Lathan plays a politician who opposes Kelsey Grammer’s plans. (A Starz Original Series)
Actress Sanaa Lathan may not be a conjurer, but she could be forgiven for believing in the power to make things happen from the comfort of her couch.
“I’ve been finding that over the last couple years I’ve wanted to stay home and watch cable television more than go to the movies,” says Lathan a tad sheepishly while sitting in a booth at Circa 55, a restaurant at the Beverly Hilton hotel. “So I told my agents, ‘I want to do a really good cable show.’ And wouldn’t you know, it was one of those weird synchronicity things that a couple months later, this opportunity came up.”
“This” is the Starz drama “Boss,” a brooding, smart, political saga starring Kelsey Grammer as Thomas Kane, a powerful, corrupt Chicago mayor dealing secretly with a degenerative illness. Lathan joins the show in its second season as Mona Fredricks, an idealistic chief of staff to the chairman of the city council’s black caucus, Alderman Ross (James Vincent Meredith). Mona is introduced as a fierce opponent to Kane’s plan to redevelop a neglected public housing project and displace a community she came from. But she’s not above making a bold move to effect change from inside Kane’s center of power.
“Mona is kind of the moral center,” says Lathan, who spent four months in Chicago earlier this year filming “Boss” in locations as varied as City Hall and the famously crime- and poverty-stricken Cabrini-Green housing project that inspired the season’s storyline. “She cares so much about her community she’s willing to work with this man who she actually does not trust. She’s very politically savvy, she’s a family woman, happily married, and I think he’s taken by her idealism and her passion.”
This being “Boss” though, expect challenges to Mona’s integrity. Adds Lathan, “I can’t give anything away, but yeah … dark things will be happening to her.”
Today, Lathan, dressed in a V-necked, moss-green Halston Heritage dress and bright red lipstick, looks more the siren than the political operator. But the 40-year-old New York native is used to switching things up, having played roles as wide-ranging as a glam-averse athlete in the beloved indie romance “Love & Basketball,” opinionated Beneatha in the 2004 Broadway production of “A Raisin in the Sun” with Sean Combs and Audra McDonald, and an adulterous love interest for Julian McMahon on FX’s “Nip/Tuck.” A thirst for diverse roles across the spectrum of media is what motivates her, which is why she doesn’t mind guesting on a show rather than originating one.
“I don’t like the idea of being committed to playing one character for seven years,” says Lathan, who enjoys a manageable recurring gig like voicing capable wife-and-mother Donna Tubbs on Fox’s animated “The Cleveland Show.” “It’s the most fun job in the world. You go in for 45 minutes a week and laugh. You know what I mean?”
Lathan’s been around show business her whole life, starting with a television director/producer for a father, and a dancer/actress mom who once shared a Broadway dressing room with Eartha Kitt.
“I would just look at her in awe,” Lathan remembers of Kitt, whose growl she would imitate to her mother’s constant amusement. Then there was what Lathan’s childhood self took away from her dad’s friendship with silky leading man Billy Dee Williams. “He had a fur steering wheel, and I was like, ‘I want that!’” says Lathan. “It’s funny, the little things kids pick up.”
After a brief flirtation studying law in college, however, Lathan couldn’t ignore that acting was her passion. Getting into Yale School of Drama helped assuage her dad’s worries about her chosen profession: “He knew firsthand how hard it is no matter how talented you are, but something about getting into Yale soothed him a bit,” she says. “Even though that doesn’t mean anything in this business. But I got a great training there.”
And though her film career has seen her in everything from science fiction (“Alien vs. Predator”) to slick romance (“Brown Sugar”), Lathan, who is single, continues to return to the theater, recently earning a Drama Desk nomination playing an aspiring black actress in old Hollywood in Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage’s “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark,” which she’ll soon perform for Los Angeles audiences. Says Lathan, “The role is phenomenal. In the first act she’s in her 20s in the 1930s, and in the second act she’s a drunk diva in the 1970s. I mean, you don’t get to do that on film.”
She loves theater audiences, too, citing a particularly vivid memory from her time on “Raisin in the Sun” at the Royale, when the seasons had just changed from winter to spring.
“I’m doing something in the mirror [onstage], and I see behind me that the whole audience goes up in a wave, like in a football stadium,” recalls Lathan. “I’m like, ‘What the …?’ Well, I found out, it was rats! I guess, now that the theater was warm, they were coming out. But the people were so beautiful. They just did this.”
Lathan mimes calmly standing up, then sitting right back down, her features perfectly composed. Then, a smile breaks across her heart-shaped face. “I will never forget that. They didn’t leave!”
BOSS
Friday, 9 p.m., Starz