I've had to reevaluate my relationship with this industry. Television New TV Drama Recounts Heroic Escapes On The Underground Railroad you gon' do your job, because you chose this. You acting out, you gon' get your butt whooped here, now, today, in front of everybody, and you gon' go back. I don't care what's happening.' And you know, on set - my mom, she's from the South, she's from Florida – like, she'll snatch us up in front of anybody. She said, 'Look, if you're not bringing home As and Bs, you ain't going to see no audition. What happens when the acting goes south? What will you know? So with acting, she made us earn it. Look, she was very conscious of the fact that she's a single mom raising two black men in a world that would not be so kind to them. And she - you know, she sacrificed a lot so that we may pursue our dreams. My mom reinforced the value of who we were in us continuously. So she was not playing about the education. And for everything, my mom was like: Education is your way out. We used to live in our car at a certain point and all that. I believe the last time I was homeless was when we moved to LA - I think I was 10. We've been homeless three different times. And us, even though we were in the business, back in Jersey and New York we were still poor. On time is late, early is on time, that kind of thing. My mother was very much a disciplinarian. And moms - so she was a single parent I was raised in a single-parent household - but moms was, she was no joke. My brother and I were both born while they were in service. That's what my mother taught me.Īldis Hodge stars opposite Kevin Bacon as unlikely collaborators in the period cop drama City on a Hill.īoth my parents were Marines so they met in the Corps. I was brought up with respect, and in that, I mean I give respect because I see the value in other people. And I know what I bring to the table, and I know how I treat people. I've had another Caucasian man in his 50s call me to my face, said, 'You're intimidating because you're black.' I said, 'What? What did you say?' And in that, I had to invoke my own power within myself to understand my value, because: I'm a human being. I've had a Caucasian man a couple of months ago call me the n-word. I've even been through it this year alone in New York. So as far as it comes to dealing with our characters together, we play the honesty of it.Īnd this is what we go through today. And most people didn't realize that there was a KKK presence in Jersey in the part of town where I grew up. I remember talking to the director of the show when we did the pilot, and even the writers now, about the tone of how this character handles racism.

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