Omari Hardwick, Lela Loren Talk Power Season 3Posted by Brad Balfour
July 11, 2016
By the time Season Three of Power will have kicked in this month, series creators Courtney Kemp Agboh and 50 Cent and their writers will not only have found ways to have extended the New York based series into fresh uninhibited realms but also take this community of characters into dubious, dangerous areas.
This third season is again steeped in the world of New York’s seductive nightlife where the elite and the international drug cartels’ underworld intersect.
In this season, James St. Patrick (formerly Ghost, the owner of several new nightclubs — and seemingly out of the violent drug game — pursues his revived relationship with first love Angela Valdes, who happens to be the Assistant United States Attorney sworn to bring him to justice. But just as they begin to feel that James’ criminal past may finally be behind them, both are forced to face the consequences of escaping from a life from which no one gets away clean.
Actors Omari Hardwick and Lela Loren make for a great couple to talk with about the series and their characters. Certainly in portraying their characters who have become so entwined with each other, they have become much of the focus of the latest season of Power — and its fan base.
Once these two kicked into the vibe of this interview, staged at the Langham Hotel in midtown Manhattan, it really turned from a Q &A to a dialogue between the two.
One of the forces that draws audiences to this series is the magnetism between the two of you and, in particular, Omari presence on screen. What it is like to project that sex appeal?
Omari Hardwick: It’s such a weird kind of thing… I think it’s being comfortable in your skin. Nowadays, social media tells too much. You don’t have the same level of mystique.
I’m a conduit for bridging age, if you think about it. Born of a baby boomer generation, I’m 20 years the senior of the common millennial, which is about 22 years old. I’m 42 years old. I think most of the world knows Omari started at that point when football said goodbye to me and I was living on couches in New York and whatnot.
Between gran pops and pops, and a lot of strong men in my life, I think it does a real cool thing for boys. I had that and maybe I ran from the part of the sex symbol thing that you’re speaking about that I didn’t think was great — which was not being taken seriously for what I possessed beyond that.
So I was running from a part that I’ve now embraced, that God gave me the opportunity to show what that was. You can’t play the characters that he and [Robert] Deniro and Denzel [Washington], and [George] Clooney brought to life if you don’t have depth that they have. I can leak into the [newer] generation that we have — the likes of Tom Hardy, Leo DiCaprio, Woody Harrelson, Larenz Tate.
There have been some sexy men who I don’t think have a problem embracing their sex appeal, but when I look at what really makes me think they’re sexy is their level of comfort within their own skin, that’s what’s being projected. Women root for boys that are men’s men.
Lela, your character has a natural appeal, but you also hold your own with him in other ways. How do you play off of that?
Lela Loren: I was a late bloomer, classically. Boys didn’t start to look at me until I was 23, 24 years old.
That’s hard to imagine seeing you now in person and on screen.
LL: It is hard, but it’s actually real. I went home to see Marco; I lived with an Italian family in Italy, and even in my early 20s I was “Ugh,” and he talks about how proud he was that I became a Girl.
OH: She’s sexy.
LL: One of the positive things of being a late bloomer, and a nerd, and not cool, is that you are not allowed to be cool, and at some point I stopped trying and said, “Fuck it” and that frees you up to be yourself. This might sound trite, but there’s also the aspect of loving yourself. I had a lot of angst and self loathing.
As a kid I was really dark and as I’ve grown up I’ve gotten more lighthearted. People say, “Oh you just have to love yourself”, let’s take the “just” out of it because it was something I really had to learn and had to be taught and I had to find other women and men to teach me what that process was and what it looks like. It takes practice.
OH: We go through it in this show. I think the world doesn’t realize it, but Omari loves Lela way better than Jamie could ever love Angela. Nobody thinks about that.
LL: Because they really know each other. James…
OH: They were 15.
LL: It’s a lot of fantasy happening.
OH: Even if I weren’t attached to another human being and Angela was single and I was single, I always thought it dysfunctional and not smart to date a cast member. It doesn’t make any sense to me, it’s not logical. We both know how to go from the heart; we couldn’t pay our bills if we were just going from logic.
But that’s a logic that makes sense, whereas that wouldn’t make any sense. That would mess up the entire environment of work. It’s easy for me to go to that place — “Oh no, hell yeah” — and she’ll look at me like she’s saying. “What am I saying???? I’m a work in progress.” True, so am I.
In real life, not just the character.
OH: We’re only talking about real life. Lela reminded me of those moments of like, “Have some grace with me, don’t expect me to believe that.” As much as you find it hard to believe, I equally at times come to work like, “It’s hard to believe you’re just figuring out how flat you are or how strong you are.”
Fly for me is not the aesthetic, it’s the entirety of a woman that’s fly or beautiful. It’s hard, it’s hard for me to remember at times I’ve got to have grace. I grew up with a doting, affectionate father, my mom was not affectionate, so it does an interesting thing. So if you take that actor and put them in Ghost, and 6.9 million viewers are going, “What’s this thing we’re looking at?” Most actors would play Ghost from the standpoint of mom being doting and dad not being doting.
You’d be a lot more narcissistic.
OH: You nailed it. The character’s already written as narcissistic, so why not bring in another element? But I can’t bring it in if I don’t possess it. So sometimes loving on each other as cast members, Lela might remind me that I don’t possess that in a totality yet. You’ve got to be careful with me… I’m trying to figure it out and I’m like, I don’t possess that yet.
But that the evolving dynamic that makes the show work, that it goes against expectations… It’s not predictable.
OH: It looks like the critics and the people came on and went, “I didn’t expect this to be as deep as it is.”
LL: Angela and Ghost don’t really know each other, and that’s the irony of Season Three. They’re starting to be confronted by who they are. They’re trying to hide certain parts about who they are, but it’s… They’re in such close quarters that they’re going to see how the sausage gets made and decide if they still want to eat it.
OH: It’s made from your perspective. Ghost is made from slaughter.
LL: The thing that’s troubling to me about Ghost as a person is this reverence for money, status, and the dollar. That’s something you see in society — “I want to get to the top of the ladder.” What’s the point of getting to the top of the ladder if it’s an oppressive ladder? Just because you’re at the top rung doesn’t mean you’re not being oppressed. It’s pretty lonely up there.
OH: I’ve decided to play him not necessarily the way you see him. It’s super cool that you see him that way. The way I justify and validate the desire for the divorce is that [his wife] Natasha [Naturi Naughton] has made me adhere to that. Part of me [is] wanting to fly free, is that I’m playing the guy that had it not been for the demands that come from her to be this thing….
LL: You could have just been James.
OH: It could be completely wrong and you guys will talk to Naturi soon and… it’s awesome that actors can go, “What are you playing?” and not necessarily answer what each other is asking. Or not even ask it because we don’t want to know too many secrets of pre production of your building of you building of character.
LL: Our motivations might not match up.
OH: You want to ask yourself what the actor’s going to bring today.
It’s about learning, evolving.
OH: I’ve always said we’ve figured it out too early if we figured it out before the whole series ends.
What life lessons have you learned from playing these characters?
LL: Angela cuts off that love in her really early because it scares her. That’s why she leaves Jamie at fifteen and doesn’t call him back. She pursues discipline and success and jobs and all of that feels like a great antidote but the truth is she’s really lonely and starving. So there’s that piece of you that no matter how many times you fall in the mud, keep your heart open. Keep love is important and vital.
OH: For me it’s been — and you commented on it — the narcissism. It’s so friggin’ high in him and I guess being a not-selfish middle kid and always sharing… Ghost shares with the three kids and with Tommy, Joseph Sikora is Tommy, but he don’t really share with anybody else. He even runs from himself at times. He’s a fascinating character because, hopefully, I’ve made him empathetic enough, stuffing in those Omari-isms. On paper, he’s interesting because how many characters have we seen [with] this magnitude of criminality?
We can talk about Bryan Cranston’s Walter White or James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano, or Idris Elba’s Stringer Bell — we didn’t have a long time to watch him string his bell — but if you look at Ghost, Ghost’s running from his own self. You have to be so narcissistic to think you can get away with that. In the Bible it says [that] hubris is [the] excess of pride. What I’ve learned is [that] you can’t win, you can’t beat hubris; if that gets up in you it’s the worst cancer ever. Which is why it’s fun playing him.
Lela, do you judge Angela?
LL: When you’re inside the character and playing the character you can’t, because you see their motivation and inner workings. We [actors] have a duality that [we] can step within something/someone but also look outside of it/them. I don’t judge her as strongly as the fans do because I think there’s a lot of pretense to [that] morality.
I find it funny when women have all this vitriol over cheating, but they’re okay with the murder and drug dealing, and you’re like, “Ok, there’s some moral pretense here.”
The way I judge Angela the most harshly as a woman is some of her manipulations because I always see being manipulative as weakness, like Iago, where you have to go puppeteer things because you don’t have the courage and the bravery to confront it head on. But it’s fun to play that as an actress.
Is it intoxicating playing these characters? Do you get a rush out of playing someone you wouldn’t usually be?
OH: Absolutely.
LL: Definitely. That’s what draws us to acting, is [that] you get to play with the shadow self. You get to play with all these specters you have inside that don’t have a functional place in this world.
Season 2 Recap
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