Rising Star Cornell Womack On The Five Things You Need To Shine In The Entertainment Industry
Stop trying to be someone other than yourself. If you need help go to therapy. Deal with your trauma. Find a spiritual practice. Learn how to have healthy relationships. Fall in love with boring.
As a part of our series about rising stars, I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Cornell Womack.
Bi-racial, multi-talented actor, activist, voice artist, and musician Cornell Womack (THE HAPPENING with M. Night Shyamalan) stars alongside Will Ferrell, Paul Rudd, & Kathryn Hahn in Apple TV+’s highly-anticipated series “The Shrink Next Door.” Inspired by a true story “The Shrink Next Door” follows the story of Marty (Ferrell) and the psychiatrist who turned his life around and then took it over. When Marty first meets Dr. Ike (Rudd), he just wants to get better at boundaries. Over 30 years, Marty will learn all about them, and what happens when they get crossed. Bruce (Womack) is a longtime employee of Marty’s that witnesses Marty’s long relationship with Dr. Ike morph into an exploitative relationship filled with manipulation, power grabs, and dysfunction. “The Shrink Next Door” is available for streaming exclusively on Apple TV+ beginning November 12th, 2021.
Born in Jamaica, Queens NYC, Womack moved many times in his life from Long Island to West Virginia, to Rochester, until he finally settled in Long Island for the majority of his life. With his life being uprooted throughout his life, he found solace, comfort, and stability in school, and with that acting. Specifically in Shakespeare, as he played Birdie in Bye, Bye Birdie, and the King in The King and I, Cornell found a deep connection with Shakespeare’s word and was even able to understand and speak it as if it’s a second mother native tongue. Like his childhood, Womack moved often when it came to attending universities; from West Point to Julliard and then Georgetown where his acting career took off and his passion for political consciousness awakened and he became a political activist for the anti-apartheid movement. Womack’s activism in Pittsburgh made him a public figure throughout the city, which led him to meet with The Justice Department in 1997 about police brutality. Fast forward 5 years to 2002, Cornell started to act again and landed his first television appearance on NBC and Dick Wolf’s “Law & Order: Criminal Intent”, and since then has appeared in STATE OF PLAY, TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN, AMC’s “Better Call Saul”, Netflix’s “Flaked”, and many more guest roles across the board.
When Cornell isn’t in front of the camera, he is completing voiceover projects i.e. the campaign for the New York Lottery, the narrator for many documentaries, and character voices of many video games, such as: Deadpool, Grand Theft Auto V, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Far Cry, and more. However, to get away from all work, you can find Womack driving cross country from forest and mountains to deserts, and exploring the beautiful, majestic sites the country has to offer to reset and clear his mind, or getting lost in educating himself in scholarly books.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you tell us the story of how you grew up?
I was born in the late 1960s, so a time of great social and cultural upheaval. My mother was white and my father was black. The anti-miscegenation laws, which forbid interracial marriage, were still on the books in Virginia and were only abolished the year I was born. However, this did not save my parents from having to face the full fury of the choices that they made to love each other. The abolishing of those laws did not alter the violence and ignorance of the culture from which they arose. Both my sister and I were largely excluded from knowing either our white family or our black family growing up because of racism and prejudice and outright hatred that skewed their perception of us as bi-racial children. There was not a little chaos in the family home. The pressure of living an interracial marriage, without family support, with much derision from the communities we lived in, and the realities of my father attempting to build a life in the north, combating his own demons, were too great for their union to bear. We moved as much as ten different times from upstate New York to Charleston, West Virginia, and finally, the intensity of life caught up with my parents and life exploded. My father left one night and I never saw him again and my mother moved us into one increasingly white neighborhood after another, attempting to raise us and keep us alive. She washed dishes and scrapped food from trays in a hospital kitchen as a dietician’s aide, doing whatever she needed to do so that we had a roof over our heads. Eventually, we wound up in Bayport, Long Island where I was one of three or four students of color. This early journey of chaos and upheaval marked me deeply and the legacy of these experiences would show up in constructive and destructive ways. They helped me achieve some remarkable things but also brought me to the brink of my life, as struggles with my own demons emerged. None of us escape our childhood trauma however far we try to run away from it, with whatever accomplishments we try to shield it from ourselves. It catches up and demands that we reckon with it. In order to live fully, freely, and authentically, we must. One of my best responses to the childhood intensity was my attraction to books. It gave me a lifelong love of learning and a burning curiosity about the world and human beings, about the nature of reality, the purpose of existence and God.
Can you share a story with us about what brought you to this specific career path?
My path to acting has been tremendously circuitous. My first acting gig was in my second-grade classroom. I played Detective Hargrove in The Case of the Missing Adverb. It was fun and I enjoyed being on stage. It gave me physical and emotional release and allowed me to be expressive in ways I was taught not to be at home. I wound up taking part after that in many of the school plays and musical all the way through high school. Yet pursuing acting as a career was not on my agenda. I actually wanted to become a corporate lawyer after having met my mother’s divorce attorney and holding on to the impression he made upon me with all those shelves of books in his office. After high school, I went to the United States Military Academy at West Point. Personal demons made it impossible for me to stay. I then went to Georgetown University and immediately was caught up in the anti-apartheid movement and the struggles against US incursion into Central America. Again, acting was not my goal. I somehow heard about a theater group at Georgetown called Mask and Bauble and I auditioned for a play, The Tempest by Shakespeare. I had done a Shakespeare play in high school and was enthralled by it. Shakespearian language felt like a native tongue to me. I understood it almost intuitively and it sounded like regular speech. In the audience of one of the performances was a man named O.B. Hardison. He was one of the leading Shakespeare scholars in the world. He asked to meet with me afterward which I did and he wanted to introduce me to Michael Kahn. At the time Michael was the head of the Folger Shakespeare Theater in Washington D.C and a teacher of acting at the Juilliard School in New York City. After meeting with Michael, he asked me to become a young member of the company which I immediately accepted. So, I dropped out of Georgetown to pursue acting full-time. I did my first professional Shakespeare play at age 19. After the year Michael suggested I apply to Juilliard which at the time I had never heard of. So I did and was accepted. I left Juilliard after two years to go back to Georgetown to complete my undergraduate degree and then came back to Juilliard for one more year before leaving again. I acted for about a year and then quit acting for 8 years. During that time I pursued a Ph.D. in the history of social movements, particularly the resistance to capitalist exploitation in the early Atlantic world. I became an anti-police brutality activist and was part of a group of activists that were the first ever to get a meeting with the civil rights division of the United States Department of Justice. I became very involved with the fight to free Mumia Abu-Jamal (the former head of the Philadelphia Association for Black Journalists) and even drove Alice Walker so she could meet him at SCI Greene where he was on death row. Again my demons and the intense pressures of radical activism caught up with me and I left the Ph.D. program and moved to New York pursuing a bunch of odd jobs. Finally, after 9/11, the internet company I wound up working for was shut down and I was fired. A classmate from Juilliard told me about a play called the Odyssey by Derek Walcott, the Nobel prize-winning Trinidadian poet. It was a Caribbean version of Homer’s Odyssey. So I auditioned and booked the role of Blind Billy Blue, the Homer figure of Derek’s version. I have made my living as an actor ever since. I was then 31 years old.
Can you tell us the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
Well, that is a hard question to answer because I have had so many interesting things happen, from working with legendary actors like James Earl Jones to performing at the Disney Concert Hall with the LA Philharmonic as our back-up band, to teaching acting and watching the principles of the craft help human beings come alive in their quest to become better storytellers, so I would say that the most interesting thing is how my participation in the craft of acting has allowed me to become part of so many cultural experiences, social experiences, and life lessons that I could never have predicted. I’ve been at this for a long time and my journey through this profession has sustained me through the most difficult times of my life. I don’t think I have fully appreciated how blessed I have been to make a life doing this as long as I have, how this profession has been very embracing and forgiving. It’s something you don’t often hear about and it may not often be the case but I’m grateful it has been so for me.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
My very first play, The Merry Wives of Windsor. Pat Carroll (Ursula from the Little Mermaid) was doing a star turn as the male character Falstaff and I was playing Bardolph. I often had time to go up into the stage manager's booth, in the back of the theater, when I wasn’t on stage and watch the play, which I loved to do. One night I was up in the booth and I was watching the play thinking to myself “Huh, I’ve never seen this part of the play before.” Well, that’s because I was supposed to have been making an entrance, and instead, I left Pat and Floyd King, one of the great comedic Shakespearean actors in our country, having to improvise. I was mortified and terrified by what the reaction would be. Instead, they were both so gracious and understanding and forgiving, and even in on how funny it wound up being. I learned two things: first pay attention! Second: be forgiving if you are ever in a similar situation, learn to extend forgiveness and kindness as it was extended to me.
What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now?
The most exciting project I recently worked on was The Shrink Next Door on Apple TV+. It stars Will Ferrell, Paul Rudd, Kathryn Hahn, Casey Wilson and myself. This is the highest-profile project I have done in my career and it was a pleasure and blast to work on. It’s based on a true story that was told on the 2019 podcast of the same name. It reminds me that a really great project can show up at any time in your career and longevity does have its own rewards. It was a pleasure to work with great writers and directors, and the cast members were just a joy to be around. We shot during Covid, so it made for a tricky set protocol which production handled with great care and safety. I couldn’t have asked for a better experience, and I hope everyone enjoys this remarkable piece of storytelling.
You have been blessed with success in a career path that can be challenging. Do you have any words of advice for others who may want to embark on this career path, but seem daunted by the prospect of failure?
If I have any advice it is to be in the efforts business and not the results business. Meaning all we can control is the effort we put in. We cannot control the outcome. So, make the craft the reason you want to pursue acting. If it becomes about the baubles, and trinkets and glitz and glamour this is a foundation that is not sustainable and will eventually erode. For me, it is also wildly out of step with the reality of most of the suffering world. However, if your commitment is to the principles of the craft, to learn about those principles, to allow them to challenge and change you, and even someday mastering those principles, and remaining a student of them still, then you are setting yourself up for a life of enjoyment and richness. Such a commitment will lead you to someplace interesting indeed, and perhaps to someplace you cannot yet even imagine. It has led me to stage, film, Broadway, concert halls, all over the country, to teaching, to voice-over work, to meeting and interacting with some of the most influential humans alive, to deep inner searching, to moments of profound humility, to levels of privacy, intimacy and human revelation that are truly beautiful. Your love of the craft is what will sustain you because I believe we only fully come alive when we are surrendered to something greater than ourselves. It is then we are able to make our greatest contributions. So many actors I encounter in LA want to know what to do to book the job and I tell them “study the craft.” What is meant to come will come, perhaps not in the time or in the form they intended but with a blessing they will have gratitude for. Also, develop the capacity to tolerate uncertainty. I used to fret and panic over every single audition and be obsessed with the outcome. Now, I go in, I do my work, and I forget about it when I have left the room. What is meant to be will be. Worry is frustrated omniscience and I am not God.
We are very interested in diversity in the entertainment industry. Can you share three reasons with our readers about why you think it’s important to have diversity represented in film and television? How can that potentially affect our culture?
First, in a society historically dominated by a singular and white supremacist patriarchal heteronormative view of human dignity, value and worth, and in a culture that framed those outside this view as less than, aberrant, and punishable, it is essential for the restoration of human sanity that diversity find representation in all areas of human endeavor. We are all traumatized by history, and therefore fragmented. Representations of diversity are healing because they portray the reality of total human existence, not the destructive fantasy of a white racial utopia.
Second, accurate representation matters because we are all searching for identity, value, significance and worth. Media captures more and more of our mental space and if those images are not reflective of reality, we can continue to feel alienated, isolated, and not part of it. It is a radical and even revolutionary act to broaden the spectrum of representation because it broadens the range of valuable identities that our culture has historically tried to restrict and confine.
Third, James Baldwin. His voice, vision, insight and love is the clearest example of why diversity matters. It is on the edges that truth lives. Often the center of a culture is the most obscuring place to be. It is on the edges where we are reminded that what is kept out is what we are most in need of, what is most challenging, rewarding, transformative and alive. I think the heartbeat of the periphery is what keeps us all going whether we know it or not.
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why. Please share a story or example for each.
1. Stop trying to be someone other than yourself.
We live in a world dominated by cultural messages that make many of us feel not enough, that who we are is not interesting enough, that we have to continually self-improve and design who we are. The current capitalist system is built upon this premise of not being enough. The greatest challenge is to come how to who you are, to fight through the layers of inauthenticity and false expression. To embrace the wild originality of your own being. When I truly began to do this, I began to work more as an actor, and I believe the route to continued working is the continued letting go of more and more of that which is not who I am.
2. If you need help go to therapy. Deal with your trauma.
The famed trauma expert Gabor Mate reminds us that our personalities are not who we are. They are largely adaptations many of us made to childhood traumas. Part of coming to know who you really are is to learn what these adaptations were and how they have become maladaptive as an adult. Then we can learn to let them go, which can be a terrifying thing. I have lost work when I have been taken over by unhealed traumas because I could not find a connection to anything beyond them.
3. Find a spiritual practice.
For many years of my life, I considered myself an atheist, and developed an entrenched habit of self-reliance, self-will and getting my way. It caused trouble in many areas of life. Yet it did something else as well which I did not realize. It hardened my heart. When my goals and desires become the most important pursuits, even if they are what might be considered noble, I can begin to lose touch with my human vulnerability. It can occur that to achieve my goals would feel empty because my heart was dehydrated. Over the years I became a Christian and feel deeply grateful for the realities of the Gospel in my life. It has changed me entirely. Spiritual practice begins to open the heart, to connect me to the frailties and vulnerabilities of others and to help me understand that my purpose here is to develop my capacities to their fullest expression so as to be of service to others. My favorite roles have been those that have touched upon human weakness because it is here that Spirit enters to heal and to join.
4. Learn how to have healthy relationships.
This may be the most important lesson of all. We so often hear that actors have tumultuous lives and dramatic breakups. For the actors I know who have both longevity and success this is not generally true. Stability in one’s relational life can truly make or break a career in any profession. I regret that on several occasions, instability in my personal life caused me to either forgo certain opportunities or be unable to be prepared for others when they came. Relational health is crucial and a toxic relationship can undermine achievement.
5. Fall in love with boring.
So often the portrayal of entertainers is a life of extravagant wealth, wild experiences and never-ending novelty. This is an unsustainable way of living, and there is no lack of stories of the dark underside of this portrayal. Rather, love what is boring. Delight in the ordinary. As Yates said, learn to find the universe in a grain of sand. In my teaching, I learned the power of specificity, which might not be exciting at first glance but yields so many discoveries. I found that there is no creative problem that specificity won’t solve and no creative problem the generalization won’t make better. I use this in my acting now. Specificity is often little, and in a “go big or go home culture”, can often be undervalued and discarded. Yet from it emerge all the greatest insights our species has arrived at.
Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?
James Earl Jones gave me the greatest advice about this and I have never forgotten it. He said “Cornell, this industry is not designed to feed your soul. You must find ways to do that outside of it.” We can never forget the intersection of commerce and craft that is the entertainment industry. At times great art emerges and it does feed the soul. Often, though we must find connections to other things that feed our humanity, which paradoxically, deepen us as an artist, open our hearts and minds, and may lead us down some new avenues of our career. Pursue all dimensions of life with joy.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
If I could inspire a movement that would bring the greatest amount of good to the most amount of people it might look like a science fiction film. It would be called The Great Deprogramming. In it, I would send out a legion of spiritual warriors who knew the truth of each human being, who knew the infinite value of each and every human life. They would be equipped with a message about the illusions humanity has been forced to believe in, the lies of division and separation, inequality, violence and injustice. They would be shown instead of the reality, the beauty, and the interconnectedness of every human being on earth. They would teach everyone that the greatest wisdom comes not from philosophy and ideology but from the human soul. They would teach people to rest and to see themselves and each other, allowing them to understand that the accelerated pace of living is destroying humanity and the earth. They would be highly trained, therefore, in liberating humanity from cultural, social and economic messages that teach them self-condemnation and fear of others. We as a species have largely adapted our minds to insanity. This is at the root of our current cultural and global dysfunction. The Great Deprogramming would expose the insanity and give us a way to become free from it.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
Well, it goes without saying that my mother gave me life, nurtured me to the best of her ability and set me off on a far better path than the one on which she entered life.
If I was to think professionally it would have to be in accordance with the parts of my being.
Intellectually, I would thank Professor Marcus Rediker. He taught me to rediscover the dignity of working-class life and to have confidence in my own mind more. I remember once when I was sitting in his office amazed by his collection of books, I said “Professor Rediker, did you read all those books??!!” He said in his slight southern drawl, “Why yes I did Cornell but I only read them one at a time.” That’s a true teacher.
Artistically, it would have to be Michael Kahn. He gave me the first shot and though my tenure at the Juilliard School was rocky he nonetheless opened up a doorway for me that would prove forever impactful in my life. I remember one time I was doing a scene from a play in which I was the character Thomas Moore, the storied saint. I did the scene and he stopped it and said “What are you doing?” I said, “I was being a saint”. He said “Yes, but you’re not to binge a human!” Lesson learned. Don’t play an idea, be yourself in the circumstances of the play.
Politically, it would have to be all the thousands of people over the years with who I have marched, organized, and taken part in social movements. Mass demonstrations and protests are the places in my life where I have felt a freedom that I’ve experienced nowhere else. It is there where the world is turned upside down for a time and one can truly see that a better world is possible.
Spiritually, it would have to be the God I am learning about from the Bible.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Do not conform to the patters of this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” -St. Paul
This quote has meant more than I can say. It reminds me that the values, ways, priorities of the world, are seldom the values, ways and priorities of the soul. It reminds me which one to be governed by, which one is in alignment with my deepest identity, and which one will bring to my life, and the lives of those I touch, the greatest peace. As I began to apply this life lesson from St. Paul, the matters in my life began to be put into their proper perspective so as to dominate my mindless and less. Each day I come to understand more fully what is truly important and lasting.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)
There is a theologian that I recently discovered whose love of God and love of the arts are deeply intertwined. His name is Timothy Radcliffe. I think it would be wonderful to meet with him and to have a conversation about the intersection of these things.
How can our readers follow you online?
https://cornellwomack.wixsite.com/cornell-womack
This was very meaningful, thank you so much! We wish you continued success!
