Eriq La Salle Opens Up About His Thrilling Second Act: Detective Novelist (Exclusive)

In Hollywood, there are several types of aspiring actors: the ones with connections in the industry, the ones who are so beautiful the camera finds them and the ones who chase the dream tirelessly until it comes true. Eriq La Salle firmly fell into the latter camp.

“I was definitely the black sheep of the family,” the 61-year-old says of choosing a life in the arts. “No one understood this dream.”

Now, 30 years after his acting career took off, the former ER star is achieving a different dream: novelist. His three books, Laws of Depravity, Laws of Wrath and Laws of Annihilation, have earned accolades and cemented him as a contender in the thriller genre.

But he says getting published in a genre dominated by White men was almost as difficult as finding a spot in Hollywood. “Gatekeepers have been a big theme in my life,” he says.

Growing up in working-class Hartford, Conn., La Salle became interested in the arts through his desire to be a writer. “In high school I decided I was going to write this amazing play and the drama class would perform it,” he says with a laugh.

When he presented his idea to the drama club, they told him that wasn’t how it worked, but he was free to audition for the play they were doing—Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. “I got the role, and that was it: 14-year-old me wanted to be an actor,” he says, adding that he didn’t find much support from his family or friends. “People were like, ‘You can’t do this. You won’t do this.’ This Black kid from Hartford, having those kinds of dreams? They thought it was very unrealistic.”

La Salle had zero connections to the theater world, but he had a mentor, Connecticut theater professor Clay Stevenson. “He was the one person who said, ‘I think you can do this. You’ve got talent,’” La Salle recalls.

Stevenson helped him prepare the audition that got him accepted into Juilliard, which La Salle thought would open doors. Instead, it introduced him to the roadblocks he’d face in the industry. “At Juilliard I met a lot of kids, [and] some of their relatives were in the business,” says La Salle.

Not many of his classmates looked or sounded like him. One from the Midwest even told him, “You’re only the second Black person I’ve ever met outside of my housekeeper.” La Salle laughs about it now. “I mean, what am I supposed to do with that?” he says.

The rest of the school wasn’t exactly diverse. “Ving Rhames was in the class above me, Lorraine Toussaint in the class above that. Wendell Pierce came in just under me,” he recalls. “That was it. Two Blacks per class.”

Two years into Juilliard, he transferred to NYU, where he “met people from all walks of life.” While theater roles remained scant — “There was an old mentality of, should Black actors get to do Shakespeare?” — he says, it was an exciting time.

“I’d go on auditions with Wesley Snipes and Wendell Pierce, and we all rooted for each other,” he says. “We were working actors. We could pay our bills, eat.” His fortunes rose when he landed the role of Darryl Jenks in 1988’s Coming to America, opposite Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall.

He says director John Landis cast him on the spot. “I’ll always remember leaving there, just literally jumping and running to my little black Honda Accord. Later, when I started directing, whenever I could, I would cast actors in the room because I wanted to return that sense of immediate validation. I never forgot that feeling.”

Six years after Coming to America, he was cast as Dr. Peter Benton on ER, and he stayed in the role from 1994 to 2009. “Everyone was just really cool,” he says of castmates like George Clooney and Noah Wyle. “We bonded immediately.”

He says it was also gratifying to suddenly see Black actors in prominent roles, like doctors, judges and lawyers. “Blair Underwood was an attorney on L.A. Law, and I was so envious of that,” he recalls. “I’m not saying every role available had to be a positive one. They were still rare, when we were mostly cast as pimps, drug dealers.”

After leaving ER, La Salle carved out a career directing and producing shows like Chicago P.D., but 10 years ago he felt the pull of writing once more. “I believe in predestiny, in people having a path,” he says.

He’d taken a filmmaking course in the ’90s where he learned to direct and write screenplays. “I got to a point where I wanted to expand my storytelling. I had this fantasy of writing a novel, but then I thought, ‘That’s only for really smart people,’ ” he recalls. “I think sometimes we convince ourselves we’re not smart enough to do certain things. But I ended up trying my hand at it.”

After some rough starts and rewrites — and plenty of rejection — he found an agent who believed in him and his books, which follow a detective duo (one African American, one Irish Italian American) who solve murders in New York.

Now La Salle thinks his race serves him as an author: “I used to live in Harlem, where there’s a culturally rich environment, there’s certain foods, there’s language, rhythms, things that you do,” he says. “Readers want to know about these things.” The response has encouraged him: “It was like, ‘Hey, we like this voice. More importantly, there’s room for this voice.’”