Truly, Madly, Deadly_ The Unofficial True Blood Companion - Becca Wilcott [27]
Lest we rest on Wesley’s laurels, let’s not forget that show business is also about The It Factor. Glenn Edwards, who taught Wesley at both the Las Vegas Academy and the University of Evansville in Indiana, recalls, “Everyone that worked with [Wesley] knew there was something special there — it wasn’t just talent.” He continues to say that Wesley has always possessed “determination, bravery, self-confidence . . . She had a dream and she was willing to work for it.”
Wesley also possesses a sense of clarity in a highly-competitive industry that replaces one actor for another. “[A]n actor shouldn’t work from a place of fear, because it’ll show in your work. You should work from a place of contentment, relaxation, and coming from your heart, and from the truth of yourself.” This conviction positions Wesley as a beacon of hope for other actors of color who are negotiating the same twists and turns that she once did. “It feels good to be a young woman of color leading the way,” she says. “I really do think it’s possible, and it’s what we need to see with this young generation.”
(RD/Bishop/Retna Digital)
Nelsan Ellis (Lafayette Reynolds)
“[When Ellis steps on the set,] we all just stand back and point the camera in his direction . . . [He] channels from his own planet.”
— Alan Ball
“I know every man, whether straight, gay, or George mother-fucking Bush, is terrified of the pussy.”
— Lafayette Reynolds
Nelsan Ellis was born in 1978, in Harvey, Illinois. After the divorce of his parents, Ellis, then six, and his mother relocated to Bessemer, Alabama, a poor and violent suburb of Birmingham. Ellis later attended Jess Lanier High School for a year before transferring to McAdory High School. His time spent at Jess Lanier was one of the lowest points of his life. “It was awful,” Ellis admits. “It’s hard to get an education when teachers spend seventy percent of their time trying to discipline students.”
Considering Ellis’s backstory for his True Blood character, Lafayette Reynolds, a flamboyantly gay short order cook who supplements his income dealing drugs and prostituting himself, one wonders how much of Ellis’s upbringing plays into his performance. “[T]here are some unfortunate things that happened in [Lafayette’s] past that have forced him to live a certain way. I think he’s like a starving person stealing food . . . [H]e’s basically a good dude who’s doing what he has to do to live the lifestyle he wants to live.” In creating this backstory, Ellis was able to identify with the character. “I grew up knowing I wanted to escape that life, and the only escape was education.”
At 14, Ellis was sent to live with his aunt in Dolton, Illinois, close to his father who works for a grocery distributor, and where he graduated from Thornridge High School in 1997. Thornridge was Ellis’s first glimpse at the possibility of a different life, and where he got his first exposure to the acting bug, thanks in large part to teachers Tim Sweeney and Bill Kirksey whom Ellis credits with reaching out to him; otherwise, “I’d probably have five kids and a rap sheet.”
Sweeney says, “Nelsan had such an unusual voice, an unusual manner, and a kind of a cragginess about him that made him a little different from every other kid.” He cast Ellis in a lead role in the play The Colored Museum, “and I could see the wheels turning and clicking,” Sweeney continues. “Once [Nelsan] got hooked, he just decided that was the world he wanted to be in.”
Thornridge didn’t just introduce Ellis to acting; it placed him in a community of other young black men who were serious about their studies, taught by teachers who were serious about giving their students the tools to succeed. When Ellis graduated, deciding he would continue to pursue acting, he went for the brass ring (not