Letting Them Talk with Will Harris - Ep. 56 - Mykelti Williamson (The Drop: A Snowfall Story / Forrest Gump / Con-Air / Heat)

This time I’m letting Mykelti Williamson talk. I’ll just go ahead and admit it: this is someone whose name I had somehow never actually heard spoken aloud before until mere moments before starting my conversation with him. As such, I discovered that I’d been mispronouncing his name wrong in my head for the entirety of the time I’ve been watching his work…and I’ve literally been watching this guy for decades now. Mind you, if I’d seen some of his earliest credits, when he was actually listed as “Michael T. Williamson,” I would’ve known better, but for years I just figured it was pronounced “M’Kell-tee,” and I was very, very wrong. But better we should focus less on how you pronounce his name – even though that’s important – and focus more on his work, because Williamson’s current series, FX’s The Drop: A Snowfall Saga, is a fantastic piece of work, a spin-off from Snowfall that’s set in 1990 and blends a family drama with a fictionalized-but-familiar look at the rise of the west coast rap scene. Williamson plays a character called Big Daddy, the patriarch of the Kinsey family, and it’s a multifaceted role that gives Williamson the opportunity to play a number of different emotional beats. We recorded this episode with an eye toward releasing it after the fifth episode, so if you haven’t started watching the series yet or you’re not up to episode five, then you may want to hang tight and play catch-up before you listen to the interview. That said, and I’m not saying you should just suck it up and suffer through the spoilers, but after we finish talking about The Drop, we start delving into other items in Williamson’s filmography,  and there are definitely some good stories awaiting you on the other side. Yes, we talk about some of the more obvious points of interest – reciting shrimp recipes in Forrest Gump, sitting next to Nic Cage on Con-Air, and playing alongside Pacino in Heat, just to name a few – but beyond that, he offers up a no-holds-barred explanation about his departure from The New WKRP in Cincinnati, details an awkward moment with Ed Asner on The Bronx Zoo, and reveals the remarkable amount of support he received from George C. Scott after working with him on the Showtime remake of 12 Angry Men. And along the way, we make brief stops on Soul Train, Streets of Fire, Bay City Blues, and… Hell, this man even has a Joey Travolta story! Well, that’s probably enough of an intro. It’s time to let Mykelti Williamson talk.