Sterling K. Brown is telling me about the underground bunker in his Ladera Heights home, a feature common to houses built during the Cold War, when fears of a nuclear holocaust ran rampant and kids were watching “duck and cover” films at school.
Brown and his wife, Ryan Michelle Bathé, sealed the bunker when they moved in, not wanting their two boys to wander in there.
But now that Brown has spent the last couple of years immersed in making the Emmy-nominated drama “Paradise,” set inside a massive domed underground city that some 25,000 people call home after a tsunami floods the planet, I wonder if the show’s doomsday vibes have seeped into his consciousness.
“It’s definitely seeped into my wife’s brain,” Brown says, laughing, adding that now that the boys are older — Andrew is 14 and Amare will be 10 next month — he and his wife are “actively” looking at opening it up and, per Bathé, stocking it with provisions. He goes on to tell me about friends who have bought land in rural areas to develop and build their own communities, so if push comes to shove they’ll survive while everyone else is picking through the rubble.
Has he considered joining them?
“It’s a different take than Sterling’s take,” Brown answers after a beat, noting that he’s not passing judgment. “But there is a level of preparation that I blissfully throw caution to the wind because I’m someone who believes in a Gump-ian existence, that everything will work out the way that it’s supposed to.”
Gump as in Forrest, Brown clarifies, as if there’s any doubt. So even though he’s in the middle of shooting the second season of “Paradise,” much of which finds his Secret Service agent looking for his wife in a world outside the bunker where things have most decidedly not worked out, Brown says he is focusing on “things that are shiny and beautiful and delightful.”
Case in point: a ring he grabs off a table in his office. When Brown and I first met, it was the first Saturday in May and Brown was at The Times taking part in an actors roundtable, which meant he wasn’t at Andrew’s soccer game or helping coach Amare’s flag football team. The soccer game was being recorded, so missing it stung less. But Brown is the defensive coordinator of the football team and, heading into the playoffs, their record was 2-3-1. Nonetheless, he was confident they’d be OK because, again, Brown is a self-professed “sunny-side-up” kind of guy.
“Not only did we make the playoffs” — here Brown retrieves the enormous ring — “we won the Super Bowl. We eked in and played our best football at the right time.
“Not to diminish anything else that’s going on in my world, because it’s a good time to be SKB,” Brown says a couple of days after earning a lead actor Emmy nomination for “Paradise.” “But it was a big moment for me. I can’t lie.”
“People are desperate for authenticity and truth,” says Brown’s “Paradise” and “This Is Us” collaborator Dan Fogelman. “Actors in Sterling’s position usually have a persona that’s carefully crafted. Sterling is who he is.”
Was it his finest moment? The word “moment” has me remembering what Dan Fogelman, Brown’s showrunner on “Paradise” and “This Is Us,” told a colleague not long ago, talking about a “Paradise” shower scene that showcased Brown’s backside. “It was his proudest moment on the show,” Fogelman said.
“He’s so dumb,” Brown says, not even letting me finish the question. “I do know what he said, and I won’t even lie. I’m not not proud of it because here’s the thing: I look at this front part of my body all the time. And I don’t always know what it looks like behind. And when I got to see it, I was like, ‘You know what?’ Not bad. Not bad at all.’”
There are many things to parse in this response. Luckily, Fogelman is more than happy to help. For one thing, he explains, it taps into Brown’s drive to be the best. Yes, he leads from a light place — you’re never going to leave a conversation with Brown feeling heavier than when you began — but the man likes to win. And Fogelman enjoys baiting him, telling Brown that if they played a game of one-on-one basketball, Fogelman would get at least one point.
It doesn’t matter that he’s winking when he says this. Just the notion that an out-of-shape writer would score a point off him drives Brown nuts.
Plus, that “not bad at all” highlights Brown’s willingness to speak his inner monologue out loud. He doesn’t have many moments where he thinks, “I wonder if I should tell this story. Maybe it will make me look bad.”
“People are desperate for authenticity and truth,” Fogelman says. “Actors in Sterling’s position usually have a persona that’s carefully crafted. Sterling is who he is.”
If you want to hear that essence pouring through, there might not be a better place than the podcast Brown does with his wife, Bathé. (Yes, a second season is coming.) It lives up to its title, “We Don’t Always Agree,” featuring the couple’s candid exchanges about money, child-rearing, racial identity and religion. No punches are pulled.
Says Brown: “My wife and I are two different people. My wife is a warrior. She’s going to fight and she’s going to fight hard. I respect her. Me … I am a peace worker. I’m going to try to find the connective tissue that allows you to recognize that we’re not as different as you think.”
“You want to know my favorite episode of ‘The West Wing’?” Brown asks. “It’s ‘Isaac and Ishmael,’ talking about how the two different branches came from Abraham — two different groups but from the same person. But yet our instinct toward nationalism and tribalism keeps us in this constant state of ‘us’ against ‘them.’ And as long as we believe in this fallacy of separation, that’s going to continue.”
Brown, center, with co-stars James Marsden and Krys Marshall in “Paradise.”
(Brian Roedel / Disney)
Having, like Brown, grown up in the church and then gone in a different direction, believing that there’s no monopoly on God, we spend a lot of time talking about the side-eyes family and friends give us when we talk about our spiritual journeys.
“A lot of my faith practice in my youth was performative, so that people saw that I was following the rules and playing the game,” Brown says. “Now, the connection with the source is the only thing that matters. I’ve never felt closer to God, the universe, nature, whatever you want to call it.”
Brown is reading the Bible to his boys right now, focusing on the Old Testament with his oldest, Andrew, who is having a hard time reconciling the God of love in the New Testament with the vengeful God that turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt when she looked back on the ruined Sodom and Gomorrah. Does God change? Or is it the ways people explain God?
“Fear is a powerful motivator, and today we’re seeing how fear can galvanize people into making decisions for their own self-protection,” Brown says. “What the New Testament is trying to say is that love is as powerful and a pure motivator for the right action. What I want to do is embody love, which is ‘love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and soul’ and ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’”
Brown is adamant in his belief that God wants us to question how the universe works and why there is so much suffering in the world.
“What questions are you asking God these days?” I ask when we reconnect. The first thing that comes to his mind is his mother, Arlene, who was diagnosed with ALS in 2018 and soon lost her ability to speak: Why her? How does this good woman merit a disease that imprisons you in your own body?
“That’s what my brothers and sisters struggle with in a very Job-like way,” Brown says. “And what I’ve learned is that faith doesn’t remove obstacles from your life. Faith allows you to believe there is a purpose for those obstacles. There is a level of grace when I see her. Never am I seeing someone defeated or angry. Arlene Brown is still smiling.”
“Listen, my head is not stuck in the sand,” Brown continues. “Life can be difficult. But life is also too short not to find something to be grateful for.”
And there you have what Fogelman calls the essence of his friend and collaborator — “a deep thinker but not a heavy man. He radiates warmth and positive energy.”
Brown tells me a funny story about how his manager used to get mad at him when he’d miss an audition because he was too busy cleaning his house. For Brown, it was perfectly logical: Cluttered space, cluttered mind. Too much chaos? Brown’s brain can’t function.
That need for control and order runs up against the way Brown likes to picture himself as an easygoing, go-with-the-flow kind of guy. His wife, he says, is happy to disabuse him of that notion. But what really made Brown see himself clearly was the time he and Bathé partook in the psychedelic ayahuasca at a Costa Rica dispensary. (I’m not giving him side-eye. Are you? Brown feels you and heads you off. “We’re crunchy granola Black people,” he explains.)
When the shaman gave Brown the “medicine,” he didn’t feel anything at first. Sure, the stars were beautiful. But that couldn’t be the extent of the experience. The shaman approached him. Do you need another cup? Maybe. Brown drank the equivalent of half a shot glass and, instantaneously, he felt his body seep into the ground. It was like he disappeared into the earth. Was he dead? No. He could see the sweat bouncing off his body and hovering over him. Maybe the shaman saw something and was concerned because she approached Brown and asked if she could sing to him.
“And she starts singing this song, which sounded very serpentine, like if a snake was able to sing,” Brown says.
Like the python in “The Jungle Book”?
“Yes!” Brown says. “Now the more I look at things people have created, I’m like, ‘They did ayahuasca.’”
Nothing about the experience was what he anticipated, which is the lesson he took away: You can’t control anything. Just be present to what’s happening now — and observe.
“And as I move through life, I experience more peace and comfort just doing precisely that,” Brown says.
(Bexx Francois / For The Times)
