He's Not a Lawyer, But He Plays One on TV

Consider it a lesson in following your dream. Austin native Mehcad Brooks is clad in an expensive suit, sitting in a swanky, wood-paneled Los Angeles law office as he tells his tale. Strike that. This November day Brooks is in the Studios at Las Colinas in Irving, Texas, on the make-believe set of ABC's television series The Deep End, a lawyer "dramedy" which opens a six-episode run Jan. 21. But his acting dream is 100% real.

The son of former Cincinnati Bengals receiver Billy Brooks and Austin American-Statesman editorial writer Alberta Phillips, Brooks was a star basketball player at Anderson High School in the late Nineties. But it wasn't his dream. He started acting in plays at school and around town at age 15. Then he went to an arts enrichment program at the University of Texas and saw his first opera. "I didn't fall asleep," Brooks says with a grin. "There was a gentleman from Houston who looked like me and grew up in similar circumstances. ... He was traveling the world singing opera – in Italian. I thought that was so cool. I thought, 'Wow, I didn't know that was a career choice.'"

While opera wasn't in Brooks' future, it clued him in to what was. "I realized at 16 or 17 that if I didn't play sports for the rest of my life, I'd be fine with it, but if I didn't act, I wouldn't know what to do," he says. When he tried to quit the basketball team, coaches called his home urging his return to the court, and others told him he was throwing his life away. "I said: 'Really? I got quite a few academic scholarships and a 4.0,'" Brooks remembers. He eventually had to resort to faking seizures while on the court to hammer his point home. "I was doing a stage production of Othello at the time, and he's an epileptic, so it was preparation," Brooks says.

Brooks moved to Los Angeles in 1999 to attend film school. In his junior year he returned to Austin over winter break to work as an extra on the comedy The New Guy. He also heard about Richard Linklater's plans to shoot a high school football film tentatively titled Friday Night Heroes with Terrence Malick producing. Linklater "was in the callback stages, and I snuck in," Brooks says. "I ended up getting a lead." Brooks dropped out of college and moved back to Texas, where Linklater had arranged to film the Bay City High School football team for the film's pseudo documentary focus with Brooks and the other main actors close by. "We had to go into all the games," Brooks says. "He integrated us into the actual team." But the project was never completed, likely because of Peter Berg's rival Friday Night Lights film that was moving forward with Billy Bob Thornton. "He's a great guy," Brooks says of Linklater. "I credit him with kick-starting my career."

Back in Los Angeles, Brooks was hired for four episodes on the television series Boston Public, but spent much of the next two years washing the windows of Beverly Hills storefronts before roles in the basketball film Glory Road and the television series Desperate Housewives set his career into high gear. "I was wearing this uniform, carrying these huge buckets of water and these mops," he remembers. "People would just treat you like crap. It wasn't a year later that I was going into these same stores to be fitted for the SAG awards. These exact same people who were working there didn't recognize me from wearing the uniform. I saw how differently they treated me. I was astounded by how L.A. is."

The Deep End follows Brooks' stint as Eggs in the HBO series True Blood and is set in that very Los Angeles. It follows five recent law school grads recruited for a prestigious law firm. (See this week's "TV Eye" for more on The Deep End.) "I liken him to a young Barack Obama meets Jeremy Piven's Ari from Entourage," Brooks says of his character Malcolm Bennet. "He's a charming, lovable, straightforward douche bag. He doesn't sugarcoat anything. We all have those people who tell us things we don't want to hear, but they're always right. He's not insensitive, but he's been through a lot in his life. He's smarter than me, which is fun to play."

Don't underestimate Brooks in either the areas of smarts or passion. "I have the luxury of doing jobs that challenge me, that I would get a kick out of watching," he says. "I'm very ambitious. My heroes are Clint Eastwood, George Clooney, Will Smith, Denzel Washington – people who are at the top of their game because they've worked that hard to get there. I really want to achieve as much as possible in that realm. And then move on to my next career."

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The Deep End premieres on ABC Thursday, Jan. 21, at 7pm.