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The A, B, Cs of acting

Professional actor and SMSU alum Isiah Whitlock Jr. worked with theater students Friday at the Black Box Theatre

Photo by Karin Elton Isiah Whitlock Jr. signs a copy of the video game “Grand Theft Auto 5” for an SMSU student. Whitlock provided the voice of one of the characters in the game.

MARSHALL — Isiah Whitlock Jr., perhaps Southwest Minnesota State University’s most prominent alumnus, was back on campus Friday at his old stomping grounds, the theater department.

Whitlock, who graduated from Southwest State in 1976, and now lives in New York, gave a presentation to SMSU students and community members in the Black Box Theatre.

Among those in the audience was Sariah Cheadle of Fulda, and formerly of Minneota, who is a junior English major with a theater minor. She came to the presentation and workshop because of Whitlock’s vast and varied acting experience.

“He has so much experience,” she said. “On Broadway, in film, movies, television. There is so much to learn from him. We can’t learn it all in one short session, but any advice is good.”

An Indiana native, Whitlock came to Southwest State through a football scholarship and studied theater. Fast forward 30 years and Whitlock is now a veteran of many TV shows and movies. He is perhaps best known for appearing on “The Wire” from 2002 to 2008 as State Sen. R. Clayton “Clay” Davis. He currently portrays Raleigh Marks on the Donald Glover dramedy, “Atlanta.” After his presentation, he told the Independent that he hopes to be in the second season of “Atlanta,” which is filming now.

He said he comes back to SMSU because it’s “my alma mater. I love being back here and I don’t get out here enough.”

His host, Sheila Tabaka, SMSU theater professor, said “We love him. He’s so generous with his time.”

Junior business major Danish Atiq, who is originally from Saudi Arabia, is a fan of Whitlock’s.

“I’ve seen him in various things,” Atiq said.

He said he was surprised when he found out that Whitlock graduated from SMSU.

“I came to hear what he had to offer,” Atiq said.

Whitlock spoke of what it takes to make it in show business.

In a nutshell, it’s preparation and perseverance. After about 30 years as a successful actor, he has reflected that that is what it takes, he said.

“A lot of the success I’ve had was because I’ve been prepared,” he said.

He had to learn the hard way, though.

“Nobody prepares you for the reality of being an actor,” he said. “In talking with a lot of actors in New York, the number one thing I hear is ‘I wish somebody told me A, B, C, D.’ You don’t have a class for how to get a job as an actor or working in costumes or on sets.”

Whitlock is grateful for the preparation that attending the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco gave him. He was a student there for two years and a journeyman actor with ACT for four or five years after that.

“It was rotating repertoire theater,” he said of ACT. “One day we are doing ‘The Winter’s Tale’ by Shakespeare and the next day it’s a play by Lillian Hellman.”

He sometimes thought at the time the classes were not relevant to what he wanted to do — “at 8 a.m. it was ballet, at 9, tap dance and 10, voice and at 11 a.m. it was some weird thing that some guy made up,” he said. “You just put the leotard on and did it.”

He also had theater history classes that he wished he had paid more attention in.

“You need to know where things started,” he said.

Looking back, he realized that it was all useful.

“I did use it,” he said. “I felt so lucky (to have that background).”

After working as an actor in San Francisco, he moved to Los Angeles for six months, but all he heard from casting directors was “no we got a New York actor for that” so after losing the “best parts,” he decided he better get himself to New York.

In New York, “it was tough.” His first home in New York he had to sleep in a friend’s closet.

“He said, ‘you have to sleep diagonally to fit,'” Whitlock recalled his friend telling him. “That’s where I slept for a couple weeks.”

Next he stayed in a room at the Times Square Motor Hotel, “one of the most difficult places in all of New York City to live,” he said. But he was glad he wasn’t depending on anyone else. “It was a dive, but it was my dive.”

Whitlock said he realized after staying there that he had a “real strong resolve” and could stick out the tough times.

“Nothing was going to get in the way of my being an actor,” he said.

Whitlock said it was important to keep healthy so you are prepared for any opportunity that comes up. In addition to taking care of yourself physically as an actor, it’s important to “prepare yourself vocally,” he said. “You have to be heard.”

That’s important in the theater and it’s also important if you do voiceover work, which can be “quite lucrative and a lot of fun.”

He recently voiced “Car No. 32 or 34” in the “Cars 3” animated movie. Before going into the booth to recite his lines for the movie, Whitlock said he rented a studio and “for an hour for a couple of days I just exercised my voice because I had a feeling I would need to do that and that feeling came true.”

Whitlock said it was a smart thing to do and it helped him to do the voice work which took three hours.

“It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” he said. “Because they said, ‘Isiah can you do this and can you do that (with your voice).’ If I hadn’t been warmed up none of that would have happened.”

Each acting job he landed led him to another job and he made connections such as working with director Spike Lee in “25th Hour” that paid off as well.

“It can be a wonderful life,” he said of acting. “I think the life I’ve created has been fantastic.”

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