ALPHAS - SCIFI AND TV TALK: Malik Yoba - Muscling In
By Steven Eramo
07/12/2011
As New York Police Detective Julius Clarence “J.C” Williams he helped clean up the streets of the Big Apple in the popular 90s TV police drama New York Undercover, while his character of Ted Shaw on the short-lived 2009 Sci-Fi drama Defying Gravity commanded a six-year journey to explore Earth’s solar system onboard the Antares, a spacecraft with a secret of its own that impacted the lives as well as mission of its international crew.
These are just two of the many roles that the handsome, versatile and gifted Malik Yoba has helped flesh out and bring to life in his two decades working as an actor. Currently he is in Toronto and once again fighting the bad guys, this time as Bill Harken in the new Syfy series Alphas. His character is part of a team that uses their greatly enhanced physical and mental skills to solve crimes of an extraordinary nature. Given his impressive physical stature as well as ease with handling action, drama and the occasional humorous turns required with Bill Harken, Yoba is the ideal fit for the part. So it may surprise some to know that he almost passed on it...
... “Funnily enough, it was actually because of how Defying Gravity was treated and the fact that it just sort of went away after all the hard work we put into doing those 13 episodes, that, in 2010, I wasn’t really interested in doing any other series work for while,” recalls Yoba during a break in filming on the Alphas’ set. “I was happy to just carry on with feature [film] work as well as continue development on my own music and digital projects.
“One day my agent called to tell me about this great pilot, but I told him I wasn’t really interested. Then, however, I found out that Jack Bender [executive producer/lead director on Lost], who directed the Alphas pilot, was coming to New York, and I agreed to meet with him. I went online to find out more about Jack and I discovered that he started out as an actor and three years later moved over into producing and directing. He also has two daughters, and I just felt like his career trajectory was close enough to mine and that he would be someone who could sympathize with my hesitation about not wanting to leave my kids in order to go to another country and work on a TV show that may or may not go..."
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