Back then, he didn’t know how all who he is—a son, brother, friend, husband and father—would come into play for his biggest role to date. But playing Power’s James “Ghost” St. Patrick, it has taken all of Omari Hardwick to breathe incredible life into the drug kingpin and his hard-knocked climb to legitimacy from the grimy streets of Queens especially as both Tasha (Naturi Naughton), his wife and mother of his children, and best friend Tommy (Joseph Sikora) resisted and blocked him. Add in an ongoing affair with Angela, or Angie as he calls her, his old neighborhood sweetheart recalled a more idealistic Jamie, not sullied by promises of big money from drug dealing and the homicidal tendencies that seemed to accompany it.
“When you think about all those other roles that I played, and all the roles just in life, being this athlete who played four sports, that found theater at 200 pounds as a college football player, a poet who was an actor, you know, all of those different things, it would take all of the years of living in the car and showering in the YMCA and lying to the people at the YMCA—the good people at the Hollywood Y—about staying late when I was really sometimes sleeping in the locker room, true story. Like there was so much shit inside of me that it worked in terms of the timing. It worked because this guy had so much stuff inside of him. This guy, James, Jamie, Ghost St. Patrick, there was so much inside of him.”
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