On Dec. 2, Tommy joined the theater faculty for a virtual town hall on Zoom, where she responded to questions about her acting class at Fordham, her first experience working on a major motion picture, and the ghosts that find their way into all of her projects. Clint Ramos, head of design and production, moderated the discussion. The following is an edited excerpt.

Clint Ramos: How has your experience [at Fordham]been so far?

Liesl Tommy: The students that I have been working with have brought me joy every single session. They embody the things that I value the most in artists, which is curiosity and passion. It feels like that rush that one gets from rehearsal, of being in collaboration, of being with inquiring minds.

CR: What were the important [lessons]that you really wanted for them to get?

LT: The lesson plan that I had set for myself for the semester pivoted quickly in the face of what I was receiving from the students, in the face of their needs. My class is Creating a Character, and I pivoted from a pure acting class to something that was more spiritual. What I focused on was them as artists. Who are they, what are their voices, what are their dreams for themselves? And how do we make concrete practice manifest those things, in this time of turmoil?

CR: You’ve had so much success in directing. Is there any part of you that wants to go back to acting?

LT: No. I think that once you turn the corner [and spend]too many years away from it, your body changes and your performance muscles shift. I was an extremely disciplined actor because I had come from a dance background. I was one of those people who if I didn’t have literally three hours of physical activity a day, I didn’t feel like myself.

Once I switched to directing, the gaze shifted away from me, and I felt like my energy shifted from my body into my head. My workouts became much more about stress relief than being in top physical shape. I still work on monologues sometimes as a self-soothing activity, just to keep the connection between language and thought alive. When I’m talking to actors about that, about communicating thought, I just feel like I could never forget the thing that I’m asking them to do.

CR: When you’re talking about developing a practice for an actor in your class, is there anyone that you’ve said, ‘This works for a person who has trouble with this,’ and ‘This works for a person who has trouble with that’?

LT: There is a physical and a vocal practice that actors should be doing daily so that no matter what happens in that audition, that rehearsal room, or what happens as they’re walking down the street, they have connected with their pure self and their instrument.

The most important practice is one that allows you to know where your own power lies when people and forces are trying to take it away from you. I speak especially as a television director, when you’re walking into environments that are not always yours, that you didn’t create. Especially as a woman of color, you never know how welcome you are going to be in these environments.

CR: Do you think that informed your methodology in casting? You’ve been ahead of the curve in terms of really pushing for what we now call “nontraditional casting.”

LT: The phrase “nontraditional casting” isn’t useful for me because I grew up in South Africa, where people of color were in the majority. There was a huge Indian population, there was the indigenous population, and then also the African population. I just grew up saturated with every kind of person, eating every kind of food, and listening to every kind of music, and all of it synthesizing into a community.

I never really looked at it as nontraditional casting, I just looked at it as casting. But I never did what people call color-blind casting. When I cast outside of the dominant culture’s aesthetic, it was always with a political point of view that I was using to unpack ideas in the play.

CR: What was it like leaping from theater to a major-studio-backed motion picture?

LT: I’d always wanted to direct a film, and after Eclipsed we started kind of prepping for that. I was able to do a lot of very different kinds of television in a quick space of time with the eye on film eventually. Then, insanely, the Aretha Franklin biopic happened, and I chased it very hard. I had a very clear vision for it. The thing that I learned in television was that when in doubt, focus on storytelling. And I knew how to block, I knew how to compose, and I knew how to talk to actors. In my experience, even the stars, if you’re giving them something that will make them better, will not challenge you. They are so smart, and something magical happens. And then you’re on your way.

CR: What is the most important lesson you’ve learned throughout your career?

LT: Know what you love and then do that. There are certain things I just love and I put it on stage or on film all the time. As an artist, I accept that there are certain themes that in this lifetime I am meant to explore in my work, and I don’t fight it. I always put a ghost in everything that I am in charge of, and every single time it opens up something new in myself and my humanity.

CR: Yeah, what is that ghost thing?

LT: I don’t know, I just feel like we’re always learning about grief and we’re all haunted. I just feel like no one talks about it, but I feel like it’s one of the unifiers. Everybody eats, everybody drinks, everybody breathes air, everybody is haunted by grief.

CR: Anything that you can say to us that may have helped you buoy you forward?

LT: So much of our work is about muscling through. That’s good because we’re able to make magic happen with very little resources in the theater. But it also means that we put our minds and bodies through a lot.
I have realized that caring for my nervous system is what’s going to give me longevity in the business. I used to think it was money, I used to think it was maybe having a position of authority, being an artistic director or whatever. But it’s not that. So, the thing that I would say to everybody is, just make sure that you’re taking care of your nervous system and don’t close down to your community during this time. For us, that flow of energy is really survival.

Fordham Theatre alumna Betty Gilpin, FCLC ’08, has once again been nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for her portrayal of Debbie Eagan in Netflix’s GLOW. The comedy series from the team behind Orange Is the New Black centers on a crew of misfits in 1980s LA who reinvent themselves as the “Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling.”

In a recent interview with The New York TImes, Gilpin echoed a sentiment she previously shared with graduating Fordham Theatre students in 2016: Embrace the weird.

“We studied a lot of theater of the absurd at Fordham and ‘building your inner ocean of weird’ was the thesis statement,” she told the Times. “Then graduating and auditioning for things like Gossip Girl, where the No. 1 priority is muffling your ocean of weird and curling your hair, I didn’t work for a while because I was bad at both the muffling and the curling.”

This is the third consecutive year in which Gilpin has been nominated for the award; perhaps this third time will be the charm for “weird.”

Dylan McDermott, FCLC ’83, has been nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or Movie for his portrayal of Ernie—the owner of Golden Tip Gas, a service station that doubles as a high-end brothel—in Netflix’s Hollywood. The Fordham Theatre alumnus was last nominated 21 years ago for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for his role as Bobby Donnell in ABC’s The Practice.

In the emotional drama, a group of aspiring actors and filmmakers will do virtually anything to realize their showbiz dreams in post-World War II Hollywood.

In May, McDermott told Town & Country that he drew inspiration from real Hollywood greats, his own imagination, and a documentary on Scotty Bowers, on whom Ernie is based.

“I certainly watched the documentary on Scotty Bowers and got useful information out of that,” he said. “I also used Clark Gable as my muse for this role. So, between the information I had from watching great movies from the 1940s, what was in my own imagination, and what was on the pages of the script, it all came together. That’s the great thing about collaboration, whatever comes out can be magical and I certainly feel that’s happened on this show. There’s nothing like this on television, that’s for damn sure.”

Rounding out the alumni nominees, Seena Vali, FCRH ’10, received two nominations this year. The Last Week Tonight with John Oliver writer—along with a team of writers—is nominated for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics for the song “Eat Sh!t, Bob,” featured on episode 629, and for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series.

Vali, who studied mathematics and music while attending Fordham, previously took home Emmys for Outstanding Writing in a Variety Series in 2018 and 2019.

Tony Award-winning actress Phylicia Rashad, a former Denzel Washington Chair in Theatre at Fordham, has been nominated for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for her work on NBC’s This Is Us. Rashad was the first person to hold the Fordham position, established in 2011 thanks to a $2 million gift from Washington, FCLC ’77.

Perhaps best known as “America’s Mom” for her role on The Cosby Show, Rashad portrays Carol “Mamma C” Clarke, mother of Beth Pearson (Susan Kelechi Watson). Referencing a scene the two actresses share, Watson told The Los Angeles Times: “I will say, there’s this amazing moment between when Mamma C and Beth where Beth says to her, ‘I’m strong because of you.’ And in that moment, I felt more of a Susan-Phylicia thing. I’ve always looked up to her path and what she’s gone through and come through as an artist, as a woman … and continuing to go through, because she’s not stopping any time soon.”

This is the second consecutive year that Rashad has been nominated in this category. She previously received Lead Actress nods in 1985, 1986, and 2008.

The 2020 Primetime Emmy Awards, hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, will air on ABC on Sunday, Sept. 20 at 8 p.m. EST.

Known for his role as the chillingly cool and murderous Brother Mouzone in TV’s The Wire and for his numerous musical and straight roles on Broadway, such as Mafala Hatimbi in The Book of Mormon, Potts has been performing on stage and screen for more than 25 years.

But acting was never a sure bet for Potts. He said that when he decided to become an actor, his mother staged an intervention.

“I remember coming home from a summer job to find a dining room full of family and neighbors that my mother was dishing out food to. It was like an ambush. She said, ‘Sit down, we want to talk to you,’” recalled Potts. “There was a neighbor there who was a former Black Panther, she said, ‘Actor? Actor? Black people been acting all their lives; you need to do something that contributes.’”

Potts split his youth between summers in Brooklyn with his parents and the school year with his maternal grandparents in the small town of Wisacky, South Carolina. Both communities felt strongly that he should enter the professional class as a doctor or lawyer. When he got into Columbia College in New York City, however, his professors thought otherwise. One adviser told him that great black actors, singers, and writers do indeed make important contributions.

Though he may have diverged from what his elders wanted, he said his hometown of about 500 people influenced much of his education and artistry. With the church at the center of communal life, the call and response between the congregation and pastor stirred something that he carried with him to the theatre.

“Reverend Wright was an extraordinary preacher,” said Potts, recalling his church’s minister. “That man had this great bass baritone voice and he understood language and the music of it and the interplay of it. If you listen to gospel music or if you listen to Dr. King’s speeches, there’s the repetition of a phrase, the elaboration of it. It’s almost like classical music.”

Finding the music in his scripts became key to his craft. He noted that while Eugene O’Neill’s words captured the turn-of-the-century language of the New York denizens, so much of The Iceman Cometh relies on the actors understanding timing and “where the language lands and what words makes most sense in a sentence.”

Potts studied the great plays and literature in college, but the voices, he notices, were mostly those of European white men. It wasn’t until the gap between his bachelor’s and his master’s degrees, when he was in the Army Reserves, that he heard the voice of a black playwright that would change his life.

“I was watching the Tonys that year and it was the year that August Wilson’s Fences [the 1987 production]  was up for several Tonys, and I remember that great snippet of James Earl Jones and Courtney Vance,” he said of the play’s father-son climax. “That scene just blew my mind and awakened something again. I saw my life. I saw a piece that I understood. I recognized the characters. They sounded like people I grew up around.”

It was then that he decided to apply to Yale School of Drama—in secret.

“It was really one of these Hail Mary passes that was going to decide the course of my life,” he said. “I gave God an ultimatum: I said if I get in then this is what I’m meant to do.”

He would go on to graduate from Yale and perform in dozens of plays, movies, and on television. In addition to his role on The Wire, he’s also known for his role as Detective Maynard Gilbough on HBO’s True Detectives as well as recurring roles as Senator Fred Reynolds on Madam Secretary and as Sergeant Cole Draper on Law and Order. But his television work is informed by his work in the theater, he said, not the other way around. He has been lauded for his singing and acting on Broadway since 2005, where he has appeared in Lennon, Grey Gardens, and last year’s acclaimed production of Jitney, written by his theatrical hero, August Wilson. Much of what he’s learned on stage and screen, he plans to bring to Fordham students.

“I want students to learn as I have learned,” he said. “They need to ask, ‘How do you talk to people on stage?’” he said.

He said that too often actors perform and don’t listen. He described a far more empathetic approach to the craft rather than “showing off,” which he said he sees far too much of these days. Like the call and response between congregation and pastor, Potts said actors must connect with their audience. But most importantly, they must connect with each other.

“Directors love it when they see actors actually speaking to one another, actually having the conversation, as opposed to acting as if they’re having a conversation,” he said. “It’s absolutely vital to make that connection. Theater teaches you how to think deeply and listen. My hope is to impart that to these other young actors.”