The veteran actor, who just won an Emmy for his portrayal of Rowan Pope, explains how he gets into the mind of the most villainous father on television. Warning: Season 3 spoilers ahead!
Ron Tom / ABC
On Saturday night at the Creative Arts Emmys, Scandal's Joe Morton took home the award for Best Guest Actor in a Drama, and though he thanked his co-stars and the "genius — in capital letters, bold, underlined, with lots of exclamation points — of [creator] Shonda Rhimes" when accepting his gold statuette, anyone who's seen his stellar performance as Rowan Pope (aka Papa Pope) knows his delivery has a lot to do with that win as well.
Still, Morton was just as quick to give credit to those behind the Scandal scripts when he sat down with BuzzFeed in Los Angeles earlier this month. "I don't know of any actor in any television show that I have ever seen who's given monologue after monologue in a television series," he added with gratitude, acknowledging that he feels blessed to be given the honor of delivering the writers' words.
Coming off of Syfy's Eureka, on which he played an upstanding, brilliant scientist from 2006 until 2012, Morton was looking for a change. "I've played good guys for most of my career and was beginning to think it might be great to find some wonderful bad guy to play," he said. Around the same time he began looking for a darker role, Morton heard about a new ABC show that had a black female character as its lead and began watching Season 1 of Scandal on Netflix.
As Morton was eyeing the series, those at Shondaland were also eyeing him. Just a few days after he finished streaming Season 1, Morton received a call from Scandal saying they'd love to speak with him about a role, which turned out to be that of Olivia Pope's (Kerry Washington) father, Rowan Pope. "I had a conversation with one of the producers and all he told me was that, if I decided to take the gig, the only thing that was going to happen that was of any importance was that, at the end of Season 2, the two very last lines of the show would be: 'What are you doing here, dad?'" Morton recalled, noting that, just like his on-screen character, he kept that secret from the entire cast.
Rowan turned out to be exactly the change Morton was looking for and he had plenty of personal experience to draw from for the character's backstory. "Rowan is partially based on my father. My father was a captain in the Army at a time when it was not an easy thing for a black man to be a captain in the Army. His job was to integrate bases. A lot of who Rowan is in that respect, in terms of the person who has to face people who don't like him and has to tell people to do things they don't want to do, that kind of intensity, I think that comes from my father," Morton said. "But it's also just who I am in terms of the materials I've been given and the things I have to say... What this show offered me in the long run was having my cake and eating it too. They understand what I wanted and literally sort of handed it to me."
And Morton has taken that gift and cooked up unforgettable, distinct, and, at times, downright terrifying speeches. Below, the veteran actor walks BuzzFeed through some of Rowan's most memorable Season 3 moments (Spoilers ahead!), including his personal favorites: trying to convince Olivia to get on the plane in the season opener, the "boy" speech to Fitz (Tony Goldwyn) while in chains in an unidentified basement, and the park bench monologue about the 183 lives he's responsible for.
ABC via melliette.tumblr.com
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