Sterling K. Brown Is Finally No. 1 on the Call Sheet: The Actor on Hulu’s ‘Paradise,’ Turning Down ‘The Boys’ and Leaving Randall Pearson Behind
Two days before Thanksgiving, Brown is sitting at a long table in a photo studio in Culver City, digging into a take-out lunch as he begins to break down the plot of his new Hulu drama series, “Paradise.”
Brown chooses his words deliberately while simultaneously ramping up his energy to match his passion for the subject. It’s a significant departure from “This Is Us,” the NBC family drama that made Brown a star as fan-favorite character Randall Pearson, and was known for giving audiences a good weep. Though “Paradise” hails from the same creator and executive producer, Dan Fogelman, this series aims to provoke very different emotions in viewers. It’s a contemporary political thriller with a twisty plot. At times, it’s downright terrifying.
“‘This Is Us’ offered a bit of catharsis. Usually, at the end of every episode, you got a chance to lay a burden down. This one, the burdens just keep piling up,” Brown says. “It’s more intrigue and anticipation.”
Brown rhythmically raps his knuckles on the table as he walks me through the plot of “Paradise,” eager to share more, and more than I’m allowed to reveal, ahead of its Jan. 28 premiere. He’s got a couple of hours to talk before he has to pick up one of his two sons from soccer practice. But for the moment, he’s giving his undivided attention to gushing over his co-stars Julianne Nicholson (a “motherfucking beast” in her role) and James Marsden (“Sometimes I wonder, like, do I have a chance? Because he’s that charming”).
Brown is particularly animated because this is the first time he’s openly discussed details of the much-anticipated series with anyone outside of his colleagues and close friends sworn to secrecy. “Paradise” also marks Brown’s first time as No. 1 on the call sheet, as well as his debut as an executive producer. His professional horizons have expanded greatly since “This Is Us” and FX’s “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story” made him a name-brand actor. He earned a supporting Oscar nomination last year for his role opposite Jeffrey Wright in 2023’s “American Fiction.” But Brown is clearly ready to prove that he has staying power as a leading man. With “Paradise,” he’s reunited with a trusted colleague and prolific writer-producer in Fogelman to help him get there.
The stakes for Brown are evident in his obsession over every detail of the show, produced by Disney’s 20th Television. He slaps his thighs with excitement over the simplest things, like the show’s ’80s -inspired soundtrack. “It almost feels very much like ‘Bridgerton,’ which I was watching over the pandemic,” he says, noting how the soundtrack of Shonda Rhimes’ Netflix costume drama put a classical spin on pop hits such as Madonna’s “Material Girl” and Pink’s “What About Us.”
“It’s like we’ve taken these songs that are very familiar and we’ve updated them in the covers. I remember Jordan Peele in ‘Us’ did a cover of ‘I Got 5 on It’ — ba-dump bum, ba-dump bum, ba-dump bum,” Brown says. “And as soon as you heard it in the trailer, every Black person was like, ‘Oh, shit! “I Got 5 on It”!’ We’re hoping for a certain demographic, they’ll hear the songs and be like, ‘Oh, shit.’”
Before “This Is Us” ended in May 2022, Brown says, Fogelman came to him with a “really great idea” for his next show — but it wasn’t “Paradise,” and at that time Brown wanted to explore the world of film. After his success with “American Fiction,” Brown got a new pitch from Fogelman.
“He goes, ‘I wrote this show, and as I’m writing it, I realized I was kind of writing it for you.’ He said, ‘If you’re not interested, all good, I understand — but if you are, then we can talk about it.’ So I was like, ‘Bro, you’ve written six years of dope-ass shit — let me take a gander.’ I read it, and I called and said, ‘I’m in.’ He heard me say, ‘Amen,’ because I’m Black, and he figured I was just saying something from church, and then he’s like, ‘What does “amen” mean? Is it good? Is it bad?’ ‘No, dummy. I’m. In.’”
Set in a serene, wealthy community, “Paradise” follows Xavier Collins, a Secret Service agent and single dad with two kids, whose tranquility is threatened by the shocking murder of former U.S. president Cal Bradford, played by Marsden. Brown’s character becomes the leading suspect in an investigation closely overseen by a mysterious character named Sinatra (Nicholson).
“‘Paradise’ is the exploration of that storyline, but it’s also about how people deal with crisis, how you move on when the world has been flipped upside down and you don’t necessarily see a way to move forward but there is,” Brown says. “And how you cope with a sense of loss with a new normal. The truth of the matter is, he had a very complicated relationship with the president, who is his employer, who I think he would also consider to be a friend. Maybe not at the time of his passing, which is why he’s also implicated, but definitely in life, they have a friendship.”
Xavier and his trials are a world apart from the family-focused Randall, the character Brown played on “This Is Us,” which earned him five consecutive Emmy nominations (and one win) between 2017 and 2021.
“Where Randall was sadder, I think Xavier is angrier, and anger is the emotion that I think that people latch on to in order to not feel sad,” Brown adds.
When casting Brown as Xavier, Fogelman asked the actor to bottle up all those emotions he’d previously spilled out on-screen in tearful monologues. In “Paradise,” he expresses himself through stoic looks, not waterworks.
“It’s just a whole different side of him, this kind of muscular acting, quiet acting,” Fogelman says with awe as we watch Brown’s performance in the first episode of “Paradise” in the showrunner’s office on the Paramount lot in Hollywood. “Sterling doesn’t talk that much in this pilot until the very end of it, and in ‘This Is Us,’ he never shut up. It’s just a very different role.”
Brown’s work in the 2019 indie coming-of-age drama “Waves” inspired Fogelman’s choice to offer him the role of Xavier. “I thought it was one of the best films that year and should have gotten Oscar nominations,” Fogelman says. “And he was a very dark character, a much darker character than he was in ‘This Is Us.’ He’s just got such range that I think he sits nicely in the middle here in ‘Paradise.’”
Brown has been putting in the work to develop that range since he was fresh out of NYU and broke as he pursued his acting career. His role as L.A. County prosecutor Christopher Darden on Ryan Murphy’s “The People v. O.J. Simpson” changed everything.
“He calls me ‘Big Time,’” says Sarah Paulson, who co-starred as prosecutor Marcia Clark in the miniseries. “We have this long joke where now I’m like, ‘You’ve lapped me. You’ve lapped me so hardcore. You’ve got two Emmys, and you are nominated for an Oscar.’ And it’s just funny how he used to look at me like I was super fancy and successful, and now I’m like, ‘Wow, little brother, really, you lapped me. It’s over. Congratulations.’ And he still is like, ‘No, no, no.’ But I know what I know. The proof is in the proverbial pudding.”
Paulson recalls how much the two trusted each other during filming, which allowed them to push themselves and to experiment. “There’s this one scene where we’re supposed to be at the hotel together, and we’re in a bar breaking things down, and they’ve had too much to drink, and they go upstairs, and there’s this moment where they almost kiss in a doorframe, and it doesn’t happen,” Paulson says.
“But then on one take, Anthony Hemingway, our director, told him to do it, and so he totally shocked me by kissing me. And I know there’s footage of this somewhere, because I think my face was like, ‘Ah!’ And we all just fell out laughing, because, of course, it couldn’t be used, because we don’t really know what happened between them ultimately. But it was pretty spectacular. He was brave enough to do it.”
Despite his high energy, Brown has a way of measuring out his responses in a slow tempo that matches his intention in each word. He acts like he has all the time in the world, which his manager of 25 years, Jennifer Wiley-Moxley, would be quick to remind you he doesn’t. “There are so many careers built on offers that Sterling had and wasn’t available to do,” she says, recalling how far the St. Louis-born actor has come since his days of living on doughnuts.
“Sterling just never had to work doing anything else. He was one of the rare actors who never had to have a side hustle because he was willing to live so frugal-minded that he rented a room in a Harlem townhouse, didn’t have his own bathroom, couldn’t afford a gym membership,” Wiley-Moxley says. “He would get a dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts and eat them in front of me at my desk like, ‘Well, these are my calories for the day!’ He was very fun and very quirky in that way. That grit of ‘I’ll do whatever I have to do to get it.’”
Fogelman’s “Paradise” lends sinister undertones to a town that presents itself as a slice of privileged America. (The show’s original title was “Paradise City,” but it was shortened when the studio couldn’t come to terms with Guns N’ Roses on use of the band’s 1988 hit song of the same name, or its title.)
“Our goal here was always to kind of show a town that felt like idyllic Americana, like a lot of money has been spent trying to make this look like a place you want to live that still has a little bit of a patina on it,” Fogelman explains, comparing it to Jupiter, Florida, home of celebrities such as Tiger Woods and Tom Brady. “It’s where rich people live and a lot of money has been spent making it look bucolic and normal.”
“Paradise” is debuting eight days after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, and the themes explored in the show will inevitably spark comparisons to the fraught politics of the present day. Fogelman says he’s had the idea for 10 years, but it wasn’t until “This Is Us” ended and he sat down to write something new that the story was fleshed out. Fogelman insists he didn’t consciously write it for Brown — but he also maintains that only Brown could bring Xavier to life.
“I remember being really nervous when I sent it to him because (a) I didn’t want him to feel pressured to do something or feel uncomfortable saying no to something. But (b) I was like, I don’t really have a plan B here that excites me if Sterling doesn’t want to do it,” Fogelman says.
Fogelman has plotted out “Paradise” as a three-season series, eight episodes each. Brown says the show will shift in tone and focus similar to the approach taken by HBO’s critically adored drama “The Wire,” which was set in Baltimore but featured new dimensions of the city each season, with new characters that interacted with a stable of recurring players. Hulu has yet to give the greenlight to a second season, but Fogelman has assembled a Season 2 writers’ room and just polished off the premiere script.
Brown’s eager to get word on a renewal for his return to TV for multiple reasons. He’d like the stability of being able to see the end date on the horizon, as well as the luxury of filming in Los Angeles. “Paradise” was shot in part on the same small-town sets in Burbank that Warner Bros. used for the fictional Connecticut hamlet of Stars Hollow seen in the WB Network/Netflix series “Gilmore Girls.” Moreover, working in Los Angeles keeps him close to his wife, actress Ryan Michelle Bathé, and his sons, ages 13 and 9. And it gives the production the chance to employ many of the crew members from “This Is Us” at a time when employment in series TV has plunged.
“Everything has shrunk so tremendously, and I hope that it’s like the housing bubble and everything else, that there has to be a contraction before we find a new equilibrium that has a little bit more space,” Brown says. “So many people left L.A. between, first, the global pandemic, and then there were the strikes. And people have to work in order to pay for things, and there’s no jobs, there’s no work. So being able to go back to ‘Paradise,’ which was a lot of the crew from ‘This Is Us,’ also added to the feeling of the homecoming.”
Fogelman’s firm decision to cap the series at three seasons means Brown will remain available if other intriguing projects come around, including a blockbuster franchise. Brown whet his appetite for such work with a small part in 2018’s “Black Panther.”
“I feel like Marvel should be like ‘Law & Order’ — after a certain number of years, you gotta reset, you get to come back,” Brown says as if he’s speaking directly to Marvel chief Kevin Feige. “I would love to come back to the Marvel universe, absolutely. Please have me back. Please, please. Thank you.”
But big franchises can’t come at the expense of his time with his wife of 18 years, Bathé (“The First Wives Club,” “Boston Legal” and a guest spot on “This Is Us”) and their sons. The couple have a “three-week rule” that both of them need to touch grass back home in L.A. before continuing a project away from the family.
Brown sees work on popcorn franchise pics as akin to estate planning for actors.
“The IP stuff allows for you to think about retirement in a real way,” he says. “You get the franchise, and it’s something you can do a few of and people keep coming back for — that means you can breathe a little easier and don’t feel like you have to just keep working all the time. I’m not saying I’m in that place right now, but it does allow a very large exhale.”
Brown gets colorful as he argues that franchise fare doesn’t mean selling out or giving up on making art. He points to Ryan Reynolds and the way he has made Marvel’s profane Deadpool character all his own.
“I think about Reynolds and finding that thing for him that fit like hand in glove. It’s perfect. You can’t imagine anybody else playing the part other than him. If I found something like that, oh, my goodness, I’d be like a pig in shit.”
Brown is well aware that “Paradise” will premiere in a country that has been polarized by the return of Trump. Over our pre-Thanksgiving lunch, Brown admits he doesn’t know “how it’s going to land on people” in 2025’s fractured political climate.
Brown delivers what sounds like a well-practiced disclaimer: “I can tell you it was written long before [the 2024 election], and that it is a work of fiction, and that any sort of resemblance to characters in real life is purely coincidental. OK, I said it.” He continues, “I’m sure it’s gonna hit different people in different ways. We’re living in a very divided time in our country right now, and some people are incredibly enthusiastic about [the president], and some people are not. And I’m sure everybody’s going to put their own thing on what the show is,” he says. “But I actually welcome what people have to say about it, because I am as curious as you are.”
Karey Burke, head of 20th Television, says there were “no conversations” about shifting the show’s premiere date because of real-world events.
“We knew the show would be ready when it was ready, when Dan told us it was ready,” Burke says. “And he’s exceptionally talented at what he does, but I don’t think he has the ability to predict the future. This was not a politically motivated show for him in any way. He wrote it during the pandemic, and was really much more interested in, what happens when people are thrust into an overwhelming and untenable situation? What are the choices we make when faced with massive life-and-death stakes?”
Burke likens the tone of “Paradise” to that of ABC drama “Lost” — a comparison also made by both Brown and Fogelman during our conversations. Burke is cagey when pressed on how the shows are similar. I’ve promised, as a condition of getting early access to the series, to not divulge any spoilers about the surprises in store — and there are many.
“It’s just absolutely not what it seems at first,” Burke says of “Paradise.” “It’s a mystery wrapped in an enigma. You think you know what it is when you first see it. And I think much more so than ‘This Is Us,’ it continually represents itself as about something else, and that I found fascinating.”
On Jan. 22, Disney revealed plans to air the premiere episode of “Paradise” on ABC in primetime one day after it drops its first three episodes on Hulu, followed by a cable debut on FX. The move is a splashy and unprecedented one for the Bob Iger-led company, which has experimented with airing 20th Television’s “Only Murders in the Building” (produced by Fogelman alongside series creator John Hoffman) on ABC, but only after seasons of the streaming series completed their initial run on Hulu. In short, “Paradise” is a huge priority, worthy of Disney breaking down windowing barriers in an attempt to reach the widest audience possible at launch.
While he waits to find out how viewers react to “Paradise,” Brown has a string of movie roles to tackle. He’s starring opposite Henry Cavill and Rita Ora in a live-action adaptation of beloved animated series “Voltron” (potentially, it’s been rumored, as the villain — to which he says, “That’s crazy!” after a beat). He’s already wrapped filming on drama “Is God Is” with Janelle Monáe and Vivica A. Fox, as well as Hulu’s limited-series adaptation of Esi Edugyan’s novel “Washington Black,” which he’s executive producing under his Indian Meadows Productions banner.
Now he’s trying to find time in his schedule for three more high-profile film projects: “The Gallerist” with Jenna Ortega and Natalie Portman; “By Any Means” with Mark Wahlberg; and Adam Scott’s directorial debut,”Double Booked,” with Scott, Alexandra Daddario and Zazie Beetz.
And those are just the projects he’s permitted to talk about. The 48-year-old actor known for his considerable abs says he’s also “maintaining the sexy” (mainly so he can run after his kids) and on board for anything that requires him to take his shirt off, until people “stop asking” him to.
Brown is not only past the point of having to take whatever acting gig comes along, he’s having to be more selective with all the things that are coming his way. He was heartbroken to have to turn down a season-long arc on Amazon Prime Video’s drama “The Boys,” offered to him by showrunner Eric Kripke. Brown previously worked with Kripke on the WB Network/CW drama “Supernatural.”
“It think it was a bad guy [role], because it was very tempting,” Brown says. “But a full-season arc, they are in Toronto — it’s tough. Listen, these are Champagne problems I’m talking about here! But because I’m blessed enough to already have certain things in place, I get a chance to be a bit more choosy.”
Moving forward, when there is time, Brown wants to return to the stage (it’s been “calling for a long time”), potentially write a book (“Writing is really, really hard”) and do more of the “This Is Us” rewatch podcast he has set up with co-stars Mandy Moore, Chris Sullivan and Bathé. The podcast is his way of communicating to fans his continued love for the show even as he works to separate himself from Randall. He’s worked too hard to be pigeonholed.
“I have no desire to make people think I am something other than what I am. I’m a very flawed, very silly human being, but comfortable with being flawed and comfortable with being silly. And if you want to put something on me, make sure you’re putting it on a canvas that is not already biased, for better or for worse. I’m gonna tell you exactly who I am, and either you choose to roll or you choose not to,” he says.
He’s also considering the possibility of directing.
When Fogelman was planning out the final season of “This Is Us,” he offered Brown and his co-stars their last chance to direct episodes, and Moore, Milo Ventimiglia, Justin Hartley and Jon Huertas took him up on the offer. Brown raised his hand, and then quickly brought it back down.
“He goes, ‘You sure? You’re not gonna get in the middle of the season and be like, “Why is everybody directing this except for me?”‘ ‘Nah, I’m good,’” Brown says. However, that “could happen” on his new series.
“What I’m most intrigued by in any sort of thing is performance. As a director, you have to be intrigued with the totality of it all. And sometimes I’m like, ‘I don’t really care about this,’” he says with a booming laugh. “I’ll let the world-builders do their thing. But if I was going to do it, that would be a fun opportunity, because I know that crew. I know they would have my back. And one thing that I do know is I could delegate to other people the things that are not my strong suits. I feel good about my eye towards performance and my ability to speak to actors.”
Stopping a moment to mull over the question again, he adds, “You may have planted a seed there.”
Maybe it will grow in “Paradise.”
The moment he comes on-screen in FX’s 2016 “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story,” Sterling K. Brown nails the mien of a mid-level Los Angeles County prosecutor. From how he wears Deputy District Attorney Christopher Darden’s ill-fitting suits to the way he shoves his tall frame into his compact car, Brown helps the much-lauded series capture the deeper significance of the double murder case that transfixed the country.
Brown’s work as Darden provides much of the emotional heart of the story; the character embodies the conflicting perspectives in L.A.’s racially stratified communities that swirled around the case. “People v. O.J. Simpson” could have been a campy retrospective take on the sordid saga; instead the limited series probed hard questions that still defy easy answers, like how celebrity, wealth, race and class impact the criminal justice system.
Brown sets the tone early on when Darden has an exchange with one of his Black neighbors during Simpson’s famous freeway trek in the white Ford Bronco. Darden notes to the neighbor that Simpson didn’t seem to pay much attention to the needs of low-income Black youth during his peak years as an NFL star. “Where are all the O.J. Simpson playgrounds in the projects?” he asks rhetorically. When the neighbor responds, “He’s got the cops chasing him — he’s Black now,” the facial contortions that Brown goes through say more to the audience than any line of dialogue ever could.
In 2017, when Brown won his first Emmy Award for his work in the series, justice was finally served. — Cynthia Littleton