About six years ago, one Alex Cross passed the torch to another. In 2018, Aldis Hodge had the title role in the film Brian Banks, about a real-life star football player who was falsely accused of rape in high school and tried to make it to the NFL after he was released from prison. The great Morgan Freeman played Banks’ prison mentor, an experience Hodge describes as “awesome.” But there was one moment that especially stood out. “Mr. Freeman leaned over to our director, Tom Shadyac, and he whispered something,” Hodge recalls. “And then Tom walked over to me, and he said, ‘Morgan said, This kid right here, he’s got it.’ And I was like, Whoa, I guess I’ve got whatever that is.”
Freeman, of course, originated the role of Alex Cross on film in 1997’s Kiss the Girls, and reprised it four years later in Along Came a Spider. Little did both men know, Hodge would eventually get his own chance to inhabit the beloved character from James Patterson’s bestselling detective novels. He steps into the role for Prime’s new series, Cross, which debuts Nov. 14.
Rather than directly adapting plots from any of the books, this first season from creator Ben Watkins (Burn Notice) tells a group of new stories about the brilliant Washington, D.C., cop, which find him chasing a serial killer, facing Black protesters who call him a traitor to his own community, and being stalked by the person who a year earlier murdered his wife Maria. It’s a star vehicle with a performance to match — and, especially with a second season already greenlit, it could be the role that finally lets audiences see the full breadth of Hodge’s talents.
Hodge, 38, has been acting since he was a kid. He and his older brother, Edwin, both appeared on Sesame Street in the early-to-mid Nineties, and both had small roles in Die Hard With a Vengeance. This will be the fourth TV show where he’s played a lead role, following his stints as a charming hacker on Leverage, an escaped slave on Underground, and an ambitious prosecutor on City on a Hill. Between those shows, parts in films like Hidden Figures and One Night in Miami, and his abundant charisma, he has seemed perpetually on the verge of a big breakout. Even joining the ranks of movie superheroes as Hawkman in Black Adam didn’t quite get him over the hump, as the movie fell flat with fans. Not that Hodge’s faith in himself has been shaken.
“Mr. Freeman sharing his vote of confidence, or his support of me as an actor, doing what I was doing,” Hodge says, “it gave me not just confidence, but also reassurance that I felt like I was making the right choices that I needed to make.”
What appealed to you about playing Cross?
His general moral compass. Who he is represents or reflects what I feel to be a truth about Black people, and me as a Black man, that is not often reflected in media. He stands for real justice. He loves his people, he loves his culture, he loves his family. He’s going to do what he needs to do to serve the true intention of justice, not the perverted idea of justice. He doesn’t play the game of politics, of trying to abuse his position to get ahead. I think the show is brilliantly written. It’s a nuanced take on the idea of a thriller that I’ve been waiting on for a long time, done in a really creative, avant-garde way that I think draws the audience in, allows them to participate and play the game with us. This is coming off a book series that people have been living with for years, and we’re inviting them to the world that they love.
Ben Watkins has given you a lot of material to play about what it’s like to be a Black cop at this particular moment in our nation’s history.
We live in a world where Cross can’t just be a detective, can’t just be a man, because the world sees him as a Black man first, and then detective later. But when Cross is dealing with his community, his community oftentimes sees him as a detective first, because of the societal issues that go on. Cross gets to stand as a bridge for that very tough, oftentimes contentious conversation. He gets to calm it and help people understand both sides of the argument. And Ben is the perfect person to lead people through that conversation, because of his tact, because of his perspective, and because of his respect for the audience that he’s addressing.
Did you have much familiarity with the character, either from the books or the films that had been made prior to this?
I knew of the character for certain. I knew what the character did, and who the character was, but I hadn’t read the books yet. Which, for me, was actually a great asset, because I was able to form my own opinion of the character based off of my conversation with Ben Watkins, and then based off of my conversation with James Patterson. You know, I was able to take who this character should be straight from the minds of the makers and build that relationship one on one, without prior influence. I have since started reading the books after having shot [the show], and the books are really great. I’m really proud to be a part of this project. But it was great for me to be able to start with a clean, blank slate.
Cross is a bit of a renaissance man. He’s a cop, but also a psychologist, he plays the piano… He seems good at whatever he tries. You act, but you also play music and design watches. Did you relate to him in that way?
Cross to me looks like a normal human being. He’s a brilliant savant. He plays the piano a hell of a lot better than I play any of the instruments I’ve ever touched. He’s cultured, he’s worldly. And even though he’s a savant, even though he’s extraordinary as a human being, in the scope of Black culture, he’s normal to me. And what I mean is that all the things that make him excellent and awesome and cool, that’s normal for Black people, and we get to reflect that on the screen. And the point of it all is not to prove a point or say we’re great, or we’re better, but we’re just saying we are equally amazing. And people need to acknowledge and accept that. So he represents that as a normal standard: Hey, here’s your potential. Meet your potential. And that aligns with what I grew up aiming for. Because for so long, so many people tried to deflate my ambitions and my potential, because they saw me through their lens, not through my own. And I feel like Cross is an outlier, but also stands to represent for other people who are trying to do it, that you can do it and that you are supposed to do it, and you’re not supposed to apologize or explain. You’re just supposed to be great. That’s it, and that’s what Cross is to me. That’s why I really love playing him.
When you say people were trying to deflate your ambition and your potential, what were they doing?
Oh, man. How much time you got? I grew up on the East Coast between New York and New Jersey, before I got to L.A. Let’s take it to the school system, where my history was not taught to me. True history was not taught to me. The teachers I dealt with oftentimes would teach me to reach for less than my potential because of who and what I was, because of how they saw me, because of how they saw a Black man, because of how they saw Black culture. They taught me, or they wanted to teach me to live in their scrutinized view. My mom is the one who said, “No, you’re better than that. You’re smarter than that. You’re going to do better, because you’re supposed to.” The whole reason I’m a watchmaker is because I just wanted to do something that had to do with engineering and had to do with art and elegance and science and technology. Because it’s what I felt about my culture, which is that we are brilliant, beautiful, we stand in academia. All of these things are normal to us, but the world told me, especially my environment told me, that I couldn’t be, that I wasn’t supposed to be.
Education was paramount in my house, so I had to break through the lies of the world to reach my truth in order to stand in my own power, which is terribly reductive and tough for anybody. Black children, especially in this country, we deal with that on a daily basis, and people don’t understand how damaging it can be, especially if you don’t have a mom like mine who’s telling me, “The hell with all that, go be brilliant and great.”
So again, bringing it back to Cross, to be somebody that represents that as a normalcy. If I was a young minority looking at this character — actually, not minority. I can’t stand that word. It’s not true, because we’re not minor in any capacity. But you know, if I was looking at this character, then I’m going to see something that looks like what I can be and what I can do, and that’s what I’m going to go for. It takes a lot, man, just to be decent, especially in this country, especially with how things have always been. So for me, I had to fight for my potential. I had to fight for my education. I had to fight to believe in myself. I had to fight to love myself because of everything this country told me not to be, and it’s a tough thing, especially now. We still deal with it today, but regardless, through it all, I stand in resistance through my brilliance, and that’s what Cross is to me.
Hodge as Carter Hall, a.k.a. Hawkman, wearing a watch of his own design.
Frank Masi/Warner Bros.
How did you and your brother get into acting as kids? Was it something you wanted to do? Something you fell into?
When he was three years old and I was two, he kept telling our mom that he wanted to be in “the box,” which was what we called the TV, because he would watch The Cosby Show, and he wanted to be one of the kids. My mom was a Marine, and when she got out of service, we moved from Hawaii to New Jersey, and she got him started with extra work, background print work, commercials. And I fell in line right after him when I was three years old as well. I was just trying to be like my brother. But then also, after I did my first job, my mom got me a Batman toy for being on my best behavior, and my little three-year-old mind was like, I’m going to turn this into a business, because I want more Batman. So yeah, I wanted to do more auditions, and I wanted to do more print work and things like that. Oftentimes I’m like, How did I know that at three? But I have a three-year-old now, and I get it. They are smart little mischievous negotiators.
So you’re on Sesame Street, you’re playing Samuel L. Jackson’s nephew in a Die Hard movie, and then you’re going back to school in between. What was that like for you?
Man, I grew up rough. I grew up in Clifton, New Jersey. Some of the kids were cool, some would start fights. When Die Hard came out, I definitely got into fights at school, because kids were jealous. We lived in a town that dealt with a lot of racism. My mom took us out of school for safety reasons, because we were often targeted. So I was homeschooled from, I don’t know, like eight years old up until I started college when I was 14 years old.
You started college when you were 14?
Like I said, we grew up rough, man, but education was our way out of everything. We grew up in poverty, we grew up around a lot of racism, we grew up around a lot of violence, and my mom was always protecting us. She was always shielding us and making sure that we had the right drive and mentality to live a life beyond all of that. She said, “Acting is the privilege, never the priority” — meaning that we had to earn it. And she said, “Look, you can get contracts all day, but if you don’t know how to read them, it doesn’t matter, because somebody’s always going to be in your pocket or or trying to screw you over. You need to know what’s in those contracts. You need to know how to handle your business.” So she didn’t raise actors. She raised entrepreneurs and businessmen. So as far as my education, we were advanced. We would come home from school and do more school. The public school couldn’t hold us, because they would send me home from school and tell my mom, “He’s doing too much,” you know? But my mom would teach us at home. So homeschool was really about safety and protection and also the autonomy to still pursue acting, and when we had the opportunity to advance, we did. I took my entrance exam for college, and I skipped all of high school. I went in straight away, along with my brother. He was 15 at the time, I was 14. And you know, that was just that was our normal.
I started off at a few community colleges, like West L.A. College, Santa Monica College, and I ended up at ArtCenter College of Design, which had a big impact on me. It paved the way for my for me building my watch company. It paved the way for me being engaged in my visual development studio. Art was always a part of my life, and in a big way. It’s how I express myself, it’s how I found my confidence, how I communicated with the world around me for so long. I just got lucky with hopping around from school to school, and finding my pathway organically.
Have you ever, in a movie or show, gotten to wear one of the watches you’ve designed?
On Black Adam, I was working on a watch model that I’m still working on now. We’re years into development, which is normal. So on Black Adam, I made a dummy model, specific for Carter Hall. I wanted to wear my current model in the show now, but it’s not ready. We’re very, very close to production, so hopefully, one of these seasons, I finally get to wear my own watch in this show.
All eight episodes of Cross begin streaming Nov. 14 on Prime Video.
