When he was a teenager, actor Dule Hill's plan was to be a corporate lawyer. By a fortuitous turn of events, he got his wish _ sort of. Hill plays attorney Alex Williams, an ambitious senior partner at the law firm Pearson Specter Litt in USA's "Suits," which is back for its eighth season.
Hill's teenage whim soon passed. After all, he had attended dance school at 3. By the time he was 10, he was performing in "The Tap Dance Kid." "Growing up I've done a lot of shows, dancing in theater and on Broadway a couple times," he says.
"And I had a desire to expand out and to continue a career. In this day and age it's hard to have a career as a tap dancer. I really love the art form, but at the age of 15 I made the choice: I wanted to pursue acting. It wasn't necessarily one over the other, I just wanted to become an actor."
He landed his first acting role when he was 13. "I played a basketball boy on the show 'Ghostwriter.' I had about two lines. That's how I got my SAG card and did commercials too."
When an agent offered to represent him, his parents _ Jamaican immigrants _ were cool with the idea. "They said as long as I wanted to, I could do it. And whenever I didn't, I didn't have to. When I wanted to stay home and play with my friends, I stayed home."
By the time he was 17 he'd snagged his first feature film, "Sugar Hill," and began to take his career seriously. By then all thoughts of jurisprudence was gone.
He worked in New York not far from his home in New Jersey, but occasionally he'd trek to Los Angeles for auditions. "If I had to come out and test, my mom would fly out with me ... We'd come out all excited, and I'd go back all disappointed. It was just part of the journey. You pick yourself up and keep going toward it," he shrugs.
"The only time I thought about possibly quitting acting was when I moved to L.A. and I went for about a year without booking a job. It's not a long time, but when you're on your own, it is a long time. At that point I made up my mind. I was going to be an actor or spend the rest of my life trying. From there things began to improve," he says.
Unlike many actors, Hill is savvy to the business end of show biz. "I've always liked business," he says. "It's always a chess match. As long as you know what's going on, you have to navigate yourself through it. I don't take it personally. I understand it was business. It is what it is."
What it is sometimes is waiting for the chance. And Hill's big chance came in 1999 when he auditioned for the part of the president's personal aide in "The West Wing."
"I read twice for that role, but had gone a year without working just about," he recalls. "Then I read for (executive producers) Aaron Sorkin and Tommy Schlamme once, and came back and read again. I was guaranteed four episodes, so my screen test was my first four episodes."
By the time the show premiered, the producers had made Hill a regular. "I did seven seasons of the show. It changed the direction of my career," he says.
While he was memorable in "The West Wing," it was USA's comedy caper series, "Psych," that ignited the autograph fans.
"When I first read the script, I didn't want to do it," he says. "I thought it was a great script. I thought it was funny. But I thought my character was too much of a nerd. I told my agent I didn't want to play a character like that for five years because people would see me as that. If that were me, it would be fine. But it's not me."
His agent suggested he try again with the thought that the network was open to changes. "I thought it would be kind of funny if HE thought he was kind of cool. It all worked out."
Among the accolades that followed, the one he remembers best came from his grandmother. "When I did the third year of 'West Wing' they had this 'West Wing' book come out. And there was a full page picture of me. I gave that as a gift to my grandmother. She opened the book and just broke down and kept saying, 'Look what I lived to see!' I remember that moment _ knowing her journey. She'd worked as a seamstress, walked to the bus in the middle of winter ... I thought, 'All that stuff you've gone through.' But she said, 'Wow, all I went through, it's been worth it.'
"It taught me that when you pursue your dreams and sometimes you keep working hard and working hard and you may not get the reward yourself, but for the grace of God, it all works out in the long run."
ACTRESS ON THE HUNT AGAIN
Syfy's "Killjoys" is back for another season of interplanetary bounty hunting led by the courageous and charismatic Dutch, played by British Hannah John-Kamen. "I have been acting ever since I can remember," says John-Kamen, who co-stars in "Ant Man and the Wasp."
"It's just using my imagination. My mum always told me that when I was a kid she'd come in and I wouldn't just be playing with the hair of the Barbie doll or dressing them up, I used to be having these epic imaginative stories with all my Barbies and Kens. And I would write new pieces, and it was all action-packed and really emotional and it was just so much fun to let my imagination to absolutely have no limits."
HULU USES 'SCARE' TACTICS
If you like the moody and super-scary works of Stephen King, Hulu has a deal for you. "Castle Rock," which premieres Wednesday, is a concoction of works by King about an attorney who returns to his home in Maine, only to find things inexplicably and subtly changed. Andre Holland plays the prodigal son, Sissy Spacek plays his adoptive mother and the wonderful Scott Glenn plays his mother's live-in protector. The first episode is eerily directed by Michael Uppendahl, ("Ray Donovan," "Mad Men," "Fargo.") He's also one of the producers.
SWEDISH ACTRESS ON THE 'CRUISE' LINE
Tom Cruise is up to his old tricks in "Mission: Impossible � Fallout" opening Friday. The thrills are tripled in this adventure, which finds Cruise jumping out of skyscrapers, tethered from a flying helicopter and inundated by an avalanche. Along for the ride is Swedish actress Rebecca Ferguson, best known for "The White Queen." Ferguson was just a kid when she was cast in a Swedish soap opera. She doesn't remember how she got the part.
"I don't actually remember who approached me and how it happened," she says. "Was it someone who knew someone? My mother was sort of in the world of the avant-garde of culture life in Sweden. And it was probably through her that someone knew someone. They just said, 'They're casting for this soap opera, and we would love for you to (try) for it.'
She played a 15-year-old girl. "Since they'd taken me from school _ I'd actively chosen not to go to school, they put in the contract that I would work on the production side of the film during the months we were not working. So I got both an on-screen and off-screen life for two years. It was good training," she says.
