“It Was Extremely Difficult”: Deon Cole on Leading His First Show With ‘Average Joe’
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Comedian and actor Deon Cole is stepping into the role of leading man with the new series Average Joe, which debuted on BET+ Monday. In the dark comedy-drama, Cole portrays Joe Washington, a husband and father whose regular blue-collar life gets turned upside down after his father dies and he discovers he stole $10 million from a Russian mob boss (Pasha Lychnikoff). In some ways, Cole, too, experienced a life change when he accepted the part and found himself number one on the call sheet for the first time in his career.
“It was extremely difficult because I’ve never been a lead,” Cole said during a special preview screening of the series held at Goya Studios during BET Weekend. “I’m used to just coming in, doing my part, jumping in my car and taking off, and going to go do stand-up. That was my routine with everything I’ve ever done. They wouldn’t let me get in my car on this show. They were like, ‘No, you sit your ass down.’”
More from The Hollywood Reporter
Though initially Cole couldn’t fathom abandoning his other work to focus solely on the TV show, remarking he was typically the “first one to come, first one to leave,” when it came to other roles, eventually he realized everything else had to take a backseat. “Seeing the dedication that the cast had, for me not to have that same dedication would be weird and I couldn’t do that,” he said. “I learned to put everything aside. Every project I was doing I put aside, and I buckled down and I followed their lead.”
Cole’s castmate Tammy Townsend who plays Joe’s wife, Angela Washington, had almost the opposite problem when it came to filming each of the 60-minute episodes in the series.
“I took Angela home with me and I’ve never done that before with any character I’ve ever played,” the veteran actress admitted. “When I came back home, I had to decompress. Angela’s under an insurmountable amount of stress, anxiety and insecurity, and I was feeling all of that when I got home. I really had to find the tools to be able to come back to me and it took me a long time to do that,” explained Townsend who added that the emotional toll “was worth everything.”
Joe’s wife and daughter (Ashley Olivia Fisher) aren’t the only ones affected when he decides to find the money his dad stole and keep it for himself, after being attacked by members of the mob. His best friends, Leon Montgomery (Malcolm Barrett) and Benjamin “Touch” Tuchowuski (Michael Trucco), agree to help him out in exchange for 20 percent of the cash. For Trucco, the chance to play Touch — a cop who not only involves himself in a crime but is also battling personal demons, including a drug addiction — was an opportunity he couldn’t pass up.
“I heard a quote from an actor who said, ‘When you read a script and you see a character and you can’t envision anybody else in that role but yourself, then you have to go after that role 100 percent,’” he said. “When I read Touch, there’s something that just spoke to me. There was something about this project. There was something about what Rob Cullen did. There was something about having Deon and Tammy and Cynthia Kaye Mcwilliams and Malcolm and Ashley and Pasha — everybody who was involved. I absolutely knew that this was something I had to do.
“You don’t often have control over those things. So, you put that out there and for whatever reason, Kismet came around and this role came to me and it just spoke to me, and I felt like I could walk in the shoes of this character,” Trucco added. “He’s a very complicated character and there’s a lot more to be discovered that I won’t give away, but this is quite a ride. I haven’t had a chance to do something like this before and I’m very grateful and very proud to be sitting on the stage with this incredible cast.”
Best of The Hollywood Reporter
"This Was One Hot Mess": Lisa Vanderpump, Keke Palmer and the THR Reality Roundtable
Tom Holland Breaks Free: Talking Zendaya, ‘The Crowded Room’ and the Future of Spider-Man
