Evan Parke Joins Quentin Tarantino’s Django UnchainedPosted by Wilson Morales
February 10, 2012
Evan Parke, who currently plays District Attorney Spencer Walsh on the CBS soap opera ‘The Young and the Restless,’ has joined the cast of Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Django Unchained.’
According to Deadline, he joins a cast that includes Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Don Johnson, Leonardo DiCaprio and Samuel L. Jackson.
The film, which has begun production and will film in Orleans and Saint John the Baptist parishes in Louisiana, centers on a slave-turned-bounty hunter who sets out to rescue his wife from a brutal Mississippi plantation owner.
Originally from Jamaica and raised in Brooklyn and Long Island, Parke was a full-time economics student at Cornell when he decided his senior year to take classes in black theater and dramatic literature-and discovered his passion for acting. After receiving his degree in economics, Parke worked for three years in various corporate jobs (including FedEx and pharmaceutical sales), but he could not get acting out of his system.
Following his dream, Parke went on to receive his master’s degree from the prestigious Yale School of Drama and then went to New York, where he appeared on different daytime dramas (including All My Children and As the World Turns). He also began building his theater credits, appearing in Colored People’s Time, The Old Settler and The Lion King on Broadway, among others. In 1997, Parke was the recipient of the William & Eva Fox Foundation Fellowship, which funded his attendance at the New York Film Academy, where he focused on film producing.
In addition to his TV work including ‘Dragnet’ and ‘Desperate Housewives,’ the Cornell grad appeared in Peter Jackson’s ‘King Kong,’ Tim Burton’s ‘Planet Of The Apes’ and ‘The Cider House Rules.’
