Photo Source: TNT
TNT’s “Southland” breaks that mold by giving minority performers a chance to showcase their talent in co-starring and guest-starring roles. “There are more minorities on ‘Southland’ than any other show on television,” said John Frank Levey, the show’s casting director.
The one-hour cop drama is shot on location in L.A. and uses actors drawn from the communities it’s set in. Korean, Latino, and African-American performers regularly appear as shopkeepers, witnesses, victims and, yes, criminals. The difference between “Southland” and other cop dramas, where minority actors often find themselves getting busted or put on trial, is that its guest performers are encouraged to improvise.
The show, which began life on NBC before switching to TNT (where it was recently renewed for a fifth season), strives for authenticity, said Levey.
For instance, the series routinely casts former gang members—face tattoos and all—referred by Homeboy Industries, a non-profit organization that puts reformed gang members to work.
Christopher Chulack, John Wells, and Jonathan Lisco, the show's producers, don’t want the “usual suspects,” according to Levey. “They want men and women who look like they belong to the neighborhoods the show takes us to.”
The series will take a chance on an inexperienced performer for a co-starring role (guest-starring spots are more developed) if he or she looks the part, but that doesn’t mean Levey isn’t looking for acting talent, too.
“A lot of parts aren’t gigantic—three-, five-, seven-scene roles—so the authenticity for the casting is important, but they better be good, too, because they’re going up against the series regulars,” said Levey, who also cast costar-heavy series such as NBC’s “ER.”
Cast members Michael Cudlitz, Shawn Hatosy, C. Thomas Howell, Ben McKenzie, and Lucy Liu, who is billed as a special guest star, praised their fellow performers during a "Conversations" event at the SAG Foundation Actors Center on Friday.
McKenzie, who also starred on the FOX series “The O.C.,” said the show is “the best training ground you could possibly have” as an actor and compared it to an improvisation theater troupe.
“You have to allow yourself to be very open, very flexible,” he said. “We’ll literally show up at a location and the entire geography of a scene will be different than it’s scripted. It requires some improvisation.”
McKenzie pointed to a scene in “Integrity Check,” an episode from the show’s fourth season, which was screened for the audience on Friday. He noted that Cudlitz and Liu’s interactions with a racist father demanding swastikas on his son’s birthday cake were mainly improvised.
“It was scripted more or less that way, but nothing like that. There’s so much improvisation going on there,” McKenzie said.
“The work of those guest stars—one-day roles—they came in and they brought it,” he said. “They matched [Cudlitz and Liu] toe-to-toe and that’s an incredible gift.”
He also praised Levey for finding the right actors.
“He’s able to cast the perfect person who is not only right for the part but sophisticated enough as an actor to change on a dime because that’s what we need,” McKenzie said.
Something performers should remember when they show up on the set of “Southland” is to come prepared, the cast members warned. That means having your lines memorized because, as a hard rule, no scripts are allowed on set.
Hatosy, who plays Det. Sammy Bryant on the series, said the drama is “the perfect L.A. show for actors.”
“A lot of times people will audition and they’ll improvise a line…and that’ll end up in the show,” Hatosy said.
Howell, a former child actor, said landing a role on “Southland” was a “real badge of honor” for many actors.
“They want to do good,” he said. “We get a lot of great actors that come on and they bring it. The commitment is there.”
