Shalita Grant saw the "NCIS: New Orleans" cast and crew start to gather on set as she filmed her final scene last season with Scott Bakula. She assumed her time on the CBS drama was coming to an end. The producer asked everyone to give her a hand for her last day filming and then sprung this happy piece of news.
"It's not the last time we'll her because she's out new series regular," Grant recounted in an exclusive interview with Headlines & Global News.
Grant joined "NCIS: NOLA" at the end of last season in the recurring role of ATF agent Sonja Percy. She starts season two as a full-time member of Special Agent Dwayne Pride's (Scott Bakula) team, transferring over to NCIS. She retains her professional rank from ATF, but that doesn't mean her new co-workers won't treat her to some friendly, probationary agent hazing.
"For the first episode, you're going to see that I have officially joined the team and I transferred from ATF so I'm still on the same professional level, but the team still treats me like a probie," Grant said. "They are quizzing me on acronyms. They're pranking me. There's all of this probie stuff going on in the first episode."
The Tony-nominated actress ("Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike") can take the light-hearted teasing from her colleagues on and off camera, but she took an early stand with her co-star Zoe McLellan to make their characters' relationship more than just catty female drama.
"There was a moment in the first scene where Zoe's character [Meredith] Brody comes up to me and she's giving me crap. Both Zoe and I thought that it was just two colleagues ribbing each other and not like a gender thing," Grant said. "We got a note saying maybe you should try this [a negative slant] and we were both like, 'No.' We're not doing that. We are standing together in that we are two women working together and not working against each other."
Grant believes showrunner Jeff Lieber and the "New Orleans" writers are all on the same page to ignore the tired, overused stereotype that women can't get along in the workplace and give Brody and Percy a more healthy and respectable working relationship.
Joining the show full time also meant Grant would have to move to New Orleans permanently. She choreographed her move from Los Angeles to the Big Easy over the summer while filming the upcoming miniseries "Mercy Street" in Virginia. The regular gig provided her stability she hadn't felt since leaving New York City in 2013.
"I had a feeling in New York City that I'm going to go to California and I'm gonna make my dreams come true. They're going to love me because, hello, I'm nominated for a Tony," Grant enthused. "Then I got there and they were like, 'Uh-uh. I'm sorry boo, no.' I was there for a year really doing the auditions. I had some 60 auditions before I booked my first job."
Location location location #ncisneworleans @NOLA_Writers @NCIS_NOLAFan #artists #ncisnola pic.twitter.com/UK3Zywiex8
— Shalita Grant (@ShalitaGrant) July 24, 2015
Grant then had to worried whether the show would keeping filming in New Orleans after Louisiana put a cap on the motion picture tax credit in June. Creator Gary Glasberg quickly stemmed her worries about another move.
"He said, 'Listen, you can't recreate New Orleans anywhere. You gotta be in New Orleans. You gotta be here,'" she remembered. "And it's true. New Orleans, it's a character in our show. The street art is very much alive. People who generally are voiceless are speaking out through their art and that's really awesome and it feels really right... So you get to walk through that and you can't create that in Burbank. You can't do that in Atlanta because they have rules."
PBS's "Mercy Street" had no alternative but to recreate its set of Alexandria, Va. in 1862 around the modern day state. Grant stars in the miniseries as a newly freed slave named Aurelia Johnson, who works as a laundress. Although the show will focus on the medical techniques and materials of the time, it could not avoid the societal changes taking place outside the hospital walls.
"My character had set herself free and escaped to Alexandria and believes that her station in life is going to be different because for the first time, in her lifetime, black people are at the center of the conversation in a way that they hadn't been. It's the glue to the nation. You have people saying we need to be set free for the nation to survive and you have people who say we need to be enslaved in order to survive. So our lives are hanging in the balance and my character took it on herself to do something about her life," she said.
@PBS @McKinleyBcubed makes it so easy to do hard work! #mercystreetPBS #samuelandaurelia pic.twitter.com/3wd5eBfZuF — Shalita Grant (@ShalitaGrant) June 2, 2015
At first, Grant hesitated to ever play a slave in her career because she never wanted to use that "to validate another story. I never want the black experience to be used to promote something else." She let go of that reservation when she realized that she held the responsibility for the portrayal of this strong woman.
"Aurelia sets herself free and she comes to this town saying, 'Okay because I'm free, I can live my life like white people who have been free their whole lives. And if I want services, I pay you for services and then you render those services to me. It doesn't matter that I'm black. It doesn't matter that I'm an ex-slave. That's how the world works and that's how freedom works.' But she gets a rude awakening," Grant said.
The actress related it to her own feelings when Barack Obama won the presidential election in 2008. She felt an overwhelming sense of relief and hope as she pursued her dreams at Julliard in New York City.
"The effect on people of color but specifically black people, this was monumental. Then you fast forward years later and you see black and brown people being gunned down in the streets like it's 1862," Grant argued. "Now we're starting to deal with the lie of a post-racial society and it's something that people of color have known since the beginning but it's taken the white community awhile to soberly look that in the face. A lot of people are still like, 'No, no, no. That's not true.' But it's right in front of us."
Grant stressed that any parallels between the events portrayed in "Mercy Street" and modern day are completely unintentional. "It's about the medicine of the day, but [the parallels] are there," she said.
"Mercy Street" will premiere in 2016 on PBS following an episode of "Downton Abbey."
"NCIS: New Orleans" premieres tonight, Sept. 22 at 9 p.m. on CBS.
