LL Cool J again walked the St. Albans streets on a recent summer weekday, just like he did when he was James Todd Smith.
He began rapping as an audacious 9-year-old on Farmers Boulevard in Queens. (Somehow, that was nearly half a century ago.) He recorded his first demo from his grandmother’s basement. He frequented block parties and avoided shootouts at a park that now proudly displays his image on a mural, along with other notable celebrities from the area.
But this homecoming is not about the part of his career that earned him Grammy Awards and a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction. He’s here to film a scene for his debuting procedural, “NCIS: New York.”
For 14 seasons and more than 300 episodes, LL anchored “NCIS: Los Angeles” as Sam Hanna, the resolute ex-Navy SEAL turned federal agent in a spinoff of one of network television’s most enduring franchises.
The series ended in 2023, even though Hanna still made pop-up appearances in the ubiquitous franchise’s flagship show and its Hawaii outpost. In April, CBS announced “NCIS: New York,” with LL reprising his role as Hanna and serving as an executive producer. The show premieres Tuesday.
“You get a chance to see some of the vulnerabilities, the uncertainty,” LL, now 58, said. “Because don’t forget: He hasn’t been home in so long. He’s almost like a stranger in this place.”
Hanna is from Brooklyn — not Queens. Otherwise, LL could have been speaking about himself instead of his character as the show hopped around shooting scenes in both New York boroughs.
A neighborhood crowd, growing as word of the filming filtered out, lined up to greet the returning star, who smiled and took a selfie with them. A man told LL his wife had gone to school with him; that man was immediately roasted by other bystanders. Some parts of the city are unrecognizable to LL, but St. Albans has not changed much for him.
“It is the same energy in that way,” he said. “It’s always been a place where you’ve got to be on your p’s and q’s. You’ve got to be on point.”
LL knew where to grab the best soul food in the neighborhood. Not the spot closest to the shoot — a crew member who returned with lunch received LL’s joking disapproval — but one a couple minutes away, where the chicken wings at Nettie’s Restaurant & Bar did not stand a chance against LL during this interview.
“The world changed while I was gone,” LL said of his years in California as he shifted to the prime-time pillar portion of his career. “The grass is a different color. The street signs are different. There are no subway tokens anymore. It’s a whole different world from what it was. There’s a bit of Joseph Campbell in it, right? The hero’s journey.”
BEFORE FILMING IN HIS NEIGHBORHOOD, LL reached out to the BBS Boys, a community that celebrates the cars and culture of the 1980s and 1990s.
At his request, vintage cars — a burnt orange Acura NSX-T, a tan Mercedes-Benz SL-Class, a maroon first-generation BMW 8 Series — lined the streets outside the day’s shoot.
“It was a little metaphor for the last time I was there and what the world looked like,” LL said. “It was my way of nodding to how long ago it was with having those specific types of cars out there.”
Another car from the 1980s made an impression on the actor Malik Yoba when he spotted LL while the two were teenagers growing up in New York City. Yoba, on set for a guest appearance for the show, recalled hanging out on 125th Street and trying to flirt with a girl, poorly.
“All of a sudden, 15-year-old LL Cool J pulls up outside the Apollo in a white Porsche,” Yoba said. “Courtney looked at him, and she forgot I even existed. He was that guy from day one.”
Soon, LL had elevated hip-hop music, crafting new lanes for others to follow as he embodied personas both tender and aggressive, penning enduring odes like “Hey Lover” and dismissing rivals through verbal combat in songs like “Jack the Ripper.”
Hip-hop was a lifelong passion, but it wasn’t the only one. Watching Bruce Lee action flicks as a child ignited the passion for acting that blossomed into a parallel career. “I’d like to be able to have a six pack and be in a movie and kick the light on the ceiling and punch people in the face and be charismatic,” he said. “Bruce Lee, to me, he embodied that.”
His first film appearance was not much of a stretch. LL appeared as a rapper in 1985’s “Krush Groove,” a cult favorite film loosely based on the early days of the Def Jam record label. Breakout roles in movies like “Deep Blue Sea,” “Any Given Sunday” and “In Too Deep” and a sitcom run on “In the House” followed, before LL debuted on “NCIS: Los Angeles” in 2009.
Procedurals require added dedication, especially being first on the call sheet. There are the 4 a.m. gym sessions and the 14-hour days on set. Sometimes, those happen on the same day.
“If you’re not ready to sacrifice and be uncomfortable, forget about it,” LL said. “People see success as a banquet, but they don’t think about what went into cooking the food and the heat in the kitchen,” he said, adding: “If I’m not here at 6 a.m., you got 250 people that might not get to see their family on Saturday because your delay costs them.”
Yoba understands that level of responsibility. The impact of the pair sharing the screen together is not lost on him either.
Yoba made history in the 1990s as Detective J.C. Williams on Fox’s “New York Undercover,” one of the first one-hour prime-time dramas led by actors of color. The show’s executive producer, Andre Harrell, was also the founder of Uptown Records and tapped into hip-hop in creating the show’s soundscape.
“Hip-hop was the pulse of the show,” Yoba said. “Def Jam’s very first solo superstar was LL. So to stand on set with him now in New York — it’s the legacy of hip-hop meeting the legacy of Black men leading prime-time television drama. It’s still a small club.”
THE NEXT DAY’S SHOOTING shifted to the show’s gleaming Brooklyn production stage. LL was all energy between takes, whether he was choosing the music to listen to, singing Eminem’s “My Name Is” or discussing the hip-hop group Cypress Hill with Scott Caan, who is playing LL’s partner in the show.
“He hasn’t gotten to where he is and done all the things he’s done by accident,” Caan said. “You don’t get to be relevant for 40 years without having a fantastic combination of talent, hard work and drive and an energy that other creatives want to be around.”
Before acting, Caan was a hip-hop artist who performed under the alias Mad Skillz and worked with Cypress Hill. A day earlier as they walked the Queens streets, Caan recalled, LL pointed out where A Tribe Called Quest shot videos or where Run-DMC got started in nearby Hollis.
“It’s like being a sports fan and having Derek Jeter take you through Yankee Stadium and the Bronx and be like, ‘Oh, this is where I did this, and this is where I did that,’” Caan said. “It was crazy. I’m not too geeked on too many things, but I was pretty geeked about that.”
Returning full-time as Hanna in New York was easy, LL said. He is still having fun, hopeful that the character will allow viewers to momentarily escape with them. And he’s ready to re-embrace the hyper-pragmatic approach to the everyday labor of his craft.
“How do you keep a show on the air?” LL asked. “Scene by scene. How do we win a championship? Play by play. How do you make a platinum album? Line by line, song by song. A lot of people are patient, but they’re patient with no activity. They think patience means not doing anything, but patience can mean doing something. Doing something consistently and slowly but always on it until you get the reward.”
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