Riding the Whirlwind

NCIS: New Orleans’ Shalita Grant went from Broadway star to struggling Los Angeles actress in the blink of an eye.

Shortly after graduating from The Juilliard School, Grant found herself acting alongside veterans Sigourney Weaver and David Hyde Pierce on Broadway in a role she originated for Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. Not long after her Tony Nomination for her role in that Broadway play, Grant was fighting to stay optimistic amid a series of rejections in Los Angeles.

She persevered and a year after she moved to the city of angels, she juggled the filming of two vastly different television roles— one on the acclaimed PBS miniseries Mercy Street and the other on CBS’s NCIS: New Orleans.

What’s more, Mercy Street was shot in Petersburg, Virginia—the same town she grew up in.

Growing up in Virginia, acting was not on Grant’s radar until she was a teenager. Grant had bounced around schools and ran with the wrong crowd. She didn’t feel challenged and got bored easily. When a new Governor’s arts school opened up near her house, she wanted to attend—to meet new people.

This desire to meet new people led her to audition for the acting program at a new Governor’s arts high school in her neighborhood.

Tell me about your very first acting audition for the Governor’s art school.

Instead of doing a monologue, my mom said I should do a whole scene. The only play she knew was A Raisin in the Sun and so she had me do Mama and Beneatha—the scene where Beneatha tells Mama she doesn’t believe in God. I got myself into the school but even after getting into this Governor’s school, I wasn’t really sure that I wanted to act.

Because I was not such a good teenager, I was shipped to Baltimore to live with my dad’s family. Baltimore is really rough. And for basically a girl from the country, it was too much. So we went to the arts high school and asked for an audition and I got in to the Baltimore School for the Arts.

That was the first time that I made a decision in my life at that point. It was something definitive that I wanted to do. I looked at acting as a way out. Petersburg is one of the roughest cities in Virginia and a lot of my family has been affected by the Prison Industrial Complex so things didn’t seem that great and a lot of my family members were not doing well.

When I got to Baltimore, I quickly realized that if I was going to have any semblance of a life that was different from what I had known up until that point, I needed to do something outside of the box. And I need to be successful because I can’t depend on my family to take care of me. I saw it as an opportunity.

How did Juilliard enter the picture as something that was a possibility for you?

I did an art competition that the [high] school had us participate in and I won. I went to Miami and I met this incredible organization and they were also doing a documentary to celebrate their 25th year and I was asked to be in that. And then I come back to Baltimore and they talked to me about maybe auditioning for Juilliard—a school I had only heard about through the movie Save The Last Dance.

I knew it was a good school, but I didn’t know. I auditioned and I got in and they gave me a scholarship and I moved to New York City at 17. In my mind, I had made it. I had gotten out. I had gotten out of Baltimore. I had gotten out of Petersburg.

And I’m in a big city and I’m by myself and I’m fucking frightened. The first week was orientation week. It was really awesome. Community! And everyone was artists. Everybody has a different story. But after that first week, I experienced some really intense loneliness. Everyone had phone calls from family members and had a place to go back to, which was really different from where I was. It made it really hard.

Was there a point at Juilliard that you decided this is something you wanted to pursue as a career?

I’m not the best judge of my own work. It’s often hard to get me to admit that anything is good or worthwhile.

It took me a little while to realize what I had done and where I had landed. In my life, that was the biggest thing I had done at that point.

This was really the first time I had taken myself seriously with acting. I had a lot of really great success that propelled me to that place. It was also talent that I didn’t really recognize that I had or was worth anything. Having adults tell you that “you’ve got it. You’ve got the thing. And you’re making people feel things.” That was what I needed to do it.

What was your post-college plan?

[Playright] Christopher Durang taught at Juilliard and a couple months after I graduated, he called me and asked me to read some one acts that he had written. I did the reading of the play [Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike]. The character of Cassandra was written with me in mind.

I’ve never seen this character before in his work so I asked him, “Chris what do you want me to do?” Chris said, “I don’t know, make it up. You’ve got two hours before we have to do it in front of people.”

I came up with this characterization based off my great-grandmother back in Virginia along with what was on the page and it took off, stopping the show in the first act. We’ve done 500 performances and without fail it always stopped the show.

They commissioned that play. So I do more readings and Sigourney Weaver gets attached and they decide they are going to put it on and Lincoln Center gets involved. But they say they don’t want me to do it. They say they can get someone else who is a star or is older, but just not me.

After a while I get another call that the auditioning of the part not going well. By the way, they had auditioned every age range, every ethnicity and even thought about auditioning a man. So I come in to audition. I know how the beats are; I helped shape those beats. And I walked out of the room with the job.

We go to Lincoln Center. We have a meeting about maybe going on Broadway. A month and a half later, we’re on Broadway. And a month after opening on Broadway, I get the Tony nomination.

Wow, that’s quite a whirlwind! So what made you decide to move out to Los Angeles?

At the end of this colossal emotional ride, I was like, “I friggin’ created a character!” I get this feeling here in New York City that I could totally go to LA and I could be awesome. I left with a lot of optimism.
That was the catalyst for leaving. You have to keep practicing, you have to keep working.

What was your experience once you got to Los Angeles?

I get there and it’s all sunny and stuff. I’m thinking, “Oh my god, this was a really good decision because New York don’t have sun.” I moved there at the end of August. I was like, “this is going to go so well for me.”

And it didn’t. I was like, “they are going to love me.” And they were like, “nah, we don’t love you; we don’t even know you.”

I had a few really ego busting moments in the audition room. I had casting directors asking me, ‘Do you do regular acting?’ after reading my resume. They didn’t understand who I was and what I was about.

The expectation in L.A. is different from theater in New York. In New York there’s a lot more collaboration and creativity. There’s a variation of bodies in New York City. The body image esthetic in L.A. was not my body. At the time, I was a size four but I’m pretty short so it shows differently. I wasn’t unhealthy, but I also was so tiny, but I wasn’t tiny enough.

In New York, I worked with a few women with eating disorders and I always hated the idea of even feeling pressure to thin out and now here I was.

So I made the decision to get strong, instead of getting skinny. So I started lifting heavy weights and I started running here and there, building muscle and shape. And the responses changed. Then it became the issue of my hair.

How long did it take for you to book for your first gig?

It took almost a year to the day [that I moved] before I had booked my first job. It was something like 59 different projects I auditioned for from September 2013 to August 2014. 59 projects. 59 nos.

That’s a lot, even for an optimistic person who had come with some relatively good self-esteem. I had almost zero by six, seven months in. And then was just determined in that last month that I book a job.

How did you make money while you were auditioning?

Up until that point, I really didn’t work in the restaurant industry, but that’s how a lot of people make their money in L.A.. I couldn’t be a waitress, though, because people are awful to waitresses. I was already beaten down. I couldn’t have a money job that made me feel worse. Everybody loves a bartender!

And this is when the eternal optimist kind of showed up. I was like, “I’m really good at a lot of things, I can be a bartender. I’ll just go on YouTube and YouTube how to be a bartender.”

I made up a resume chock full of lies with restaurants from New York City that had already closed so they couldn’t check up on me. I had made up this total lie about how I was a New York City party girl who had just saved up enough money to move to L.A to figure myself out. I have zero ambition. I would never leave for an audition. I am not that chick.

I get this dive bar job. I got fired after two weeks because they realized I had no idea what I was doing.

And then I got an even brighter idea that I had to work for a corporate restaurant structure as a bartender because they have to train you on their bar. So I brought that same lying-ass resume to Dave & Busters and was like, “I’m amazing!” Same spiel. And they hired me. Now, they kept me.

It was one of the worst, soul sucking jobs I have ever done. It was a really rough clientele. I had booked Battle Creek and now I’m still working at Dave & Busters. The show didn’t change my life, it was a guest star.

I called my manager in New York and I was like “listen, I don’t know how long I can do this; I think I’m ready to quit.” I had 59 auditions to get that one job. How long do I do this?

What was the first job that you booked?

It was Battle Creek. It’s a show that’s no longer on CBS. They did one season with Dean Winters and Josh Duhamel. By this point I had run out of money for the second time.

After I booked that first job, I either booked a job or worked every other other month after that.

Someone hired me. Someone thought I was good enough to be hired. Almost six months into being a kind of rotating working actress, I turned a guest star on Bones into a recur.

I quit Dave & Busters, thank goodness. I did a little ABC Family job. And then NCIS: New Orleans happened. At the end of the first season, that’s when Mercy Street came up. That was the first time, I got six episodes of something.

What was it like going back to your home state to film Mercy Street?

It was a total full circle moment for me. I shot the show right down the street from my grandma’s hair salon. They were shooting in my town!

Tell me about your character on Mercy Street, I gather she’s a stark contrast to Sonja Percy, your NCIS: New Orlean’s character.

Aurelia Johnson is an escaped slave from further south in Virginia. She escaped up to Alexandria where Mercy Street is set and she’s in this holding pattern for her mom and her son.

She’s experiencing freedom for the first time in her life. She conducts herself like a free woman—as much as it was allowed as a black person.

She asks for services in exchange for goods from her boss and he rapes her. He convinces her that she has to continue in that sexual relationship in order to get information for her child and her mother. And he’s lying.

There is this other man who would be a more viable relationship, but their situations are so tenuous that it’s hard for them connect. Most of the series is Aurelia trying to reconnect with her family and trying not to lose faith in her stance.

And Sonja Percy is this badass former ATS agent, kicking in doors, shooting the bad guys.

How did you prepare for your role on Mercy Street?

The night before having to fly to Virginia, I’m looking through all this information they sent me and I’m like wow, I don’t know how I got this job. I shot the audition video in my kitchen. I thought it was a total shot in the dark. And now here I am, after a year of unemployment, I’m doing two television shows, this is amazing.

I’m playing a former slave. I don’t know what that’s like. This is so scary to me because it could go so awfully. What if I get there and they realize that I wasn’t good enough.

The research packet they gave us for Aurelia was pretty thin, so I needed some inspiration that I need to draw from.

I decided that I have to read all of the news articles and watch all of the videos about what’s happening right now. That was the first real step toward into inhabiting that world and inhabiting the character.

I realized I did have something in common with Aurelia. For the first time in her life, she’s taken her life in her own hand and takes advantage of the moment in time to set herself free. She escaped. She gets to Alexandria and she gets hired and she’s getting wages for her work.

Then she has this idea that she’s truly a free woman. And if she conducts herself the way a free woman conducts herself she’ll be able to have the life she wants.

Silas, her boss, expresses to her that she is not free. Her freedom is in name only. Not even her body belongs to her in this idea of freedom. She has this realization about what her reality is as a black woman in a country and what happens when someone loses faith and her paradigm has shifted.

So I was like, what do I have that’s similar to that?

In 2008 Barak Obama was elected. I was at Juilliard and I remember it like it was five minutes ago. The way that I felt when I walked from the dorms to the school the night after the election… I felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I didn’t even know that I had that weight.

Life is changing. And I’m at Juilliard. It feels like anything can happen. I come from nothing. I thought maybe we are post-racial?

And then eight years later in my Facebook newsfeed are videos of black and brown men and women and transgender people being gunned down in the street. And we are arguing about humanity. Every day, reading and watching this, my heart was broken.

It was a really tough place emotionally and mentally to be in.

Let’s switch gears, what are you watching on television that you are loving right now?

I just found out about The Americans. I’ve been binging watching that show. It’s so good! I’m obsessed. Tangerine the movie is so good and the fact that it was shot on an iPhone; it drives me crazy. I bought the app, a steady cam for the iPhone, and the lens attachment. It inspires you to tell your own story.

NCIS: New Orleans wraps up its second season on Tuesday, May 17th.