Courtney B. Vance is no stranger to breathing life into the characters he portrays, and he has achieved this feat once more in his role on The CW’s legal drama 61st Street , which aired its first season on AMC back in 2022. He stars in the series opposite Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor.
As Franklin Roberts, an attorney who agrees to represent a Chicago police officer with the hopes of also placing the corrupt actions of his department on trial, Vance recalls how one of his character’s north stars is the power of community.
“The theme of community … it’ll be tested, that’s for sure,” he told Blavity’s Shadow and Act. “Because we bridged that in the first season. We’re bringing the community together, potentially, with the second phase. The community, when they actually see what the second phase is, that sense of community, they may not — I don’t know if they’ll go with it. In the second season, I’m making a new case about why you all should listen to me and support me and go with me. For the same reason, different case, people may look at it and go, ‘It’s crazy. This case is crazy. This world is getting crazy.’ But, in our form of government, you got to make your case and if you make your case well, you got to trust that people will respond, and so that’s all I’m doing.”
“I’m going to make a case for why I think that the community, the justice system, needs to come my way and not the way of the defense or the way of the prosecution, and so we’ll see. That’s all I can say. That’s all we can say.”
His character’s determination to go after this particular case could cost him everything, but Vance admitted that it is a reflection of sometimes having to “call a spade a spade.”
Vance also recalled a lesson that he learned earlier in his career that he tries to bring along with him in every role.
“I always remember early on someone said, ‘You’re much bigger than any character you’ll play because you’re alive, you’re going forward right now,’” Vance said. “So, Franklin is the main character, but the moment to make him live, to make him be where he is now, is not necessarily where I’ll be in an hour, or, you know, based on who I talk to or how the day goes, I may shift. I’ve got to be open to that person and his or her citation to be able to make that person make that moment, these moments, add up and make them alive. So you go, ‘Wow,’ and that may affect you, the audience, their perception, their point of view about what they feel about things, about life, about people. That’s why I say actors are some of the most courageous people that I know.”
He added, “When you go on stage, when you go in front of that camera, we’ve got to be able to be alive. And there’s a cost for that — to be on that engine of life and, in the alternative, to finish that scene and finish the play that night and go home and get ready to do it the next day.”
With a character like Franklin Roberts, Vance said it is often a direct reflection of what many people who look like him experience in their day-to-day lives, and through his art he showcases that “you can’t hide from it.”
“You gotta get in it,” Vance said. “And it’s not going to be pretty. Freedom is a fight. It’s a daily fight our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, they knew it intrinsically because every day was a dog on bikes and everywhere you looked it was a ‘no, you can’t do this, you can’t go there. You can’t.’ You gotta get off the sidewalk and put your eyes down. I mean everything was a no and still they wrote and still they were able to instill in their children and grandchildren hope. So, [that’s] the dichotomy that our parents and grandparents had to navigate, and there’s no difference today. The only difference is from the outward appearance. You can walk where you want to walk, you can put your eyes where you want to put them, but there’s subtle hatred. There are subtle things that are happening in our community.”
“So for such a time as this, you got to stand up, you’ve got to make your case and stand up and go to the king and say, ‘What’s happening to us?’ And at a certain point in everybody’s life, you’ve got to make a case, you’ve got to take a stand, you cannot hide, we cannot hide. The world is changing around us and we got to get in it and state our case and make our case and band together.”
New episodes of 61st Street ’s second season air on Mondays on The CW.
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