Skeet Ulrich in PARISH – Season 1 | ©2024 AMC
PARISH, in its first season Sunday nights on AMC and AMC+, stars Giancarlo Esposito (who is also an executive producer on the show) as Gracian “Gray” Parish, a New Orleans upscale car service owner who is trying to stay on the straight and narrow. This becomes more difficult when he is contacted by his old pal Colin, played by Skeet Ulrich.
Colin has just been released after a seventeen-year stretch in the brutal Angola Prison. He could have gotten his sentence reduced if he’d flipped on Gray, but Colin stayed loyal. Now Colin wants Gray to go back to being a getaway driver for just one more job. Gray feels obliged, and soon they’re both stuck in the middle of a mob war.
Ulrich, originally from Lynchburg, Virginia, has had a thriving career in both film and television, with credits that include the SCREAM franchise, AS GOOD AS IT GETS, RIDE WITH THE DEVIL, and series lead roles on MIRACLES, JERICHO, LAW & ORDER: LA, and RIVERDALE.
During AMC’s portion of the Winter 2024 Television Critics Association (TCA) press tour at Pasadena’s Langham Hotel, Ulrich sits down for a one-on-one discussion of PARISH.
Ulrich explains that his involvement with the series began when “the script came to me and I had to audition for it. Obviously, I fell in love with it. It’s so brilliantly written, and so complex, and I love the Cajun accent. It’s written as, he’s Cajun, and so, there were just all of these elements that just felt so right, so my daughter did a couple scenes [on video] in the kitchen, and by the grace of God, I sit here now.”
The Cajun accent is something Ulrich has employed before in 2020, when he did a Quibi series called #FREERAYSHAWN, starring Laurence Fishburne. “Seith Mann directed – he took over for [that series’ executive producer] Antoine Fuqua at the last moment. [The accent] was something that Antoine and I had talked about in that one, and I had come to him with the idea, because we shot in New Orleans, and I played a sheriff. I wanted it to feel like a local street war between Stephan James’s character and I.
“I proposed to [Fuqua] that I do the accent then, and he was into it, and they fortunately put me with a driver who had that accent, and so I got to run stuff by him every day. And so, I had it in my knowledge base, but I wanted to really nail it down. It wasn’t that I felt any indebtedness to the accent, but because of the seventeen years in Angola and a ninety percent Black population in the prison, I was able to sort of mangle it into this other thing, and not necessarily worry about specificity so much as tone and musicality.”
Colin seems confident that, when he enlists Gray, the job will go well, despite evidence to the contrary even before they start. Is he aware of the possible downsides?
“If you’re talking about the initial bringing of Gray into it,” Ulrich says, “I don’t think it really crosses Colin’s mind so much that there are deeper ramifications if things go wrong. I think it’s an opportunity for him to reacquaint himself with the only family he has, given the way his brother and his ex-girlfriend treated him. Gray is really the only family he has known, and the history with him allows a reconnection, and a reason to go to Gray. But I don’t think he thinks much past, ‘It’s a simple lift, we’ll get whatever [Zimbabwean gangster] Horse [played by Zackary Momoh] wanted me to get that I failed at, you can help me, we’ll reconnect, and we’ll see what happens after that.’ I don’t think in any world did he imagine what ensues.”
So, Colin is generally optimistic about illegal business opportunities?
PARISH – Season 1 key art | ©2024 AMC
Ulrich laughs. “Yeah. He’s certainly not a businessman, for obvious reasons, but yes, he’s optimistic. I think that’s the one interesting thing about him is, he does carry a lightness, and yet, it’s a foreboding lightness, if you will. So, I think there’s a certain optimism throughout for him, which is bizarre.”
Beyond what’s in the script, Ulrich relates that he gave Colin a back story, both for what happened to him in Angola and what had occurred earlier.
“It was easy to surmise some things and what he did to maintain, keeping Gray safe through those seventeen years, never ratting him out, never saying a word about his involvement in what we were up to that led to Colin even being in jail in the first place. There was a lot of imagining, for sure, a lot to build that. A lot of it really went into prior to that – what were they up to, what was their relationship, and why would they still go to bat for each other for so long? So, yeah, there’s a lot of back story.”
Did Ulrich have to learn anything in order to play Colin? “I had to learn how to pour a beer in my mouth at fifty miles an hour. I learned a lot about Angola and the prison system in Louisiana, I learned a lot about that accent, which is pretty unique. That was pretty much my focus. There weren’t any really specific things that weren’t outside of my wheelhouse to pick up. Even hanging out of a window wasn’t so hard.”
Colin spends much of PARISH with bloodshot eyes. Ulrich has had experience with sclera contact lenses before, although “I never played a vampire. I did a movie called BLOOD, though, with Michelle Monaghan recently, for [director] Brad Anderson that is a vampire-esque story. I played a zombie for an NBC pilot once [2014’s BABYLON FIELDS]. I played twins in that, actually.
Sclera lenses are incredibly uncomfortable. Oddly, while we were filming [PARISH], I developed cataracts, to the point where, near the end of filming, I could barely see when we were on the water, because of the light bounce. I had surgery like the week after we finished filming. So, yeah, I’m familiar with all things eye-irritant,” he laughs.
What would Ulrich most like people to know about PARISH? “It is an incredible story, full of so much life and desperation, and I think it really speaks to our times in such a unique way.”
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Article: Exclusive Interview: Skeet Ulrich on the new AMC action series PARISH
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