Everything Girl

Our Man of the Moment for April, Eamonn Walker, is probably best known to American audiences from the HBO series OZ, and the movie Cadillac Records but his body of work is actually pretty extensive, and includes stage, tube, and screen work. His new show Kings premiered on NBC two weeks ago, and he took time out of a personal trip to Grenada to chat with us about the show, his work on OZ, and his general approach to his craft.

Tell our readers a little bit about yourself. Where are you from? Did you plan to be an actor? Was it something you always wanted?
First of all, I’m born in London. My parents are from Grenada. (Well, my mother’s from Trinidad and my Dad’s from Grenada.) Which is why I’m here. To find my Dad’s side – I know Trinidad well.

I from a very early age wanted to be an actor, although I didn’t call it that when it first happened. It was after the film In the Heat of the Night - Sidney Poitier. I was nine years old. It struck a very deep chord in me. I knew I wanted to do something like that. Be him, probably. But – ah – it resonated, and you know, I asked mother at the time. She didn’t know how to go about it. She, in actual fact, tried lots of different avenues. Good mum she was, but she couldn’t make it come about.

I was a dancer for a bit, which was the first thing, and you know, by the time I came conscious I wasn’t really thinking about it.

And then…and then…when the dancing thing went away through an accident with my leg, I was - The Stage, which is a newspaper for actors, in London – it’s like Variety here – was put in front of me by Christine, and Christine said, “Stop being depressed about your leg not working. Go out there. You can do this.” And I was being a barman at the time. And I started chase – well, that’s when I really started chasing it.

And Christine is… ?
Christine…Oh! Christine is the person I was seeing at the time I was a young person. So, but, I will always remember her for doing that. She’s - she holds that place in my heart. Sort of pulling my hand up and saying, “Come on! Get up!”

That’s wonderful. And so, you were a barman?
So I was a barman, and than I started chasing it. Yeah. And eventually it took over. This acting thing. It wasn’t - there was no room for anything else. There never is. It’s all-consuming.

Something is all-consuming when it’s something you’re passionate about, isn’t it?
Oh, yeah. Well, I, yes, you know, I can – I can become obsessive about most things. Now, the way I work, I do my research, because I have to change myself so completely for some of the parts I play, my obsessive nature is now an asset. It helps now.

I believe you originally started in the theatre?
Yes. At the Albany Empire, in London. They were the first people to give me a job.

How was the transition going from stage to small and big screen? And which do you prefer?
There is no preference. It’s like: if someone said to you, “Would you like to be in a car, or a helicopter, or in a plane?” You wouldn’t turn around and say, “I have a preference.” You would say, “I like them all for different reasons.”

So that’s kind of what it’s like for stage, TV and film. The techniques are very different for them all, but the truth in the heart is the same. But the demands are different, and so trying to master any one of them can take you a lifetime. So…I don’t really have a preference.

The difference between going between them initially, I would say for every actor, is frightening. When you go from acting on stage, which is, primarily the best way to describe it is, everything’s quite big. Your movements, your voice – everything is huge. And then, you know, to television, you have to have the same emotion, but you can’t do that kind of big gestures. As they say, in England – they used to say, “You have to reach the gods.” The people and the gods have to see and understand and know every single movement and what it means, but the people in the front can’t be bowled over by it. So it’s a difficult thing to balance.

When you move into TV, it’s an unblinking eye. The TV can have multi-cameras, all going at the same time, and they can all be unblinking. In the movie it’s just one camera, many, many, many set-ups. I mean, I love it – now – but at the time, I remember, when I was making the transition between them I was quite frightened I wasn’t prepared to do it. Does that make sense?

That makes perfect sense. Now…I know you said you were born in London. Where do you make your home now?
My home is London. Where I work most of the time, is in America.

I understand that. If you know the United States very well – I have always lived in Texas but, I worked in D.C. all last year. You know, just came home every two or three weeks.
I came home for a week – I’ve been home for a week in the last four months. So, you know, that’s - but I got home.

You had a large body of work under your belt before you did the show OZ. What are your favorite things you did prior to that?
Oh, prior to that. I’ve been really, really lucky. I’ve had some really wonderful experiences, and some really good people in my life. And some of them are still there, because of the experiences of a play or a TV show. The one that comes immediately to mind is Pecong.

Pecong was basically a West Indian version of Medea, and I think it was my first time where I understood – or felt – the airwaves move in the room. That’s the best way to describe it. The audience and the actors were one. And all of those actors, still, we’re in deep contact with each other. The girl who played my sister in it, I still call my sister, and we’ve been doing it so long now everybody just goes, “oh I’m the other brother or sister,” but it actually started during the play. So there’s times like that.

I’ve done a lot of work, as you say, and had some good experiences, but OZ was the first time where – after that – where the same thing happened. Everybody in OZ still talks. We are a family. Still. Constantly contacting one another about our careers and so forth – calling to talk through technical problems, like how to get through a scene. So we’re all still going.

OZ was an ensemble piece, and I know that some of the actors I’ve talked to have different perspectives about working on HBO series, which seem to be more aggressive, and giving the writers and producers more latitude. Is that how you felt about OZ?
I would say, especially at the time, HBO had a lot of courage, and was in the area of creating something new. You know, “it’s not TV; it’s HBO,” because it was different, and nothing like it at the time, and I’m always saying, you know, about those days, and to Tom Fontana. It wasn’t just ground-breaking. We changed American television, and what was acceptable on it. It was because, with HBO, the rules didn’t apply. They normally apply to network, but cable didn’t have any rules at the time, so it was all as a new frontier. It was all being done there and then.

I wouldn’t necessarily term it as aggressive – or that it was more aggressive than some of the stuff that was on network, it’s just that they would have to cut certain things early on, or soft-soap it, or… but the intention that all of those writers and actors and directors were trying to get to was the same place where we were going, it’s just that they weren’t allowed to, because of the rules and the regulations that were there.
So…HBO not having any of those rules and regulations we could be and do more truthful, believable – dig deeper, go to the taboo subjects, talk about things that people didn’t like to talk about, or were scared to talk about. And we handled and tackled all of that and, because the writing was so excellent, Tom Fontana didn’t deliver any messages that he thought you should be thinking.

What he did, is he raised questions about who we are as human beings, under the umbrella of a prison, so you could turn around and say, “That’s not me,” but in actual fact it was you he was talking about, because everything that happened out there in that prison happens on the outside of that prison. You have to remember that those people end up in prison from - they’re outside first. That’s us. But when you stick them in that environment, it’s easy to turn around and go, “They’re animals, they’re criminals, they’re murderers, they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re…” And put it away from yourself and stop looking at you, and what he did, with that wonderful piece of writing and those actors is he said, “Please trust me, and let’s go on an exploration and a journey.” And, um, and we did, all together, which is why that link is there, and he asked us to delve deep within ourselves to pull that stuff out.

So, I wouldn’t turn around and say it was more aggressive or more this, I would say it was more truthful.

At that moment, did you all realize you were getting into something that was that ground-breaking?
Ah – In the very first year – no. In the very first year we were excited by the feeling that was being created, and to give you an example, this doesn’t happen very often, is when somebody was doing a scene, especially a difficult scene - and you know OZ, there were many – one of the things that would happen is the other actors who weren’t in the scene, but because we were a collective and it’s prison so we were all quite present, you know, we would have to be in the back of a scene or be ready to go into the back of the next scene, or whatever, depending upon the angle, but because we knew it was a difficult scene we would all come out, gather around the monitor and be available for said actor (or actors) to get through those moments. And it was like an unseen – it was like a comforting hand on the base of your spine - just there to go, “It’s okay, and if it don’t work, we’ll go again. And it’s all good and if you want to talk about it, I’m here or so-and-so’s there, or if you don’t want to talk about it – if you want to go off in the corner and get there, or if you, you know, you want to tell jokes, or…” It was just so supportive, because what was being demanded of you was so – sometimes – so difficult. And everybody would be there for every scene, watching.

Now most of the time, people go and do their scenes, people wander around, and come and do their moment, and I’ll come and do mine, and it was very different on the set of OZ. Everybody was there, and so what that meant was that there was this trust that could – you could turn around and go, “I don’t know if I felt that,” and it wasn’t just the director, because the directors would come in week in, week out, and they would change, so the consistency was with the other actors, and sometimes with a look you could go, “Yay? Nay?” and they could go, “Try again, and fine-tune it.”

And that has to be why you’re all still so close?
Yeah, ‘cause we were in – we were in jail together. We were all naked together too. You know, there were some scenes where it was “Okay, run around naked.” And you’d hear, “I’m uncomfortable!” “So am I!”

Do you get over that discomfort when you’re working with the same group for so long, or are there still moments when you gasp and go, “I’ve got to take off my clothes again.”
It’s like – you know, if you go to the gym and you’re in the female showers – half the time you’re not thinking about it. But then on occasion you’ll go “Ahh! I’m naked.” The very first time? SCARY!!!!! Very, very scary. But then after a while you’re reading the script and you go, “Oh, I’m being thrown in the Hole. Great. That means I’m naked.” So you just wrap your head around it and you move on, and because the scene was never about you being naked - you know, you would come from some hellish situation – probably beatings someone’s living daylights or all kinds of colors coming up ‘cause someone hit off you and you were bloodied, or there’s something dripping off you – if you delved into the scenario deep enough, you being naked was not on your mind.

You’ve been doing a lot of film work, including some martial arts films, like Blood and Bones and the independent film The Messenger. Tell me a little about those?
Well, Blood and Bones - I’ve done a couple of films for my son, who would turn around and say, “Dad, all the stuff you do, I never get to see,” - because I wouldn’t let him watch OZ for years, and all of his school friends would say, “Oh, it’s great and it’s this,” he was sitting in the house with the DVDs and he wasn’t allowed to watch them.
So he said, “You never do films I can watch.” So the first film I did for him was a film called Duma, and at the time he was twelve., and it was about a boy and a cheetah – a good family movie, but adults can enjoy it, too. And the other one, because I know he loves all the martial arts, was this one, the most recent one, because he likes all that fighting and stuff. We play games together – I’m a gamer with my son.

So Michael Jai White, came along, and Ben Ramsey, and they had this film, and I said, “Oh, I want to do one. I want my son to watch it.” So I picked up this Samurai sword, in this film, and Michael taught me much and there were some guys he was training with who were absolutely amazing with me and got me to a state where I could maybe look like I knew what I was doing. But I’m really excited to see it. It comes out soon.

The Messenger - I had an amazing time with Ben Foster. Oren Moverman put this thing together and in the same way that we used to work on OZ he opened up the floor for discovery and experimentation with the script as the framework and some amazing stuff came out of that, so I haven’t seen the film yet, but I do know, because of the subject matter it will break hearts. I know Sundance were raving about it, all any of us kept on hearing was, “Oh my God, it’s this amazing film.”

And I was like, “Well, we had an amazing time making it.” Because, for me, I call it flying. My friend Laurence Fishburn calls it, “This is how we swing.” There is nothing better, now, and I guess that’s what I’m always trying to reach – is when you and a fellow artist join in that special space of creativity, and you both know it, and you jump off the edge of the precipice into this…area…together, and you don’t know where you’re gonna land. You’ve got the script as the framework, and you just - it’s not about the lines; it’s not about hitting positions. It’s about capturing something in the air and therefore if you capture it right, you know everybody who’s watching it – crew included – will be moved.

When I was on stage with Zoe Tapper, playing Othello and she was Desdemona, the break-up scene just before the death scene was like that almost every night. You can only aim at it, and sometimes you jump and nothing happens and sometimes you jump and magic happens, but there’s no better thing in the world than to try and capture that magic.

Now, you did Cadillac Records, where you got to sing. Is singing something that you’d done before, or did you have to do some special preparation for that role?
Darnell Martin called me up and - I was in London, one of those few times – and she was the first director on OZ, funny enough. She’d done the pilot and the first couple of episodes, so we knew each other from then, but we hadn’t worked with each other since. But this call came in and she was like, “I’m doing this film. How would you like to play Howlin’ Wolf?”

And I was like, “Who is he?” I had no clue who he was. She told me “I’ve written this film, got the director,” and I was like, “Okay…”

Then I said, “Who else is in it?” And she said, “Jeffrey Wright,” and I went “Wow.” Adrien Brody – wow. Beyonce’ – I went “Stop! Where do I sign up?”

So the first thing I did, in London, is I found this jazz singer called Cecelia Starling, ‘cause I realized when I started to do the quick research, which was almost immediately from putting the phone down from Darnell, I went to YouTube and found Howlin’ Wolf, aka Chester Burnette, and found this man with this voice and went, “Oh my God.” He’s from Mississippi. He sounds like he swallowed something terrible. I had to go straight to work, and I didn’t want to lose my voice, because I’ve lost my voice a few times on stage, and there’s nothing like it. So I found this jazz singer to help me – one, sing, and two, keep my voice.

To get his voice, so I could do it take after take after take, and not lose my voice, and also sort of sing like him, but the one thing Darnell said was, “I don’t want you to imitate. We’re trying to capture the essence of the soul of people, but you make him your interpretation, based on the thing you do,” which is a lot of research, and so…oh, to answer your question…

No, that’s great! So, you’ve got an upcoming new series, that’s going to be on NBC in the US, and you’re playing Prophet Samuel in the TV show Kings. Is that a series, or is it a mini-series?
It’s a series. We’ve literally, we finished – wrapped – last week, Friday, and everybody said goodbye. We’ve just done thirteen episodes, very very hard work. Yes, I play prophet Samuel – Reverend Samuel we call him in the show.

Ian McShane is going to be brilliant. You’re going to find a new guy called Christopher Egan - and Sebastian [Stan] – the cast is excellent. The really pulled together a lot of excellent people, and great writers, too, to mold this into something I think people will be fascinated by. It’s going to raise many, many questions.

It starts (started) on the 15th of March, and it’s called Kings, and it’s - in short, if you know your Bible, you’ll love it, but if you don’t know your Bible, it doesn’t matter. But it’s the old testament, and it’s based on Samuels I and II and those people, and the David and Goliath story. It’s the same David that did David and Goliath and then became King David and then wrote psalms.

That’s history – you don’t see any of that. I’m just giving you my – this is my homework.

A lot of actors are very well-read, both for research purposes, and because they do a lot of reading in their off-time as well. What do you do in your off-time? Do you read, play games? Sports?

I do all of the above. I believe if you’re an actor, you’re constantly reading. Between the research – between the scripts – some writer has sat down, done a load of research, come up with a script, and if you’re gonna work on it in any shape or form, unless you’re talking about the auditions (although sometimes it’s helpful for that, and I have done an awful lot of work for an audition at times), you’re always reading. Somebody’s autobiography if it’s someone like Howlin’ Wolf – Chester Burnett – I’m never not reading.

I do like to play games with my son. When I get home, it’s what I have as a kind of routine, a little ritual thing that I do. It’s my way of connecting with him. I go home, and one of the first things I do is I’ll sit on his bed and watch him play a game and let him explain to me what the latest games are. And meanwhile, while he plays, I stare at him and see how much he’s grown [he’s now seventeen] and what’s different, and while I’m doing that, I’m catching up, because, like, four months is a long time and I’m home for a week, so there’ll be quite a few changes, and that’s my time to take it on board, and at some point he’s gonna feel me looking in the back and boring my eyes in the back of his head and he’ll give me a controller. And I’ll be like, “Okay.” And then we play together.

So that’s my gaming extent now, so why and how, and, I mean, I’ve always played, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t play often when I’m not home. I haven’t got the time.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to pursue – if not acting – than another creative field, as a way to live their life and make a living? What would you tell your son?
Well my oldest son is going to do something creative. He’s going to sing. He’s an amazing – he’s got an amazing voice, and what I’m always telling to him is: There will be moments when you have to question one, how good you are, two whether you should be doing it or not, three, whether you can earn a living at it.

So the question that every actor out there has to ask themselves is the same one I ask of my son: Why are you doing it? If you think you’re doing it just for the fame, then that will show up at some point. If you think you’re doing it just for the money, then that will show up at some point. If you’re fortunate enough to be, like so many people I know, where you’ll do it anyway – most actors I know (don’t tell anybody – I know you’re a journalist, but) most actors would do it for free, because they help themselves, because the creative process – that magic that I tried to describe earlier on - is…It’s a drug.

So, you’re always trying to attain the best way of how to do something or how to get somewhere, and those are the unfortunate ones, because then it doesn’t matter. You know, you’re just going to do it anyway. So you have to ask yourself, because it’s going to be very hard on you to be creative and earn a living, because you have to live. So that balance has got to be struck.

Marlena Affleck, and Celine and I, we did a master class the other day at NYU and we were talking to young students, and telling them exactly that. It is a very jealous god. It doesn’t like you to do anything else, and it doesn’t always pay you. And it doesn’t always give you what you think you’re gonna get from it. But the rewards of it – most of them I could never – you wouldn’t be able to ask the right questions for me to go, “Oh, that’s one of them – and that’s one of the rewards,” because we don’t have the time. But I would turn around and say anybody that really has passion for it – you go for it. If you’re faltering, if you’re going to do it for shallow reasons – they’ll be showing up at some point.

What’s next for you? Where can we look for you? Is there anything you’d like to add?
Well, because we’ve literally just finished Kings, and because, you know one of the things I do as an actor is I’m always trying to push myself, because acting’s very cathartic – know thyself, you know? And then you can put stuff out, which is one of the reasons why I’m in Grenada - which is my time, before I go home and I’m Dad, or I have to read another script, or whatever – I’m only here four days., so it’s not long.

But I’m discovering me, and I’m discovering a whole new side of me and my birthright, the birth of my people are here, and, you know, if I’m honest with you, and I’ve been very honest with you a good time, my whole body is tingling with the anticipation of meeting members of my family I’ve never met before.

So, that’s where I’m at right now, not on what script I’m gonna be in next, because we’ve just finished.

Deb Smouse is the Editor in Chief at All Things Girl. Find out more about Deb on our About Page.

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