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ERNIE HUDSON MASTERS HOLLYWOOD GRIND: Actor stars in TNT movie Sunday, Snoop film in Nov. and ABC’s ‘Housewives’ in the fall.
*Know this, we’ll be seeing a whole bunch of Ernie Hudson before the year comes to an end.
The Benton Harbor, Michigan native keeps his Hollywood hustle tight with a number of high profile roles on the big and small screen, including a plush recurring role on the upcoming third season of ABC’s “Desperate Housewives.”
“I’m playing a detective who’s trying to investigate a series of murders,” Hudson told EUR’s Lee Bailey of his role. “We shot the first episode that I’m involved with [within the past two weeks], and I’m still waiting to see how many [episodes]. I know it will run pretty much throughout the season.”
Also in the fall, Hudson will appear in Snoop Dogg’s “Hood of Horror,” a feature film in a style echoing “Tales from the Crypt.”
Hudson, who admittedly took the gig with some hesitations, said the finished product “actually turned out not bad for a horror movie.”
Due in theaters Nov. 4, the hip hop horror anthology features three tales narrated by Snoop Dogg, who goes by the tag Hound of Hell.
Hudson explains: “It’s Snoop Dogg who goes to hell and he comes back to do...I don’t know, do something. Anyway, he has a hood, and in the hood these awful things happen. And I star in the second episode with some Vietnam vets.”
Despite his initial reservations, Hudson said he had a good time during the shoot and felt that the finished product was quite entertaining.
“I saw it at the L.A. Film Festival and the audience really responded well, so people like it,” he said. “And I must say I really enjoyed working with Snoop, too. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but he turned out to be pretty dedicated to what he was doing, certainly very professional and a very nice young man.”
Hudson had similar compliments for actor Matthew Perry, his co-star in Sunday’s TNT original movie, “The Ron Clark Story.” Perry takes the title role as a remarkable 6th grade teacher who leaves behind a productive run in his native North Carolina for the challenge of teaching in Harlem, NY - enough said.
The class, predictably, is filled with a bunch of disrespectful, unruly 11 and 12-year-olds when Clark first encounters them, but throughout the course of the school year, he takes personal interest in the students, and soon they are shaped and molded into a tight outfit of obedient individuals and academic marvels.
Have we seen this before? Many times. Hudson thought so, too, when he first started reading the script. But the 60-year-old actor was swayed to participate in the project by the fact that it is based on the experiences of a real teacher.
“I get that whole Tarzan syndrome, you know, he goes in the jungle and cleans up the natives. But then when you start to get into the story, and once I realized who it was and read a couple of his books, you see that here’s a guy who really has made a difference," Hudson says of Perry's character. "Also, the good thing is there are actually people who go out there to make a difference and at some point so much help is needed, you kind of go, ‘I don’t care who does it, as long as somebody does something.’”
In the film, Hudson plays Principal Turner, a strict administrator who runs the Harlem school with a hardened weariness rooted in years and years of witnessing kids fall by the wayside. When Clark begs for the chance to take over a class vacated by another teacher who buckled under the pressure, Turner reluctantly gives in, but keeps a close eye on the new blood and his unorthodox methods.
“He’s tough, and he’s also up against a lot,” Hudson explains. “He’s dealing with what his idea of reality is. ...We’ve gotten to a place in our society where unfortunately we see that a lot, where people just figure they’ve figured it out and they don’t wanna hear it. Even though somebody comes along and says, ‘Hey, we can do this different,’ it’s like, ‘Nothing works, I know it and don’t even.’ So unfortunately, that’s a lot of what goes on. A lot of things get overlooked because people don’t want to risk stepping out there and taking a chance.”
Hudson made certain that his character didn’t fall into a Hollywood version of the hard-nosed principal who runs things with neither heart nor reason. “I knew that I just didn’t want him to be the evil principal all the way through,” he said, noting that Turner softens up a bit toward the end.
Another convention of the so-called “white savior” genre that birthed such films as “Dangerous Minds” and “Mississippi Burning” is the diminished role that African Americans often play in their own stories. Hudson says his experience was just the opposite in “The Ron Clark Story.”
“I’m glad, being a black male figure, to have been a part of this, because sometimes we get left out of those stories,” he said. “I’m really glad I found this project, because once we get past all the stereotypes and our own biases, it’s a wonderful story about a guy who’s still out there making a difference, and that’s really important.”
