André Holland owes his role on “The Knick” to the kindness of strangers.
The actor, who plays Dr. Algernon Edwards on the nightmarish Cinemax medical drama, was on vacation in Lisbon when he received the script and had to prepare an audition tape with his iPad.
He asked the hotel maid to read the off-camera lines. The result was not going to get him a meeting with director Steven Soderbergh. “When I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, this is weird because she had a thick, thick accent,’ ” he says.
He then went down to the hotel lobby. “I just sat in the lobby, listening for people who spoke English,” he says. “Then I saw this married couple and I asked them, ‘Where’re y’all from?’ They said, ‘England.’ I said, ‘Come with me.’ I managed to get the two of them to come to my room.”
The wife, who’d been to drama school, read the off-camera lines while her husband crossed his arms and watched, clearly suspicious. “Afterward, I took them out for a drink,” Holland says.
That kind of luck has been following the 34-year-old actor for about a year. He was invited to meet with Soderbergh and his executive producers, Jack Amiel and Michael Begler, and was soon on set in Bed-Stuy, where the Romanesque exterior of Boys High School had been transformed into the turn-of-the-century Knickerbocker Hospital, a struggling institution headed by Dr. John Thackery (Clive Owen) — who can’t get through a surgical rotation without shooting up vials of liquid cocaine.
Edwards is the show’s interloper, a Harvard-educated upstart whose superior skills are recognized and rewarded when Thackery discovers the advances he’s made in a clinic for black patients that he’s running in the hospital basement.
His life is further complicated by a relationship with a rich white woman, Cornelia (Juliet Rylance), whom Algernon has known since childhood.
Holland, a compact man wearing a stylish gray suit and a blue shirt, confesses that the intricate surgical scenes on “The Knick” are sometimes rehearsed a day before they’re filmed. The actors practice operating on elaborate prostheses before they are fitted onto the actors undergoing the knife. In one scene, they had to perform an emergency C-section. The results were gruesome.
“We rehearsed those scenes the day before and spent a couple of hours just figuring out what the movements were,” Holland says. “The instruments have to be in a certain place. Where everyone stands around the table had to be rehearsed. And then on the day of the [scene], we showed up and the blood starts flowing. All of our preparation went out the window at that point.”
Getting called the things I get called on the show. And doing those scenes over and over again. It gets in there. It does have an impact.
- André Holland
More difficult than handling these technical challenges is registering the internal combustion Algernon feels — but never voices — when white doctors and patients hurl ugly racist insults. The scenes were reminiscent of his childhood in Shades Valley, Ala., a small town outside Birmingham where he grew up the middle of three children.
“There’s a lot of emotional residue that [those scenes] have, just having grown up in the South,” Holland says. “Getting called the things I get called on the show. And doing those scenes over and over again. It gets in there. It does have an impact.”
Fortunately, Holland had a role model in his mother, Mary, a civil rights activist who was marching in downtown Birmingham while still in high school. Her experience provided inspiration when, shortly after finishing filming “The Knick,” he was cast as Martin Luther King Jr.’s right-hand man, Andrew Young, in the movie “Selma,” which debuts on Christmas. Call it his second lucky break.
“Playing Algernon and Andrew Young just cracked open all this personal family history for me,” he says. “So in addition to learning the American history portion of it, I’m learning family history. It really touched me.”
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