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‘Cross' star Aldis Hodge on building an aspirational hero — who's not a superhero
Alex Cross, bestselling author James Patterson's most famous character, had previously been played on screen by Morgan Freeman and Tyler Perry. But when it came time to cast a new version of the brilliant detective for Cross, Prime Video's series based on the character, creator Ben Watkins only had one man in mind: Aldis Hodge. And after the first season, which debuted at No. 1 on Nielsen's streaming ratings chart in November, it's hard to imagine anyone else in the role. Hodge's performance is the perfect combination of cerebral and physical, swaggering and sensitive, and tough and gentle that the role requires. Hodge makes it his own, which he did by not considering earlier incarnations of the character.
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"I think every actor has to maintain independent individuality when they approach any character, right? That's the artist's process," Hodge tells Gold Derby. "So I just thought about the honest foundation of his desires, his wants. What is his current situation as a man? Where can I connect to those things personally with my own life experience? And then it becomes a really easy process from there. When you focus on the nucleus of a character's honesty, it eliminates so many other factors that would serve to only deter your creativity. So really, you come up with your own version by not even trying to come up with your own version. You don't focus on that. You just focus on the character's honesty."
In Cross Season 1, Det. Alex Cross of the Metropolitan Police Department is trying to catch a serial killer whose murders are depraved tributes to other serial killers before he claims his next victim, while also trying to keep racial tensions between the department and the public from boiling over, and be a good father to his two children as they all grieve the death of their wife and mother Maria, whose murder a year earlier remains unsolved. Hodge is called on to do a lot of different things, from using forensic psychology to get inside of suspects' heads to navigating the complexities of being a Black police officer in America, and he gets to show off his impressive range. It's the breakout role that Hodge, who started in the business as a child actor more than 30 years ago and had amassed an impressive body of work in supporting roles in big projects and main roles in smaller ones, had been building toward. And he says it feels "amazing" to finally carry a hit show.
"I probably should spend more time just sitting and, like, celebrating and taking it all in," he says. "But I have a voracious appetite for pushing the work and exploring the potential of really how much deeper we can push and how much more informed we can be about touching on the subject matter, how much more we can infuse nuance into how we do it."
SEE Cross showrunner Ben Watkins on being the right 'crime junkie' with a bold vision for detective series
Hodge knew he wanted to play Cross within the first 10 pages of the script. The first version he read opened with the interrogation scene that ended up being the second scene of the first episode, in which Cross uses his identity as a Black man with a Ph.D in psychology to outwit a racist suspect who thinks the cops are too stupid to realize he confessed to killing his wife, and the character's unapologetic confidence jumped off the page at him.
"Coming off of some previous works, I had questions about how to just exist without addressing other societal norms that are deprivative," Hodge says. "Why do I have to always explain myself in the room? Why do I always have to have an excuse for my intellect, my brilliance, in the character? This washed away all of those things. He just existed. He was suave, he was smooth, he was elegant, eloquent, articulate, still edgy, still raw. Dominant, imposing without having to impose. He was the blueprint of the kind of personality or the kind of man that I would even aspire to be. So knowing that, and understanding what the value of that representation is and what it looks like, that's what got me going. So I knew from just the first couple pages, yo, this is where I want to be. It's what I want to do."
Cross is something of a larger-than-life, almost superheroic character — he's super-smart and super-strong, and fights for truth and justice — but to Hodge, his vulnerability and imperfections keep him grounded.
"Ben was saying there's a difference between sort of the hero and the superhero, and he wanted to write a hero," Hodge says.
In Hodge's interpretation of Watkins' theory of Alex Cross, superheroes are idealized into a level of perfection real people cannot actually attain. Heroes, on the other hand, are able to accomplish great things — not unlike superheroes — but have to struggle and sacrifice to accomplish them. Cross can do incredible things, but he's still just a man, and he sometimes loses his temper or struggles with his mental health. He doesn't handle his pain perfectly. He doesn't always win the fight, but he always dusts himself and prepares for the next one.
"That's what keeps him relatable," Hodge says. "That's what keeps him recognizable, and to me, far more interesting than somebody who throws every punch and lands every one of them."
Cross Season 1 is available to stream on Prime Video. Season 2, which was ordered before Season 1 premiered, is in post-production and awaiting a release date.
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