If your idea of Alex Cross is Morgan Freeman from the movies “Kiss the Girls” (1997) and “Along Came a Spider” (2001), the Amazon series “Cross,” based on a best-selling series of novels by James Patterson, might come as a surprise.
With his bulging biceps encased in sprayed-on sweaters, Aldis Hodge, who plays the title character in the series, cuts a rather different figure indeed.
“They always had me in mediums,” Hodge said, laughing, in a recent video chat. “Actually, the only thing I really had for wardrobe was like, ‘Yo, I need these sweaters to be a little thicker because we are shooting in Canada in the winter.’”
Fans of Patterson’s long-running franchise shouldn’t fret, though: The new series, which premiered Thursday on Prime Video, was only shot in Toronto — it is still set in Washington, D.C., like the books. But productions do that all the time. Perhaps more important, Hodge’s Cross lands closer than ever to the way the character is described on the page: tall, 38 in the first novel (like Hodge) and strong enough that, as described in “Kiss the Girls,” he can still pounce after being shot in the heart with a stun gun.
Obviously this is a helpful quality for a forensic psychologist.
“I did tell the casting teams at Paramount and Amazon that as we started to search for our Alex Cross, I’d like to use Aldis Hodge as sort of the blueprint for that,” the series’s showrunner, Ben Watkins, said by phone.
“I wanted someone who had natural charisma, someone that had a physicality to them as well,” Watkins added. “But I also wanted someone that exuded a high level of intellect and intellectual curiosity.”
Hodge is in good company. Several recent entries in the best-seller-to-series pipeline honor their central literary characters a little better, perhaps, than earlier adaptations, which seemed willing to trade some verisimilitude for star power. (At least Tyler Perry was a physical approximation in the 2012 film “Alex Cross.”) It’s a bet that has so far paid off, resulting in some of the more popular series streaming and raising the profile of their leads — see Titus Welliver in “Bosch” and Alan Ritchson in “Reacher” (Amazon), and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo in “The Lincoln Lawyer” (Netflix).
This kind of spotlight is relatively new for Hodge, whose most popular roles have tended to be on teams: He played a charming hacker in a group of rogues from the caper series “Leverage”; a man who has escaped slavery in the ensemble drama “Underground”; and the superhero Hawkman, a member of the Justice Society of America, in the movie “Black Adam.”
At least one of his former castmates is not worried. “Sometimes I doubt that there’s such a thing as star power, or even chemistry,” Kevin Bacon, who was Hodge’s foil in the Showtime crime series “City on a Hill,” said by phone. “I think to myself, Well, star power is just a really, really good actor, and chemistry is just two really good actors who are working together.”
“But in the case of Aldis,” Bacon added, “you just can’t take your eyes off him. I guess that’s the difference between really, really good actors and stars — he’s magnetic.”
Unlike those other recent streaming adaptations, “Cross” doesn’t take its plot from the existing books, even though Watkins had around 30 to choose from. Instead, he came up with new stories — a second season of “Cross” has already wrapped — that are propped up by familiar presences from the novels, starting with the two children whom Cross, a widower, raises with the help of their grandmother (Juanita Jennings).
Patterson acknowledged the necessity to fill in what happens between the action-driven scenes. (The show’s first season involves a particularly deranged serial killer.)
“My strength as a storyteller is that I get people flying through the pages,” he wrote in an email. “My weakness is that I don’t always dig as deep as I could. Ben Watkins and his team dug deep and revealed a more complicated Alex Cross. We both wanted the new Cross to be more relevant and realistic while continuing to show Alex as a dedicated family man.”
This particular subject is dear to Hodge, who is close to his older brother, Edwin, also an actor, and calls his young daughter “the most important person to me in the world, hands down.”
“She has reformatted how I think about life,” he added.
That life got off to a challenging start. Aldis and Edwin were raised primarily by their mother, a former Marine who did her best to protect them during periods of homelessness and hunger, mostly around New York and New Jersey. They slept in cars. They slept on floors. As described in a New York Times article from 1996, their mother shuttled them to and from acting auditions early on, determined to give them a better life.
In 1993, Edwin landed a role in a Broadway revival of “Show Boat”; two years later, at age 9, Aldis joined him, the same year he appeared in “Die Hard With a Vengeance,” his screen debut. He has hardly taken a break since.
Aldis Hodge — who is an executive producer of “Cross” — signed up for the show soon after reading Watkins’s script. He then threw himself into helping refine it. “From the beginning, Ben and I talked about where we were at as men in our lives, what we wanted for ourselves,” Hodge said. “That’s what fed the trajectory of how I portrayed Alex Cross.”
Integral to the character’s psyche is the death of his wife, who is killed at the start of the first episode. Cross, who is described as having a hero complex that gives him a “compulsion to protect,” is burdened not only by loss but also by guilt at the thought that he failed her.
“I want to create a character who is dealing with grief and making choices that are having a negative impact on the people around them,” Watkins said. “It’s an iconic detective, but your journey as a character is really going to be about you confronting your own emotional burdens and figuring out a way through them.”
A key element as Cross navigates his feelings is his relationship with his colleague and longtime best friend, Sampson (Isaiah Mustafa) — another important, intimate connection lifted from the books.
“It’s not a romantic love story, obviously, but a familial, brotherly love story, and that’s something that’s really important to me,” Hodge said. “We get to see these two men, these two Black men, that are really supporting each other’s best efforts.”
“To be able to have that represented on television, something that I’m familiar with in my own personal life, amongst my group of friends, is amazing,” he added.
This fellowship seems to echo that of Hodge and his brother, who might understand better than anyone the high bar they have to clear.
“Unfortunately, our ratio for coming back from bad mistakes, traumas, whatever, is not high when it comes to this industry for us as Black men,” Hodge said. “So we had to always be as aware of that as possible in order to achieve what we wanted for ourselves, which is creating a career where we can have freedom and autonomy, and a lack of fear of not being able to do what we love.”
He added: “Being in a position of authority now, where I actually have a choice to change those things — this was always the goal.”
The post With Aldis Hodge, ‘Cross’ Seeks Justice … for Its Title Character appeared first on New York Times.
