She’s been a princess and a Dreamgirl. Now, Bloomfield’s Anika Noni Rose is a streetwise cop on the cable drama “Power.”
Her character, LaVerne “Jukebox” Ganner, makes her debut in drama about a nightclub owner in the drug trade in the Sunday, July 31, episode. “She is very smart; she’s somebody who grew up in New York, and has now moved to D.C. to become a cop there,” Rose says of her character. “She is very wily and has her own agenda.”
“This is very different for me,” Rose, 43, says over the phone from Los Angeles. “I think it will be very new for my audience. And I had a great time doing it because of that.”
After winning a Tony for her Broadway work in Tony Kushner’s “Caroline, or Change,” becoming Disney’s first African-American princess in “The Princess and the Frog” and starring in the film version of “Dreamgirls” alongside Beyonce Knowles, Jennifer Hudson and Jamie Foxx, Rose says she was looking for something different.
Busy as she is, “there are some things that I really miss,” Rose says. “I miss doing comedy. I’d love to do some action stuff and something like this. So I’m always looking for something that’s different, but sometimes it’s about how people see you that will dictate whether you’ll be able to be thought of for a certain thing.”
As it happens, Rose first ran into executive producer Courtney A. Kemp years before she even created “Power.” “We met in a very casual fashion, actually, at a mutual friend’s game night,” the actress says. “We had a meeting and I really, really liked her.”
It was a coincidence that Kemp, of Westport, also had Connecticut roots.
“Look at these two New England girls doing our thing!” Rose says with a laugh. “I did not know her in Connecticut. Randomly we met in L.A. — and how many people actually meet in L.A.? That’s rare! So both of us to be from Connecticut is more rare. That’s just luck of the draw.”
As such, though, neither woman could claim a gritty, crime-ridden upbringing to inform their story.
“Not in the least,” Rose says. “I mean, Bloomfield has changed quite a bit, but Bloomfield was cow country when I was growing up. The milk that I had in school was from Maple Hill Farms and that was directly down the street from my house. So, no, that was not at all my experience growing up.”
“But,” she adds, “I’m a big reader and I love crime books. I love suspenseful crime novels. I love David Baldacci, particularly in the summer. I love a Walter Mosley, that kind of stuff. And I’ve lived in New York for 13, 14 years, so I feel at this point I’m a New Englander, but I’m also a New Yorker — I feel that energy in my person really well. I know that energy. And it’s not as far away if you had spoken to me in high school.”
When in high school, the 1990 grad initially concentrated on singing when she got into a musical production of “Fame” as a freshman.
“I loved the acting but my plan was like, to be a pop star and have my Grammy by now,” Rose says. While at Florida A&M University, “I decided to train as an actor because that was the thing that I didn’t really know how to do. I knew I had a proclivity for it, but I really wanted to train myself so that I could be as good at it as I could possibly be.”
She’s been singing in musicals along the way, so a Grammy is not out of the question.
“It could happen!” Rose says. “We came close in ‘Dreamgirls.’ But, you know, life is not over yet and I’m still looking into album possibilities.”
Specifically, she says, “I’ve been meditating on an album of standards in honor of my grandmother. I’ve been meditating on that for a little while. I did a concert series a few years ago with that type of theme — I did it in Hartford actually, at The Bushnell — and I just haven’t pursued it the way I should and the way I ultimately want to. But I definitely want to do that.”
There is, so far, no singing in the cards for her “Power” character opposite the show’s Omari Hardwick and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, who is also an executive producer on the show. “But you never know what somebody is going to throw out at you.”
After all, her character has the nickname Jukebox.
“Well, Courtney Kemp says she was called Jukebox, because back in the day, in her neighborhood, she could sing any song on the radio,” Rose says. “I thought she was called Jukebox because, depending on what coin was dropped in the slot, you’re going to get different song being sung.”
Next Up: Producer
Either way, holding a gun instead of a microphone for the part meant a little training.
“I had an ex-cop working with me,” Rose says, “because I’m not somebody who randomly goes to a gun range. I’d been to a gun range once in my life, so this was something I needed to work on, so it could look natural.”
She had to learn some movement as well.
“Not that I had to do a lot of running or anything, but a lot of things, a lot of movement for the body that is not natural to me as a cop — the way you come into a building, the way you utilize your weapon, the way you take in a room, is very different than the movement I use in my life. And I like that. I like exploring the different spaces your body needs to go in to speak for someone else.”
Rose comes to “Power” after earning accolades for her role in this year’s remake of the miniseries “Roots” as Kunta Kinte’s daughter Kizzy.
“It was spiritually exhausting — and actually exhausting,” she says of the experience. “It was a very difficult thing to throw yourself into, and it was a very difficult shoot in itself. I think it was different from other things that I’ve done because it had a depth and level of truth about our country that’s very difficult to look at and more difficult to experience.
“But it was also extraordinarily fulfilling. because I was able in doing the role of Kizzy to give credence to and to give thanks to and to give honor to all of the people who had come before me. it was all of those things wrapped into one. And I feel really proud and pleased to be able to leave that behind me, to drop that off.
“America is not always pretty,” she says, “as we’ve seen quite a bit in the past few years, the past few weeks, the past few days. But that doesn’t mean we don’t owe it the truth of honesty, that we don’t owe it the space of honesty. We have to. Otherwise we’ll keep doing these stupid things that we do.”
Rose says she’s “very lucky and blessed to be a consistently working actor.” But at the same time, she’s been acquiring properties to produce that better reflect the world she sees.
Producing her own projects, whether there’s a role for her in them or not, will help make that happen, she says.
“I feel like there are a lot of things that I want to see that just aren’t there. And I’m not interested in waiting for it to happen; I can’t expect anybody to read my mind and know that that’s what I want to see, or to even care that that’s what I want to see. So my plan is to make it known by making it happen.”
It’s not just because there are few roles for African-American women in Hollywood, she says.
“Is that getting better? I’ll say yes, and I’ll say hopefully,” Rose says. “But my goal is to assist in making it better.”
“POWER” runs Sundays at 10 p.m. on Starz.
Editor’s Note: this story has been updated to correct the last name of Anika Noni Rose’s “Power” character, LaVerne “Jukebox” Ganner.
