The Sunday Conversation: Hill Harper
The 'CSI: NY' star talks about show business, his new book and playing basketball with the leader of the free world.
By Irene Lacher, Special to the Los Angeles Times
September 4, 2011
Hill Harper, 45, returns for his eighth season on the CBS crime drama "CSI: NY" on Sept. 23. Meanwhile, the Harvard Law School graduate juggles another role — as a bestselling author — with the recent release of his fourth self-help book, "The Wealth Cure: Putting Money In Its Place."
What's coming up this season on "CSI: NY" for your forensic investigator character, Dr. Sheldon Hawkes?
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We ended last season with something I was very excited about, and that's the fact that I finally after seven years had gotten a girlfriend. The hope is she'll come back this year. Now she was getting me into trouble at the end of last season, but it was fun trouble because Dr. Sheldon Hawkes had to loosen up a little bit. All work and no play make any forensic pathologist a dull boy.
Do you have anything in common with Sheldon in that area?
Of course, Dr. Sheldon Hawkes and I share similarities, but he's much smarter than I am, certainly much more scientific. And he's the guy everybody looks to for answers. And that's partly why I love playing the character — it's a stereotype-busting character, where the African American male character on the show is the smartest character. And I would venture to say we don't see representation in media of a number of extremely smart African American scientists who certainly exist, but it's not the predominant image of the African American male.
In your new book, "The Wealth Cure," you say you sometimes felt that your "CSI: NY" gig was like a pair of golden handcuffs. What did you mean?
We all have choices we have to make, and with those choices come certain sacrifices. I would want to do "CSI: NY" as long as the show runs. I love playing my character, and I love the opportunity to play it with these wonderful writers and actors. Still, there have been Broadway shows and feature films that have come down the line, which I would have loved to have done. But here's the interesting paradox: Perhaps but for my being on "CSI: NY," those opportunities would never have presented themselves. That's why you refer to them as golden handcuffs, because they're really wonderful handcuffs to have.
How did you morph from being an actor into a personal finance author?
I am never the expert — I'm an individual like the reader on a journey, trying to figure it out for myself. I have a foundation called the Manifest Destiny Foundation [which works on lowering the school dropout rate], and a lot of people I work with — young and old — talk about their fear and anxiety around money and wealth. You ask people why they're not doing what they truly want to do and they say they can't afford it. So exploring issues around money and finance was something I wanted to do. Then I got diagnosed [with thyroid cancer], while shooting a movie with Tyler Perry in Atlanta, "For Colored Girls," and that made me take an even bigger step back and say, OK, what is true wealth? The key that unlocked the book was the idea that I could use the methodology that a doctor uses to cure a disease and apply that to curing financial ills.
How do you think we got where we are financially?
We got where we are, unfortunately, by being bombarded with messages that somehow money and the things we can acquire with money buy happiness. When I was doing research for my book, one question I would ask people was, "If I could give you as much of anything you wanted in the world right now, what would it be?" And 95% of the people said money. Very few people said happiness or health. I asked myself, what are the things that create wealth for me, and that's how I came up with the formula: money plus wellness equals wealth. I'm not trying to discount money's value. But if we focus on other things — our passion, what stimulates us emotionally, intellectually, creatively — that's when we start finding we have enough of material things and can fill ourselves with things that are true wealth factors.
You wrote that you've watched celebrities spend money like they're printing it. Has Hollywood had a role in feeding this mind set?
Certainly those of us in the entertainment industry, we are part of creating fear in people — fear for me stands for "false evidence appearing real." We create fantasy, and in certain ways that's wonderful because it allows people to escape. But it can suck people into wanting to achieve something that isn't real.
So what is the wealth cure?
The wealth cure is looking at your life step by step — making a diagnosis and saying, am I using money or is money using me? You can't be free if the cost of being you is too high, whether it's credit-card debt or emotional debt, whether we are trying to keep up with the Joneses and have gotten so far off our path of what makes us happy in terms of the work we do or how we act, it levies a real cost on us. We have a personal debt crisis in this country that has exploded. You don't spend what you don't have, and you don't spend to fill a void.
You mentioned that the president was your classmate at Harvard Law School. Did you know him there, and do you have any good Obama stories?
We played basketball a lot there. In fact, we played basketball on Election Day in Chicago. I was part of the National Finance Committee for the Obama campaign, and something that became a good-luck tradition was that on certain primary days he'd play basketball.
Where did you play?
We played at the Harvard Law School gym. One time we went out and played basketball at a maximum security prison in Walpole, Mass. There was a goodwill trip I organized, and I took my friends and good basketball players from the law school, so we drove out and played against the inmates at this prison.
Who won?
The inmates. The entire prison lined the court, and they were betting. I think our future president scored some good baskets and played some good defense.
