Zen and the Art of Acting Maintenance The Philosophy of Chi McBride

You know Chi McBride. You may not know you know Chi McBride, but trust me, if you’ve been anywhere near a television set or a movie theater in the past two decades, you and Chi are acquaintances, even if he’s the guy who you see around the office that you like but still weren’t quite sure of his name. It’s time you were sure of his name because he’s been entertaining you for years now.

Chi (pronounced “Shy” and short for Chicago) was born Kenneth McBride in Chicago, Illinois, where he graduated from high school at 16 with plans to pursue a career in music. He did find some early success in that quarter with the release of the single, “He’s the Champ,” a song that parodied the marriage of boxer Mike Tyson and actress Robin Givens. He laughs of that tune, “Records can go gold or go platinum. My record went plastic. So I really wasn’t ‘in’ the music business.” Although he did sign with Esquire Records and he joined the rhythm and blues band Covert, McBride found his true calling when he turned his attentions towards acting.

Over the years, you’ve watched McBride grow from bit parts on sitcoms like “Married... with Children” and “The Fresh Prince of Bel- Air,” to a recurring role as Heavy Gene on “The John Larroquette Show,” and almost straight into the titular role in the edgy, hilarious, but short-lived “The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer.” Just as you were convincing yourself that this guy was a truly gifted comic actor custom-built for sitcom work, McBride pulled a 180 on you and showed up as battle-weary principal Steven Harper on the critically lauded drama, “Boston Public.” His resume reads like a menu at the world’s greatest delicatessen, where you can sample flavors like his feature film work in everything from sci-fi juggernauts like I, Robot, medium-sized comedies like Undercover Brother and The Frighteners, to Oscar bait like The Terminal; or snack on tasty television bits like his recurring roles on “The Nine” and “House ,M.D.,” to truly satisfying seven course meals like the too-brilliant-for television “Pushing Daisies.”

Asked about his versatility in an industry that loves to pigeonhole you, McBride waxes philosophic, “I’ve been fortunate to go back and forth between comedy and drama because once people think of you a certain way, that’s all they think of. They’ll say, ‘No, he just did three in a row like that. Let’s find the next guy who’s like him.’ I always say there are five stages in an actor’s career: There’s ‘Chi who?’ Then ‘Get me Chi McBride.’ Then ‘Get me a Chi McBride type.’ Then ‘Get me a young Chi McBride.’ And then ‘Chi who?’ So you have to try to diversify your portfolio.”

For an actor so versatile and with such a great resume, McBride got a pretty late start to the business. “I didn’t get started as a actor until I was thirty-one.” Asked if he ever imagined the level of success he’d attain he laughs, “That’s a tough question to answer without sounding like an asshole. But, yeah, I did. I got exactly what I wanted out of show business. I never wanted to be the guy who people are chasing with cameras. I never wanted to be that famous. I’m exactly as famous as I want to be. I can get into a good joint to eat without a hassle, and I don’t have to worry about anybody paying me with a bounced check. That’s all I really cared about and what I intended when I came out here. I just didn’t do stuff that didn’t make sense. If I knew I had an audition in the morning, I didn’t stay out till four in a nightclub. There are some common sense things about being in show business. You have to be smart about some of the things you do and a lot of people get in their own way.”

McBride understands that concept extremely well. He channels that knowledge in his role as blues legend Willie Dixon who guided the hand of fledgling recording mogul Leonard Chess in the upcoming feature film Who Do You Love. The story reminded him of his own upbringing.

“I’m from Chicago so I grew up with WVON and the Chess Brothers. My parents raised me as a Seventh Day Adventist, so I couldn’t listen to any of that stuff and I had to do it on the sneak. But I’ve always been a big Muddy Waters fan, and Howlin’ Wolf too. This really struck a chord with me. A lot of people claim to be the father of the blues, but I think Willie Dixon really was. Not only did he write a lot of great songs like ‘Hoochie Coochie Man,’ but he was also Leonard Chess’ guide into a world he wasn’t familiar with and helped to start that record company and helped it grow into the heights it reached as a result of having that kind of talent on board. It was really amazing to listen to the old studio recordings to refamiliarize myself with that music and learn how to play the bass because I played all the music you see me doing in the film.”

Watching McBride swing the upright bass in the film, it’s hard to believe he hadn’t been playing it for years before the film. “I was a musician, but you can’t call yourself a musician if you don’t play. You really do forget. There was a time when my ear was so good, I could listen to a great piano player like a Rodney Franklin and after an hour and a half, play a really complicated and hard piece of symphonic jazz. Now, if you put a gun to my head, I probably couldn’t do ‘Chop Sticks!’ I haven’t sat down at the piano in twenty-some years so I can’t do it anymore. But I do know what music is in theory and practice. Although the bass isn’t an instrument I played, I had a really good teacher. By the end of it, I was playing that shit like I wrote it! It was really a cool experience to add that because it was something you could bring to the part as an actor to give it more authenticity.”

McBride is a great believer in authentic acting because he’s seen the results of others who ‘play’ musicians without taking the time to familiarize themselves with the instruments they’re supposed to be the master of. “It looks horrible. They think nobody’s going to know the difference, but if you’re playing the piano and don’t even take time to learn the fingering… That’s the thing I loved about Denzel Washington when he did Mo’ Better Blues. He killed it! I really bought that he was playing the trumpet. His fingering was on point! He worked with Terrence Blanchard. It might have sounded like shit when they recorded it, but it looked so authentic and so real. It also informs your acting because it makes you who you are.”

McBride has hopes that the film will not only entertain audiences with a good story and great music, but also spark interest in what gave birth to the blues. “The good thing about film when it’s done right, it’s a record of history. If you couldn’t be there, and you sit down to listen to blues music that touched so many people’s lives and emotions and wondered where it all came from, Who Do You Love is a good film to find that out. It’s a window into a world that’s not around anymore. These guys were the rock stars of their day. And when you’re in that, you think it’s going to last forever. Thank God in the aftermath, after a lot of legal wrangling and lawsuits, Willie Dixon ended up getting a lot of the money that he rightfully deserved. And while a lot of people said that they took advantage of some people april 2010 who were uneducated and couldn’t look out for themselves, if it weren’t for guys like Leonard Chess, they’d have played all their music in backwater juke joints and nobody would know their music. In a way, although Leonard Chess was a very shrewd businessman — and I’m being kind — he gave them the kind of exposure that would allow their music to live on. So I can’t call Leonard Chess a bad guy.”

But if he’s looking for bad guys, McBride can find plenty to deal with as he’s currently starring in the newly-minted hit Fox action series, “Human Target.” “It’s a show about three guys played by Mark Valley, Jackie Earle Haley, and myself. They work in a unique scenario where they protect people who have been marked for death and they don’t have anyone to turn to. Mark plays Christopher Chance who is sort of like our star player who goes in and assumes the identity of someone close to the subject in order to stay close and expose the threat. I play Winston, the guy who’s the face of the company. I get and deal with the clients. Jackie plays a character named Guerrero who’s a freelancer and a guy who has a lot of moral ambiguity, but he’s a necessary evil because he’s a fixer who can get things done. I enjoy it a lot because it gives me the chance to do something I’ve never really done before, action. I get to run and fight and shoot guns and do stunts. That’s cool because this is a business where people will only let you do what they think you can do. The more things you reveal about yourself in terms of your skill set, the more chance you have to survive. I’ve been in this business a long time and as a result of that I’m eligible for a pension when I retire. Next year it’ll be twenty years I’ve been in the business. It goes fast, but that’s because I’ve been fortunate. It only goes fast if you’re working. There are some people who have been in or around the periphery of show business for as long as I’ve been in it and those years pass by at a snail’s pace.”

It would be remiss to speak to McBride without broaching the subject of the critically lauded “Pushing Daisies,” a show that was veritably murdered in its infancy. McBride played detective Emerson Cod who stumbled into the most unusual, but lucrative, business model when he teamed up with a pie-maker named Ned who could bring the dead back to life with a single touch. Now if you wanted to solve a murder mystery, all you need do is ask the victim. McBride knew it was going to be a special show from the moment he went in for his first meeting. “I read it and I really dug it, but when I really felt that way was when I went to meet with those guys and director Barry Sonnenfeld was at the meeting. That’s when I knew I wanted in. On my way there, I was thinking, ‘I’m probably going to do this a lot differently than they think I’m going to, which is how I did it. But when I saw Barry, I thought, ‘Good!’ To me, if it’s funny, you don’t have to ‘make it funny.’ I didn’t want to be one of those dudes who was going to do a whole bunch of crazy antics. I think Emerson is funny because when the situation gets chaotic, he’s not flipping out and making a spectacle of himself. That’s how Barry is. He would always say to people [in Barry Sonnenfeld voice], ‘Don’t be funny.’ I used to say that Barry is the kind of guy who thinks that doom is always around the corner. He’s the kind of guy who would say, ‘Some people see the glass half empty. Some people see the glass half full. I see half a glass of poison.’ I really like Barry and I’d wanted to work with him. I’d met him years earlier in Canada when I was doing something else and I told him as much and he remembered that. When I came in I was wearing a jacket he really liked and we went toe-to-toe for half an hour on fashion. I wanted to play Emerson as over-the-top with fashion, which is where all those wild shirts and pattern mixing come from. Plus the script was really funny. I didn’t do a whole lot of ad libs, but if the time came and I wanted to say something that I thought was funny, they pretty much let me do what I wanted. It was nice. I liked working with the producers Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen and writer/creator Bryan Fuller. But I had the most fun of all working with my co-star Kristin Chenoweth. We had a lot of fun together and knew how to play off each other. We were like a comedy team.”

Asked about the possibility of a “Pushing Daisies” follow-up film, ‘Chi the Pragmatic’ shows up. “Bryan’s doing a comic right now and it’s pretty brilliant. But as far as a movie is concerned, people say all kinds of things in this business so you never know. If the Warner Bros. brass were convinced that people would want it, it would be done. That’s the one thing about this business — and I don’t say this like it’s a bad thing at all so please take my point in context — this business is not driven by art, it’s driven by commerce. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a business. You look around this town and you’ll see hundreds of office buildings housed with people who are in there conducting BUSINESS. That’s what makes show business work. People don’t make movies, television, or Broadway shows because they’re swell, they make them because they can make some dough doing it. And by all rights it should be. There’s too much bullshit in show business not to end up making a buck out it. You’d have to be crazy to deal with everything that comes with being in show business and not make any money out of it. But if the picture presents itself, then maybe that could happen.” If empowered to make anything happen himself, McBride confesses that he would love to play legendary boxer Sonny Liston in a film. “Sonny was a guy who never had any peace. He was Mike Tyson without the money. This guy was heavyweight champion of the world — which is still the most prestigious individual achievement in professional sports — but when he moved from Philadelphia to Denver, Colorado, he said, ‘I’d rather be a lamppost in Colorado than heavyweight champ of the world in Philadelphia! It got to a point where Sonny was walking everywhere through alleys. He was the heavyweight champion and wouldn’t walk the streets. That’s a helluva interesting man. Even after he won the belt from Floyd Patterson, when he came home there was nobody there at the airport. I’d like to know what it would be like to be that guy.” McBride has always found himself drawn mto interesting characters, but as hard as he works on giving a convincing performance, he never allows himself to be swallowed by them. “I’m not that dude who thinks you actually have to do crack to play a crack-head. Most of the time, it’s just an excuse for some actors to act like assholes. You can get some of these great performances without all that extra bullshit. For me, this is all pretend. I know this is a skill because, like I said, I’ve been onstage enough times with people who don’t know how to do it to understand that’s what it is. But at the end of the day, I make my living doing what I used to do for free when I was a kid. When we were playing cowboys and Indians, secret agent, or cops and robbers, that shit was for real and  played it like it was for real. It was a real as you could possibly make it in your head. And all acting is, is exhibiting behaviors. It’s not this complicated science. You stand on a piece of tape and say some words that somebody else wrote and try to get people to believe it. There’s some doctor today who pulled a tumor the size of a ball out of some kid’s head. That’s hard!”

The great Spencer Tracy, when asked for advice about acting was purported to have said, “Know your lines and don’t bump into the furniture.” It’s a philosophy that seems tailor-made for McBride who, despite his success, views himself as Chi McBride, a working man’s actor. The feeling even exudes from his answer when asked, ‘When people hear the name Chi McBride, what would you like them to think. “That I’m just like they are. I’m just a guy trying to make a living who doesn’t have to act like an asshole to get you to pay attention.” ▼

“Human Target” airs Wednesdays at 8PM on FOX. Who Do You Love opens theatrically April 16.