A career Q&A with Harry J. Lennix from the hit television series The Blacklist.
Moderated by Liz Spaulding, NY Director, Screen Actors Guild Foundation
Biography
Harry Lennix is an accomplished film, television, and stage actor who currently stars as Harold Cooper, Assistant Director of Counterterrorism for the FBI on the hit NBC series The Blacklist. Moviegoers worldwide saw him in the Warner Brothers’ blockbuster Man of Steel as General Swanwick, a role he will reprise in the upcoming sequel, Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice.
Other television credits include re-occuring roles on Fox’s Dollhouse, HBO’s Little Britain, NBC’s ER, CW’s Emily Owens, M.D., Diagnosis Murder, and the critically acclaimed 24 as Walid Al-Rezani.
Lennix made his Broadway debut in Pulizer Prize winning playwright August Wilson’s Tony nominated Radio Golf. He has directed and appeared in stage productions across the country including Northlight Theater Company’s Permanent Collection staged at the Greenway Arts Alliance in Los Angeles. Under his directing consultation the play was remounted at Los Angeles’ Kirk Douglas Theater. He has directed the stage version of Robert Townsend’s The Five Heartbeats, which received three NAACP Theater Award nominations and The Glass Menagerie for Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater Company.
As a stage actor Lennix was the first distinguished recipient of an Ollie Award for his portrayal of Malcom X at the Goodman Theater in Chicago and two Joseph Jefferson Citations for roles in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Caught in the Act. He also starred in August Wilson’s King Hedley II at the Mark Taper Forum. In 2001, he was part of the first American company to be invited to the Royal Shakespeare Company in the production of Cymbeline. Lennix has also been extremely active in his native Chicago community where he was an English and music teacher before becoming an actor.
In 1989, along with renowned director Chuck Smith, he founded Legacy Productions, a company dedicated to promoting significant works about the African American experience. He is also on the staff of the Goodman Theater Co. and is an internationally recognized Shakespeare practitioner, writing for various theatrical and literary journals dedicated to the Bard.
In July 2014, Lennix announced the creation of Exponent Media Group, a movie production company he founded with longtime Chicago associate Steve Harris. A distribution deal is in place with NEHST Media’s Digiplex chain for three of the company’s titles, Mr. Sophistication, H4 and Revival! The company intends to shoot five more films over the next three years in the $1 million range.
