S. EPATHA MERKERSON NEWS, INTERVIEWS & UPDATES



News for 12/24/2006


The following article appeared in the October 2006 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine





News for 6/15/2006


Seven More Board Hopkins' Slipstream

Source: The Hollywood Reporter


John Turturro, Camryn Manheim, Jeffrey Tambor, S. Epatha Merkerson, Fionnula Flanagan, Christopher Lawford and Michael Clarke Duncan have joined the ensemble cast of the Anthony Hopkins-directed indie Slipstream, says The Hollywood Reporter.

Hopkins, Christian Slater, Stella Arroyave, Lisa Pepper, Kevin McCarthy, Gavin Grazer, Aaron Tucker and Lana Antonova already have joined the cast.

Written by Hopkins, Slipstream is a noir comedy about an actor and would-be screenwriter who, at the very moment of his meeting with fate, comes to discover that life is random and fortune is sightless as he is thrown into a vortex where time, dreams and reality collide in an increasingly whirling slipstream.

Hopkins, Arroyave and Robert Katz are producing the film. Slipstream began production Monday in Los Angeles. Filming also will take place in the California desert.



News for 3/30/2006


The following article appeared in the March 10, 2006 issue of Entertainment Weekly Magazine





The following article appeared in the February 6, 2006 issue of TV Guide Magazine





The following article appeared in the February 13, 2006 issue of Jet Magazine





The following news item appeared in the March 13, 2006 issue of TV Guide Magazine





News for 12/6/2005


Laying down the law

She's a top cop on 'Law and Order' and one of Detroit's finest

Mekeisha Madden Toby
The Detroit News


On NBC's omnipresent crime drama "Law & Order," a flinty Lt. Anita Van Buren gives the orders that help her detectives nab the bad guys.

While this is the role that made S. Epatha (pronounced e-PAY-tha) Merkerson famous, she is a Detroiter at heart who misses Vernors ginger ale and Better Made chips and paid her dues for many years on and off Broadway and on the small screen.

"When I walk down the street, people know who I am," said Merkerson, 53, in a teleconference call plugging tonight's episode of "Law & Order," which centers on Lt. Van Buren. "New York police officers call me 'Lou' (short for lieutenant) and go out of their way to help me."

Despite such public acknowledgments and numerous awards and nominations for her stage performances, the 1970 Cooley High School grad has played second fiddle on the show for 13 seasons. Merkerson is the only African-American to play a TV character this long. She also is the show's senior player, a distinction formerly held by the late Jerry Orbach.

The spotlight on her has much to do with the Emmy Award she won for her lead role in HBO's "Lackawanna Blues."

"She is really one of the most talented actresses of her generation," said Matthew Penn, an executive producer on "Law & Order."

"Epatha's character usually advises the detectives, making her secondary. But she is such an extraordinary actress, as shown with the Emmy win, that we wanted to show what she can bring to this role with tonight's episode."


She's a Cooley grad


Born in Saginaw, the youngest child of five began performing as a cheerleader and a member of Cooley's drama and dance clubs in her neighborhood on Detroit's northwest side.

Back then, most everyone called her by her first name, Sharon (that's what the "S" stands for), said high school classmate Steve Melancon. It's the name she used while performing in summer shows at Cedar Point, in Sandusky, Ohio.

"She was always so serious about acting," said Melancon, 53, a former Cooley football player, who today delivers copy machines. Now a husband and father of two who lives in Westland, he remembers admiring Merkerson's cheers from the field.

While he never worked up the nerve to ask her out, a casual friendship developed as the two navigated the rocky social climate of the late 1960s.

"She was cute, but back then at Cooley, blacks went in one door and whites went in another and I was neither," said Melancon, a Native American. I think the racial tension helped make Sharon who she was. She never let racism hold her back."

It certainly didn't prevent Merkerson from being one of the popular, cool kids at Cooley, said classmate Barnett Jones, 53, police chief of Sterling Heights.

"She became exactly what she was then -- one of the people at the top," Jones said.

A flip through Cooley's yearbook proves his point. As a senior, Merkerson appears in several photos other than her class picture.

After Cooley, Merkerson briefly attended Indiana University before transferring to Wayne State University. First she studied dance, but ultimately made acting her focus.

At Wayne State, Merkerson starred in "The Blacks," at the Studio Theatre in the basement of the Hilberry, and "Purlie" at the Bonstelle Theatre, both in 1975. She also choreographed "Purlie." During this time, Merkerson started going by her middle name, Epatha.

Joe Calarco, 67, a professor at Wayne State for 37 years, remembers Merkerson fondly. She was in his dramatic literature and acting classes.

"Her thoughtfulness and ability to relate to people and characters made an even greater impression on me than her academic and artistic qualities."

Merkerson's longtime friend Thomas Suda is a drama professor who attended and graduated with her from Wayne State. He also performed with her in the college's production of "The Count of Monte Cristo."

"Epatha was always a triple threat," said Suda, now a drama professor at Oakland University. "She can sing, act and dance, making her a director's delight."


She was Reba the Mail Lady


After graduating from college in 1976, Merkerson moved to New York. Her big break in theater came two years later, when she was cast in the national tour of Ntozake Shange's "choreopoem" (poetry set to dance) and stage play "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf."

In the early 1980s, Merkerson worked with Denzel Washington in Bill Harris' one-act play, "Every Goodbye Ain't Gone," off-off Broadway.

Harris,a playwright for 30 years, called Merkerson "one of the best actresses in the world."

"Epatha is extremely intelligent as a person and as an actor," said Harris, who also teaches creative writing and playwriting at Wayne State. "I remember her penchant for reading. That's rare in acting.

"And she has great transitions. She's one of those actresses who can go from A to Z in 60 seconds."

Merkerson also is adept at making career transitions. After performing for years on stage, she made the leap to the small screen as Reba the Mail Lady on CBS' Saturday morning odd-ball variety show, "Pee-wee's Playhouse."

"I would just hang around the set and soak it up because (fun) acting gigs like this were rare," said Merkerson, who while working on "Playhouse" became friends with Pee-wee Herman himself, Paul Reubens. She also befriended Laurence Fishburne, who played Cowboy Curtis on the show, and Jimmy Smits, who guest-starred as a TV repairman.

While on "Pee-wee's Playhouse" (1986-91), Merkerson kept going back to theater. In 1990, her portrayal of Bernice in the late August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson" earned her a Tony-Award nomination. A year later, she starred in the play "I'm Not Stupid" and won an OBIE for her performance.

It was around this time that she landed a guest-starring role on "Law & Order." In the episode, she played a grief-stricken mother whose baby is accidentally shot and killed.

Eventually, producers asked Merkerson to join the cast as Lt. Van Buren, a role she never guessed would endure more than a decade.


'I never thought it would last'


"This is show business. Acting jobs usually don't last a year," she said. "It took me eight years to put anything in my dressing room. I never thought it would last this long. But the story line is so rarely about (Van Buren), I rejoice when it is."

Occasionally, the episodes do focus on Lt. Van Buren. One season, Merkerson's character shot and killed a man trying to rob her at an ATM machine. In another, she sued the New York police department when she wasn't promoted to captain.

In tonight's episode, Lt. Van Buren goes too far in pushing her detectives to find the perpetrator of a crime against a friend's daughter.

"Now that she's won the Emmy, a lot of people in the industry are going to stand up and take notice of Epatha Merkerson," said TV and pop culture expert Robert Thompson, a professor at Syracuse University.

"She is a lot like Denzel Washington was on 'St. Elsewhere.' Like him, she has all this talent and they don't seem to know what to do with her. The Emmy will change that."

And the role is one Merkerson said she continues to appreciate.

"As long as Dick (Dick Wolf, the creator and an executive producer of 'L&O') continues to have my contract signed every year, I'll be here," she said. "It's one of the better shows on television."

In contrast, "Lackawanna Blues" gave Merkerson the opportunity to play the well-rounded character Rachel "Nanny" Crosby, a sexy yet maternal woman whose daughter dies at a young age.

"As they get older, women get fewer parts," Merkerson said. "Three women of a certain age, including me, won Emmys. I think people are realizing baby boomers go to the movies, watch TV and buy products. We are here, all of us actresses having hot flashes, so put us to work."


Memorable Emmy moment


The plan was to pull her speech out of her dress to appear spontaneous, Merkerson said. Instead, the sheet of paper shimmied down her strapless dress, making her spontaneity genuine.

"It never occurred to me that it would move with me as I moved. I was trying to be cute and it backfired."

The humorous moment didn't take any of the shine off her "Lackawanna" performance, however.

"There were a couple of scenes when she had those Epatha moments, when she makes you feel for the character," said playwright Harris. "Epatha makes the writer better and she makes all the people around her better, like the Chauncey Billups of acting."

When Merkerson isn't improving the craft for herself and others, she returns to Detroit, a city that most of her family still calls home.

"I come home and my older brother Barry and I grab a couple coney dogs, plain Better Made chips and some Vernors and the day is done," said Merkerson, who may come home for Christmas. "That's straight-up Detroit. It doesn't get more Detroit."



News for 9/28/2005


Merkerson Joins Black Snake Moan

Source: Variety


S. Epatha Merkerson, fresh off her Emmy win for Lackawanna Blues, has joined the cast of Paramount Classics' Black Snake Moan, reports Variety.

Merkerson joins Samuel L. Jackson, Christina Ricci and Justin Timberlake in the drama, directed by Hustle & Flow helmer Craig Brewer.

The film is about a small-town girl (Ricci) and her relationship with a bluesman (Jackson). Produced by John Singleton and Stephanie Allain, the movie is slated for a 2006 release.



News for 9/21/2005


Off the cuff, from the heart

S. Epatha Merkerson's gown may have scarfed her speech, but her sincerity survived.

By Lynn Smith
Times Staff Writer


With her acceptance speech still stuck in her bodice, S. Epatha Merkerson was clearly the standout star in a huge tent brimming over with celebrities Sunday night. Friends and well-wishers crowded around her table at HBO's post-Emmy celebration to tell her they loved her in "Lackawanna Blues" — or that they just plain love her.

Earlier, Merkerson had contributed the most endearing acceptance speech of the evening when she arrived on stage to accept her trophy for best actress in a miniseries or movie and admitted losing her notes down the front of her gown.

"When I saw her struggling with that note, I was about to go up there and try and get it out," joked Jimmy Smits, one of her costars in "Lackawanna Blues." Merkerson beamed and gave him a bearhug.

"When my name was read there was a lot of movement," Merkerson said. "And when I tried to get the paper it dropped down below. It's still there now; I can't reach it, my bodice is too tight. I can laugh about it ... Sooner or later you just have to know how to laugh at yourself."

Earlier that evening, Merkerson had told the press corps backstage that she wished she had put the notes in her purse because she wanted to remember everyone who had helped her. "To me, the names of the people who have been supportive are very important." Clutching her statuette against her chest, she added, "This is the gravy for all the hard work."

At 52, Merkerson has built a substantial career as a working actor in theater, film and television, notably as the articulate, no-nonsense Lt. Anita Van Buren on "Law & Order" since 1993.

She delivered a richer performance as Nanny, the tough, maternal presence in HBO's "Lackawanna Blues." Her character runs a boardinghouse post-WWII and copes with an unfaithful husband while nurturing the recovering addicts, ex-convicts and eccentrics boarding with her as they look for a new start in life.

For Merkerson, being recognized for a single performance is wonderful but has to rank among many career highlights, including working with Ossie Davis, a leader in the African American acting community who died in February. "[Winning an Emmy] can't top that."

But it is different. When Merkerson finally got up to leave the party attended by the likes of Geoffrey Rush, Bill Maher, Matthew Fox and Quentin Tarantino, Merkerson stood on a chair and threw her hands in the air. Everybody in her vicinity raised their arms also, and cheered.



News for 4/19/2005


Ernie Hudson and Billy Porter Join Off-Broadway's Birdie Blue Starring S. Epatha Merkerson

By Ernio Hernandez
Playbill.com


Actors Ernie Hudson and Billy Porter join S. Epatha Merkerson in the cast of the upcoming Second Stage Theatre presentation of Cheryl L. West's Birdie Blue, starting Off-Broadway May 31.

Seret Scott stages the New York premiere of West's drama at the midtown Manhattan stage to open June 23 for a run through July 17 run.

The playwright behind Jar the Floor takes a look at the world through the eyes of her sassy title character (played by Merkerson) who speaks of love, marriage and the passage of time and "tells it — and we mean all of it — like it is," according to show materials.

Merkerson is known to television audiences for her role on "Law & Order" and recent turn in the HBO Films adaptation of Lackawanna Blues. She has been seen on stage in I’m Not Stupid, The Old Settler, Fucking A and her Tony Award nominated turn in The Piano Lesson.

Film actor Hudson is remembered for his work in "Ghostbusters," "Basketball Diaries," "The Hand That Rocks The Cradle" and "The Jazz Singer." The HBO "Oz" native was also recently seen with Birdie Blue co-star in "Lackawanna Blues."

Porter — who just performed Off-Broadway in his Ghetto Superstar — has been seen on Broadway in Grease, Miss Saigon, Five Guys Named Moe and Smokey Joe’s Café.

Director Scott previously staged Charles Fuller's Zooman and the Sign for Second Stage Theatre. As an actress, she has performed on Broadway in My Sister, My Sister and For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf.

The Birdie Blue design team includes Anna Louizos (set), Emilio Sosa (costumes), Donald Holder (lighting) and Obadiah Eaves (sound).

Birdie Blue received a premiere workshop production at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in July 2002. Marion McClinton directed the run starring Cicely Tyson and Charles Brown.

Tickets to Birdie Blue at Second Stage, 307 West 43rd Street (just off 8th Ave.) are on sale at the box office and by phone at (212) 246-4422 or (800) 766-6048. For more information, visit SecondStageTheater.com



News for 2/21/2005


The following article appeared in the February 6, 2005 issue of TV Guide Magazine





News for 2/13/2005


S. Epatha Merkerson on 'Blues'

By FRAZIER MOORE
AP Television Writer


NEW YORK (AP) - "It made me kind of giddy," says "Law & Order" veteran S. Epatha Merkerson about her latest project. "I'm 52 years old, I have hot flashes, and I'm the lead in a film!"

A remarkable film. "Lackawanna Blues," which premieres 8 p.m. EST Saturday on HBO, is a star-studded portrait with Merkerson at its heart, playing Rachel "Nanny" Crosby, the proprietor of a rooming house in the black section of Lackawanna, N.Y., during the nation's last years of legal segregation.

Ever nurturing and gutsy, Nanny looks after her motley collection of residents, including a child who becomes her charge almost from his birth in 1956: Ruben Santiago-Hudson, destined to grow up and turn his loving memories of Nanny into a one-man off-Broadway show.

In this glorious film adaptation, for which Santiago-Hudson wrote the script, the 20 or more characters he depicted single-handedly on stage are played by a full-blown cast that includes Louis Gossett Jr., Macy Gray, Ernie Hudson, Hill Harper, Rosie Perez, Liev Schreiber, Henry Simmons, Jimmy Smits, Jeffrey Wright and, in one of the roles, Santiago-Hudson himself.

It's a dream ensemble. But it's Merkerson's showcase.

"I said to Sam Waterston the other day, `When this comes out, I'm gonna be a movin' pitcher star,'" says Merkerson, laughing at herself. "Dennis (Farina) said, `You're excited, aren't you?' And I said, `I can't tell you how excited I am.'"

Waterston and Farina, of course, are Merkerson's co-stars on "Law & Order," the enduring NBC crime drama where she plays NYPD Lt. Anita Van Buren. In her 12th season, she's the senior member of the current lineup.

She sees the series as "well-written, and still interesting to do." But the fact is, she gets limited screen time playing a character whose practical function is to point her detectives in the story's next direction.

"A lot of people only know me from `Law & Order' _ the two or three minutes each week I'm on film," she acknowledges.

But she has also distinguished herself in theatrical features (recently, "Radio") and on the stage, including August Wilson's 1990 Broadway play "The Piano Lesson" and, off-Broadway, "I'm Not Stupid," for which she won a 1992 Obie.

And, as her first TV series, she was part of a groundbreaking venture: the wildly innovative "Pee Wee's Playhouse," in which she played Reba the Mail Lady.

Born in Saginaw, Mich., and raised in Detroit (where hers was the first black family in a white neighborhood), Merkerson hit Manhattan in 1978. Now she is proud to report that "there was just six weeks when I had to do work other than acting: I answered the phone on the graveyard shift at this low-life escort service."

Even so, during three decades doing what she loves to do, Merkerson never had a crack at the kind of full-bodied, high-profile, eye-opening film role she scores with in "Lackawanna Blues."

"It will give people an opportunity to see that I'm larger than Van Buren," she says with a full-dimpled grin, "and that I can do other things."

And how.

A model of gumption and grace, Nanny is a caretaker, peacemaker and reservoir of strength for her extended family _ mostly "ramblers or drifters of some sort," according to the narration, who "each had some experience with prison, mental hospitals, alcohol, drugs, pimping, gambling or church."

In an era when blacks were still forced to live amongst themselves and looked after one another, Nanny's philosophy was: "Everyone need a little help sometime."

Early in the film she is called from playing hostess for her Friday night fish fry to deliver the baby who will become her surrogate son. In this instance of the film's magnificent storytelling, action ricochets between raucous, music-stoked revelry and childbirth on an apartment floor.

Besides getting to portray a full spectrum of emotions, and a 30-year time span (taking Nanny into her 80s), Merkerson gets one other opportunity never granted her as nothing-fancy Van Buren: She gets to be glamorous.

In particular, Nanny, along with her neighbors, gets gussied up for a jammin' dance hall interlude.

A look of weariness crosses Merkerson's face when recalling that scene.

"We started filming on a Thursday at 8 in the morning, and we wrapped at 8 a.m. Friday," she chuckles. "I pretty much hated that gold dress by the end."

The film was shot last March in Los Angeles, which meant some scrambling for Merkerson to also meet her "Law & Order" obligations. She even missed the "Lackawanna" wrap party, she says, to rush back to New York to help solve another case.

"As willful as I am, and strong in myself, I became very vulnerable doing the film, because this was a new experience for me," she says. But under George C. Wolfe, the noted stage writer-director in his feature directorial debut, "I felt safe and comfortable. And I felt so supported by the rest of the cast.

"I've worked very hard in my career," says Merkerson, "and it felt good that I would be asked to carry something so incredibly wonderful as this." No being coy as she savors her worth-the-wait spotlight. "I've worked hard, and this is my reward. I'm tickled!"



They're so glad they got 'Blues'

By Bill Keveney
USA TODAY


S. Epatha Merkerson is recognized by millions of TV viewers as the even-keeled lieutenant on NBC's Law & Order. Director George C. Wolfe is known to theatergoers as the longtime head of New York's Public Theater.

They get to stretch their wings in a different environment in HBO's Lackawanna Blues (Saturday, 8 p.m. ET/PT), a film adaptation of Ruben Santiago-Hudson's one-man show about growing up in the '50s and '60s in a black neighborhood in upstate New York.

Merkerson, a New York stage veteran (The Piano Lesson) whose films include Radio and Jersey Girl, gets a lead movie role: vivacious Rachel "Nanny" Crosby — a far cry from L&O's staid Anita Van Buren. Wolfe, who headed the Public Theater from 1992 to 2004, makes his film directing debut.

"It was a grand opportunity to show what other stuff I've got," says Merkerson (whose first name is pronounced ee-pay-thuh). She delights in a "stellar cast," saying actors want to work with Wolfe. HBO's reputation is a draw, too.

After seeing Santiago-Hudson's show, Merkerson, 52, developed an understanding of Nanny, who serves as an anchor for all around her. Raised during the same era by her mother in Michigan, Merkerson also had her own knowledge of the times and strong black women.

Wolfe, 50, a two-time Tony winner whose theatrical directing credits include Angels in America and Caroline, or Change, knew of Hudson's work, too. He directed the writer/actor in Jelly's Last Jam and encouraged him to put his life stories to paper, yielding Blues.

"The material is fundamentally screaming to be a movie, with different people's stories, lives and rhythms overlapping," says Wolfe, back in New York to direct Neil LaBute's This Is How It Goes with Ben Stiller, Marisa Tomei and Jeffrey Wright.

Blues' music and the film's set, a Los Angeles home in the stages of "exquisite decay," "gave permission for my imagination to come out and dance," he says. And Merkerson was just right for the main character.

"She had all these wonderful qualities that we call contradictory that aren't really contradictory," Wolfe says. "She's very strong, very direct, but at the same time there's an emotional vulnerability. And I thought she was very sexy as Nanny."



News for 2/28/2004


'Law & Order' Cop Merkerson Leads 'Lackawanna'

By Andrew Wallenstein


NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - Longtime "Law & Order" cast member S. Epatha Merkerson has landed the lead role in the upcoming HBO original film "Lackawanna Blues."

She will play Nanny, caretaker to a group of eccentrics at an all-black rooming house in Lackawanna, N.Y. Merkerson will star opposite film rookie Markus Franklin, who plays an abandoned boy. Franklin is appearing in the Tony Kushner musical "Caroline, or Change."

"Blues" will begin shooting next month in Los Angeles.

With George C. Wolfe signed to direct, "Blues" is being transformed from an Obie-winning one-act play into an ensemble drama by its author, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who has a role in the film, as does Halle Berry. Both Santiago-Hudson and Berry will serve as executive producers.

HBO recently closed a flurry of deals with Delroy Lindo, Henry Simmons ("NYPD Blue"), Terrence Howard, Macy Gray, Hill Harper ("The Handler") and Thomas Jefferson Byrd ("He Got Game") to round out the ensemble. Already cast in "Blues" are Jeffrey Wright, Rosie Perez and Liev Schreiber.



News for 9/14/2003


The following article appeared in the September 2003 issue of Essence Magazine.