ABFF 2016: Omari Hardwick Talks ABFF And Power’s Move To Sunday NightsPosted by Wilson Morales
June 22, 2016
Over the 20 years that ABFF has been in existence, there have been a number of people who have come to the festival, either as an attendee, actor, director, or producer, and each time they walked away with a sense of pride and commitment to keep going on and pursuing their dreams to matter in this industry.
One of the few who’s been to the festival numerous times is actor Omari Hardwick, who’s currently capturing attention on TV as the star of Starz’s hit series, Power. Prior to his portrayal of Ghost on that series, Hardwick had been seen in TV shows and films such as Dark Blue, Kick-Ass, Salim Akil’s Sparkle, Ava DuVernay’s Middle of Nowhere and Tyler Perry’s For Colored Girls. He was also an ABFF Best Actor nominee for Everyday Black Man and was named the 2013 Festival Ambassador.
Blackfilm.com caught up with Hardwick while at the festival and he spoke about why folks still come out to support the festival and his series now moving to Sunday nights.
How many times have you been here?
Omari Hardwick: Probably about eight years.
What makes ABFF special that people keep coming out for 20 years?
Omari Hardwick: Opportunity. You’re born on this earth wanting to matter. Say a child will pass away, literally, if you don’t love on them, and so people want to matter. ABFF has done a great job of allowing people in an industry that often makes you feel like you don’t matter. ABFF and what Jeff Friday and the team have been able, to me, accomplish, is really accomplishing that which is often very difficult to do, and that’s to make people walk away going, “My voice matters. My story matters. The way I tell it matters.” I tell it with a different kind of, perhaps, complexity or voice to it than the industry I’m involved in tells it, but ABFF and the big ears that belong to this beautiful brainchild of Jeff have been ears that have listened to us and people of color in a way that you don’t necessarily find other film festivals doing, so I think that’s it. People matter here. Opportunity.
I’ve seen you in a lot of work, notably Dark Blue, Kick-Ass, Being Mary Jane, now Power. Each time your status has gone up from recurring to supporting to lead. People who are looking at your background and say, “Hey, this guy, he’s walking up certain ladders. How do I follow that path?” What do you tell them?
Omari Hardwick: I had a college roommate who, when I was playing football in college, but I had a college roommate who was a fellow ball player, and he said to me, when it really started career-wise for me, said, “Omari, yours is going to be a marathon,” and he always said that. I would say to people who are looking at my climb in a way that you laid it out, which I think is correct, it’s been a lot of great opportunities for me to make a make myself known, but more so at times people going, “But he should be bigger. He’s so good. He should be bigger.”
I think I always heard the college roommate’s voice in the back of my mind, which was, “Yours is a marathon,” and so the steady climb, to me, is, in my opinion, I don’t know, maybe it’s because I’m a Capricorn and we like mountains, I think it’s the only real way to have lasting power. My father used used to say, “Talent will always prevail.” There will be different ebbs and flows of any industry. He was a lawyer, but talent will prevail. The table will always allow talent there.
Other things will come in and out of style. Reality TV kind of took away soap operas, if you think about it, and what our aunts and grandmothers and different people grew up looking at or were watching in the background when we were growing up. Reality TV sort of truncated that. If that’s vintage, if it’s fad-ish to things that we watch to be thougt of in the same light, I think my pops was right, that at the end of the day talent will always sort of remain at the table. I think if you you look at it in a marathon way, then people will go, “Okay, you can climb in a steady way. You don’t have to be overnight.” As you know, more than anybody, I guess overnight is 10 years, anyway.
There’s a lot of TV shows on right now, a lot of programs, and it’s always a, to some, a struggle to make sure that you go onto the next season. Power is moving to Sunday nights. Bigger attraction. What’s going to draw people in, if not already, to see the series? Why do you think Starz made that move for Sunday nights?
Omari Hardwick: It’s a graduation, yeah. I think everything started on the page with Courtney Kemp Agboh being this phenomenal creator, this African American woman from Connecticut and she took Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, our incredible EP, she took his vision and she dug and scrapped and tried to figure out what … Not in terms of the era that he was raised in, but to make sure that era, in terms of what he was raised, which is the same generation I was raised in, to make sure, and she was as well, to make sure that it could be as modern as seen in 2013, 2014.
I thought she did a great job of making Starz take notice to a show that happened to have a black lead, but I always like Ghost because I felt like anybody from Chris Pine to Tom Hardy to Leo DiCaprio to actors of other ethnic diversity, not just an Omari Hardwick, could play the role, and because the role was bigger than me, and the role was more dynamic even than me, and I find myself to be pretty broad thinking, and I’ve experienced a lot in life … She made Ghost even more prevailing of a person that spoke to that dynamism or a complexity, and I love that, and I love the characters that she was building around it, so I think what’s allowing us to graduate from Saturday to Sunday, quite honestly, is the fact that we’ve graduated every single year, anyway.
I feel like we’ve sort of gotten a new niche of fan base where maybe in the beginning I was just looking at one demographic, in terms of people that were stopping me in the street. The next season, it was a different demographic. I would go to Europe, and that demographic was going crazy; we’re in 175 countries. Now watching, and my publicist reminded me this morning, we’re in middle eastern countries, as well, so that’s the thing. If that many people are watching across the globe, then it would be counter-intuitive to believe at Starz that we couldn’t graduate to a Sunday audience, which is an audience that is home more, absolutely, but even you’re vacuuming your house or washing dishes and you didn’t want, necessarily, to watch our specific show, if you’re home on Sunday night, my dollar is on us at least getting you to turn the vacuum off for a minute to sit down and see we’re talking about on the show Power.
