Sanaa Lathan: Episode 46

It’s the forty-sixth episode of On The List with Brett Gursky. This week’s guest Sanaa Lathan (“Shots Fired”) talks all about her career as an actress. She discusses growing up in New York City with a TV director dad and a Broadway actress mom, then going to college at Berkeley and getting her masters in Drama at Yale. She tells Brett about her very first roles, including Steve Urkel’s love interest on “Family Matters”, which was followed by her first break in the movies with “Blade”, co-starring Wesley Snipes. She then shares behind-the-scenes stories from the sets of her films “Life” with Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence, “The Wood” with Omar Epps and Taye Diggs, and “The Best Man” with Taye, Regina Hall, and many more. Then Sanaa tells Brett all about how she got her fan-favorite role in the cult classic “Love & Basketball”- and how the director first wanted a female basketball player who could act, not the other way around. Sanaa gives the inside scoop on what it took for her to learn basketball and win the role. Sanaa and Brett discuss her roles in “Brown Sugar” with Taye and Queen Latifah, “Out of Time” with Denzel Washington and Eva Mendes, and “Alien vs Predator” which took her to Prague for six months. She then talks about her Tony-nominated role in the Broadway play “A Raisin In The Sun”, which was followed by a season-long guest arc on the hit Ryan Murphy show “Nip/Tuck”. Sanaa and Brett also cover her roles in Tyler Perry’s “The Family That Preys” and Steve Soderbergh’s “Contagion” with Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow. She also shares stories from her Starz series “Boss” with Kelsey Grammer, the long-awaited sequel “Best Man Holiday”, her hit movie “The Perfect Guy” with Michael Ealy and Morris Chestnut, and the summer blockbuster “Now You See Me 2”. They also talk about what’s next: “American Assassin” in theaters September 15th. Sanaa currently stars in the FOX 10-episode event series “Shots Fired”, which airs every Wednesday night at 8pm. She leads a cast that includes Stephan James, Mack Wilds, Richard Dreyfus, and Helen Hunt. Be sure to tune in- or binge all 10 episodes OnDemand or on Hulu.