Actor Sean Patrick Thomas burst onto the scene as Julia Stiles‘ co-star and love interest in the 2001 classic “Save the Last Dance” — and he’s been a sex symbol ever since.
And according to him, the movie, which features an interracial love story, may be responsible for many beautiful mixed babies.
“I also get a lot of brothers or white women say, ‘You know, I saw “Save the Last Dance” [and] I felt like I was ready to have an interracial relationship,’” Sean told me. “‘And now, look, I have like four mixed kids.’”
But that movie wasn’t his, ahem, last dance in show business. Sean continued working consistently in television and was in the “Barbershop” franchise. Most recently, he plays Gene Mobley, husband to Emmett Till’s mother, in the powerful biopic about her, “Till,” out Friday.
“Not many people know about him and the role that he played,” Sean said of Emmett’s surrogate father. “So I felt a great sense of responsibility to him and to his family, to do him justice.”
He is also on Hulu’s “Reasonable Doubt,” executive produced by Kerry Washington, who plays his sister in “Save the Last Dance.”
“Twenty years later, it’s exactly the same. I walk on set and it’s just a warm feeling of family,” he said of working with Kerry.
You can tell family is important to Sean. The Delaware native speaks warmly of his parents, who came from Guyana. If you browse his Instagram page, it’s filled with beautiful photos of his childhood and endless snaps of his two children and wife, actress Aonika Laurent, who hails from New Orleans. However, there is some familial tension bubbling under the surface. The issue is football. He is a rabid Philadelphia Eagles fan, and his wife, coming from the Big Easy, has her own passionate affiliation.
“I’m cool with her liking her own team … I respect that, but do not put a New Orleans Saints jersey on my son. Or my daughter. That’s where she crossed the line, man.”
He recalled buying his son an Eagles jersey and then going away to film something. “I came home a couple of months later and he was wearing a Saints jersey. That was just the height of disrespect.”
So far this season, the Eagles are the only undefeated team in the league, so he’s got the upper hand for now.
I’m assuming he had some Randall Cunningham, Donovan McNabb or Brian Dawkins jerseys in his house, but growing up he idolized James Bond. Now, he calls Sydney Poitier’s “In the Heat of the Night” character his “spirit animal” because he grew up the lone black kid in a white neighborhood.
“He reminded me of myself when he went down into that all-white town and had to deal with all of that s–t and all the expectations and all the lack of respect … He was a detective. He came here to do a job, and everybody tried to treat him like he was less than because he was black,” he said.
As an athlete, I can relate to the way he approaches his craft. He stressed that his ability to perform is based on solid fundamentals: Training. Acting classes. Voice. Speech. Movement. Breath. Dance.
“Everything that I have done in my career is grounded in my training — really just having confidence that I can handle any type of material,” he said.
Sometimes that involves a love scene. His description of that process sounds rather clinical, revealing some very unsexy Hollywood truths.
He called his on-screen sex scenes “paint by numbers. But now it’s even more so that, because there’s an intimacy coordinator right there to make sure that everybody feels respected and nobody feels violated. They’re there with, like, breath mints in between scenes … they got the spray … so that nobody feels like they’re, you know, victimized in any way,” he said. “Even by bad breath.”
Detroit native Jalen Rose is a member of the University of Michigan’s iconoclastic Fab Five, who shook up the college hoops world in the early ’90s. He played 13 seasons in the NBA, before transitioning into a media personality. Rose is currently an analyst for “NBA Countdown” and “Get Up,” and co-host of “Jalen & Jacoby.” He executive produced “The Fab Five” for ESPN’s “30 for 30” series, is the author of the best-selling book, “Got To Give the People What They Want,” a fashion tastemaker, and co-founded the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy, a public charter school in his hometown.