After playing Randall Pearson on the hit NBC drama This Is Us, Sterling K. Brown was used to people telling him he was good at making them cry.
Throughout its six-season run, many of the Emmy-winning show’s most emotional moments belonged to his character.
Now, as he makes his small-screen return in the twisty political thriller Paradise, streaming on Disney+, Brown, 48, is hoping to move audiences in a different way.
Created by Dan Fogelman — who was also the brains behind This Is Us — Paradise casts Brown as stoic Secret Service agent Xavier Collins who becomes the prime suspect in an investigation led by a shady powerbroker (Julianne Nicholson) into the murder of U.S. President Cal Bradford (James Marsden).
“I think it’s got something for everyone. It’s got the aggression you need … a little bit of fighting and action … I think it’s fascinating. It’s almost anthropological in its set-up,” Brown says in a Zoom call from Los Angeles.
The plot twist that had everyone talking after its premiere episode last month was the idyllic town in which they all live, Paradise, is an elaborate underground bunker beneath a mountain in Colorado that the U.S. government has constructed to save 25,000 people after an extinction-level event on the surface.
Brown earned a supporting Oscar nomination last year for his role opposite Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction, which won the audience prize at the Toronto International Film Festival. But he’s ready to prove he can do something entirely different to keep viewers tuning in on a weekly basis.
“The show has an engine. The whodunit is a strong engine. But there’s such character development and richness with these people,” Brown says. “It taps into that question of what makes us tick as human beings. These people are forced into a particular situation and they have to figure out a way forward in the midst of it.”
That the episodes all end on cliffhangers, like its predecessors 24 and Lost in appointment TV watching, only adds to the intrigue.
“There’s so many twists and turns … there are all these unexpected places that it goes,” says Nicholson, who plays Sinatra, the icy billionaire architect behind the town of Paradise.
“Dan is great at bringing the audience down these pathways where you aren’t really sure where you’re going. There’s a great thrill in that,” Marsden adds. “As an actor, you’re attracted to roles where you feel like you want to tell this story to someone else … This did feel fresh. It felt original at a time when original ideas don’t come around that often and it was a rare opportunity to work with good people.”
After last week’s episode killed off a key character, Brown says audiences should continue to expect the unexpected. Beyond the mystery of the whodunit, the series delves into other hot-button existential issues, including climate change, wealth and privilege, government secrets and imagining the types of people who might be hand-picked to be saved in the leadup to a planetary emergency.
This week, Xavier faces the consequences of his investigation into the president’s murder, while Cal’s family history and his last days go further under the microscope.
Fogelman, who is also a producer on Only Murders in the Building, first conceived of the conspiracy-laden plot for Paradise over a decade ago. After working with Brown for six seasons on This Is Us, he pitched the idea of having him lead Paradise.
“He wrote the script, and as he was writing it he said he had me in mind for this character. He asked me to look at it and I responded to it immediately … as soon as I read it, I was so excited and flattered that he considered me,” Brown says. “I’ve been a journeyman actor for the majority of my career. It’s only been very recently that people have been like, ‘What would you like to do?’”
Right now, Brown (who also executive produces Paradise) and Fogelman are hoping the White House drama gets a second season.
The Emmy-winning actor says there are still many more curveballs in store for people watching at home. Using three emojis, all he’ll say about the season 1 finale is: “I would start off with the sweating emoji, then maybe the headache emoji and at the end that melting one.”
But even though he’s worked hard to separate himself from Randall, Brown is able to see the ways in which he’s different than Xavier in his own life.
“I try to look for the sunshine and the angels and the beauty and the humanity. In a Mother Teresa way, I try to see Christ in everyone,” he says of himself. Playing Xavier, he chuckles, “is basically, the opposite of that.”
“I think about how Sterling would respond naturally and then I do the opposite,” he says of his latest screen character. “That was the prep.”
The first four episodes of Paradise are now streaming on Disney+. New episodes drop every Tuesday.