you figure out as you go along.

WS: You played Christopher Darden, a person who exists in real life, while Randall is a fictional character. What are the differences between playing someone who exists, and is still alive, and playing a fictional character?
BROWN: I was always very conscious of the fact that Christopher Darden is alive, living in the same city that I’m living in and still practicing law. He’s no longer in the DA’s office, he’s in private practice as a defense attorney, but I could run into him at any time. It was really important to me that if and when he saw the performance, he could recognize at least a glimmer of himself in what I was trying to bring to the table. I wanted to do him proud. I don’t know if he’s watched the show, and we haven’t spoken. And I’m not sure he has or not, but that was always at the forefront of my mind. So there was a lot of research, reading his book, reading Jeffrey Toobin’s The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson, watching as much footage as possible of the trial, interviews, anything that I could devour. It wasn’t necessarily to do an imitation of Christopher Darden but to find the essence of who he was and try to bring that across.

Randall is much more from my imagination. He’s much closer to who I am as a person. He’s not me; I would say he’s the best of me. And [his] pursuit of [being] the best often leads to him shutting down for a while because perfection is not something that can be attained. I have a little brother and a little sister who are adopted. I’ve seen firsthand how my mom loves them, and how my biological brothers and sisters love them, but my adopted brother and sister can still feel sometimes like they have to work a little bit harder for affection, even though they don’t have to. You can tell they feel they have to work harder for the affection of their loved ones because, from their perspective, there’s already been a person who has not wanted them. So I try to infuse Randall with that hunger to be wanted and to be loved, and he doesn’t take it for granted. He works very hard to make himself the “perfect” child. I do think that Rebecca and Randall have a very special relationship. It took her a while to grow toward him. So the love that she shared with him, he absolutely cherishes. The betrayal that he felt, knowing that she knew who his birth father was but didn’t tell him, hit him at his core. He’s also a much more emotionally varied person [than Christopher Darden]. Randall goes to extreme highs and extreme lows, at least through the course of season one. So while there was no vocal cadence to attain or mannerisms to try to latch onto, just allowing him to have the breadth of his emotional life was exhausting! He can be so happy and then, because he allows himself to feel as much as possible, he also allows his heart to break, such as when he lost William.

WS: How did you feel about Darden before taking on the role, and did your opinion change as you did your research and as you were shooting?
BROWN: My judgment was harsh. With the vast majority of black America, I was firmly on the side of the defense. I can tell you now, I don’t even know if it was a question of whether or not O.J. was innocent or guilty—it was a matter of seeing someone who looked like me have the criminal justice system work for them rather than against them. Unfortunately, I should say, the deaths of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson were afterthoughts to me, in terms of the injustice that black folks had experienced at the hands of [the justice system. However,] being entrenched on the side of the prosecution team and looking at the evidence and the brutality of the murders, you can’t help but recognize that the prosecution was trying to speak up for those who could no longer speak for themselves. This case should not have been about race. It should have been about the facts, about the DNA evidence and the history of domestic violence [between] O.J. Simpson and Nicole Brown Simpson.

So I changed from thinking that Christopher Darden was a sellout, an Uncle Tom and a race traitor, to recognizing him as a man of principle, who believed in the evidence, who believed in the case and stuck that case out to the end. And he didn’t have to. He had a lot of different things going on in his life. He had his daughter living in the Bay Area, whom he wasn’t able to visit as much as he would have liked to. He had a brother dying from AIDS in the midst of the trial, whom he wasn’t able to spend as much time with as he would have wanted to. So the fact that he was able to persevere to the end was a testament to his belief system and also a reason why, still to this day, the trial haunts him more than it does any other member of the prosecution.

WS: Tell us about your upcoming movie Marshall. Will that also shed light on race relations and explain events from the past that we didn’t know about?
BROWN: Absolutely. Marshall focuses on the young life of Thurgood Marshall [played by Chadwick Boseman], who went on to become our first African American Supreme Court Justice. But way before that, he was the lawyer for the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People]. He would go around the country looking to defend African Americans who he felt had been falsely accused. He was also trying to make a name for the NAACP and show that it was there to protect and serve people. He finds a man by the name of Joseph Spell [who I play], who is accused of the rape and attempted homicide of one Eleanor Strubing, a socialite in Connecticut, played by Kate Hudson. We don’t know at the beginning if Joseph is innocent or guilty. He’s not a perfect person. He has a sordid history, but he claims that he did not commit the crimes that he is being accused of. We go through the course of the film trying to figure out if Joseph is telling the truth or not. Is Eleanor Strubing telling the truth? Where exactly does the truth lie? Thurgood Marshall winds up trying this case alongside a young Jewish lawyer by the name of Sam Friedman, because the judge does not allow Thurgood to try the case alone because he hasn’t passed the Connecticut bar exam.

It’s a wonderful case, a real-life case, and one that I did not know about. To see the dedication of Thurgood Marshall traveling all across the United States looking to defend men—he doesn’t know if they are necessarily innocent or guilty, but he’s trying to give them the best defense that is available when the chips are stacked against them—reminds me that the story of African Americans is the story of perseverance. It’s a story of achieving in spite of. It infuses me with a great deal of pride that, even when things aren’t necessarily working to your advantage, you can still overcome. I feel very much that that is at the center of this story. I hope people enjoy it. I think it’s really important and really good.