Eriq La Salle Opens Up About His Thrilling Second Act: Detective Novelist

As a child with no connections to Hollywood, Eriq La Salle had to fend for himself as an actor. Now he has added director, producer and author of thrillers to his resume

There are several types of aspiring actors in Hollywood: those with connections in the industry, those who are so beautiful that the camera finds them, and those who tirelessly chase their dreams until they come true. Eriq La Salle fell firmly in the latter camp.

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“I was definitely the black sheep of the family,” the 61-year-old says of choosing a life in art. “Nobody understood this dream.”

Now, 30 years after the rise of his acting career, the former Emergency the star realizes a different dream: a novelist. His three books, Laws of depravity, Laws of wrath and Laws of Destruction, they earned praise and established him as a contender in the thriller genre.

But he says getting published in a white-dominated genre was almost as difficult as finding a place in Hollywood. “Gatekeepers are a big theme in my life,” he says.

Eric La Salle.

Phylicia JL Munn

Growing up in working-class Hartford, Connecticut, La Salle became interested in art because of his desire to be a writer. “I decided in high school that I was going to write this amazing play, and the drama class was going to perform it,” he says with a laugh.

Eriq La Salle is going to hell

When he pitched his idea to the drama club, he was told it didn’t work that way, but he was free to audition for a play they were doing—Lorraine Hansberry Raisins in the sun. “I got the role and that was it: 14-year-old I wanted to be an actor,” he says, adding that he didn’t find much support from family or friends. “People said, ‘You can’t do that. Your habit do it.’ That black kid from Hartford, he has dreams like that? They thought it was very unrealistic.”

Laws of Destruction, Eriq La Salle.

La Salle had no connection to the theater world, but he had a mentor, Connecticut theater professor Clay Stevenson. “He was the only person who said, ‘I think you can do it. You have talent,’” La Salle recalls.

Stevenson helped him set up an audition that got him accepted to Juilliard, which La Salle thought would open doors. Instead, he introduced him to the obstacles he would face in the industry. “I met a lot of kids at Juilliard, [and] some of their relatives were in the business,” says La Salle.

Few of his classmates looked or sounded like him. One from the Midwest even told him, “You’re only the second black person I’ve met besides my housekeeper.” La Salle laughs at it now. “I mean, what am I supposed to do with it that?” he says.

The rest of the school was not very diverse. “Ving Rhames was in a class above me, Lorraine Toussaint in a class above that. Wendell Pierce walked in right under me,” he recalls. “That was it. Two blacks per class.”

After two years at Juilliard, he transferred to NYU, where he “met people from all walks of life.” While theater roles remained rare – “There was an old mentality, should black actors do Shakespeare?” — he says, it was an exciting time.

“I would go to auditions with Wesley Snipes and Wendell Pierce and we were all rooting for each other,” he says. “We were busy actors. We could pay the bills, eat.” His fortunes rose when he was cast as Darryl Jenks in 1988 Coming to Americawith Eddie Murphy and Arseni Hall.

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He says director John Landis immediately cast him in the role. “I’ll always remember walking out of there, literally jumping and running to my little black Honda Accord. Later, when I started directing, whenever I could, I would throw actors into the room because I wanted to get that feeling of instant confirmation back. I have never forgotten that feeling.”

Six years later Coming to America, he got the role of Dr. Peter Benton Emergency, and remained in the role from 1994 to 2009. “They were all really cool,” he says of co-stars like George Clooney and Noah Wyle. “We became close immediately.”

He says it was also gratifying to suddenly see black actors in prominent roles, such as doctors, judges and lawyers. “Blair Underwood was a lawyer LA law, and I was so envious of it,” he recalls. “I’m not saying that every available role had to be positive. They were still rare, when we were mostly pimps, drug dealers.”

After leaving EmergencyLa Salle built a career directing and producing shows like Chicago police, but 10 years ago he felt the desire to write again. “I believe in predestination, that people have a path,” he says.

He attended a film course in the 90s where he learned to direct and write scripts. “I got to a point where I wanted to expand my storytelling. “I had this fantasy of writing a novel, but then I thought, ‘That’s only for really smart people,'” he recalls. “I think sometimes we convince ourselves that we’re not smart enough to do certain things. But I ended up giving it a go.”

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After a few rough starts and rewrites—and a lot of rejection—he found an agent who believed in him and his books, which follow a detective duo (one African American, one Irish, one Italian American) who solve murders in New York.

Now La Salle thinks his race serves him well as a writer: “I used to live in Harlem, where there’s a culturally rich environment, there’s a certain food, there’s a language, the rhythms, the things you do,” he says. “Readers want knowing about these things.” He was encouraged by the response: “It was like, ‘Hey, we like this voice. More importantly, there is room for this voice.’”

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Source: HIS Education