When he was a teenager, actor Dule Hill’s plan was to be a corporate lawyer. By a fortuitous turn of events, he got his wish — sort of. Hill plays attorney Alex Williams, an ambitious senior partner at the law firm Pearson Specter Litt in USA’s “Suits,” which is back for its eighth season.
Hill’s teenage whim soon passed. After all, he had attended dance school at 3. By the time he was 10, he was performing in “The Tap Dance Kid.” “Growing up I’ve done a lot of shows, dancing in theater and on Broadway a couple times,” he says.
“And I had a desire to expand out and to continue a career. In this day and age it’s hard to have a career as a tap dancer. I really love the art form, but at the age of 15 I made the choice: I wanted to pursue acting. It wasn’t necessarily one over the other, I just wanted to become an actor.”
He landed his first acting role when he was 13. “I played a basketball boy on the show ‘Ghostwriter.’ I had about two lines. That’s how I got my SAG card and did commercials too.”
When an agent offered to represent him, his parents — Jamaican immigrants — were cool with the idea. “They said as long as I wanted to, I could do it. And whenever I didn’t, I didn’t have to. When I wanted to stay home and play with my friends, I stayed home.”
By the time he was 17 he’d snagged his first feature film, “Sugar Hill,” and began to take his career seriously. By then all thoughts of jurisprudence were gone.
He worked in New York not far from his home in New Jersey, but occasionally he’d trek to Los Angeles for auditions. “If I had to come out and test, my mom would fly out with me … We’d come out all excited, and I’d go back all disappointed. It was just part of the journey. You pick yourself up and keep going toward it,” he shrugs.
“The only time I thought about possibly quitting acting was when I moved to L.A. and I went for about a year without booking a job. It’s not a long time, but when you’re on your own, it is a long time. At that point I made up my mind. I was going to be an actor or spend the rest of my life trying. From there things began to improve,” he says.
Unlike many actors, Hill is savvy to the business end of show biz. “I’ve always liked business,” he says. “It’s always a chess match. As long as you know what’s going on, you have to navigate yourself through it. I don’t take it personally. I understand it was business. It is what it is.”
What it is sometimes is waiting for the chance. And Hill’s big chance came in 1999 when he auditioned for the part of the president’s personal aide in “The West Wing.”
“I read twice for that role, but had gone a year without working just about,” he recalls. “Then I read for (executive producers) Aaron Sorkin and Tommy Schlamme once, and came back and read again. I was guaranteed four episodes, so my screen test was my first four episodes.”
By the time the show premiered, the producers had made Hill a regular. “I did seven seasons of the show. It changed the direction of my career,” he says.
While he was memorable in “The West Wing,” it was USA’s comedy caper series, “Psych,” that ignited the autograph fans.
“When I first read the script, I didn’t want to do it,” he says. “I thought it was a great script. I thought it was funny. But I thought my character was too much of a nerd. I told my agent I didn’t want to play a character like that for five years because people would see me as that. If that were me, it would be fine. But it’s not me.”
His agent suggested he try again with the thought that the network was open to changes. “I thought it would be kind of funny if HE thought he was kind of cool. It all worked out.”
Among the accolades that followed, the one he remembers best came from his grandmother. “When I did the third year of ‘West Wing’ they had this ‘West Wing’ book come out. And there was a full page picture of me. I gave that as a gift to my grandmother. She opened the book and just broke down and kept saying, ‘Look what I lived to see!’ I remember that moment — knowing her journey. She’d worked as a seamstress, walked to the bus in the middle of winter … I thought, ‘All that stuff you’ve gone through.’ But she said, ‘Wow, all I went through, it’s been worth it.’
“It taught me that when you pursue your dreams and sometimes you keep working hard and working hard and you may not get the reward yourself, but for the grace of God, it all works out in the long run.”
