Medical Dialogue No Problem For Harvard Grad Harper

Actor Hill Harper plays Dr. Sheldon Hawkes on CSI: NY, but his own degree is in law. "I say all of these very large, difficult terms and it's a challenge, like doing Shakespeare," Harper said. "Finally I get to play a character where my educational background has an absolutely positive effect."

Harper told Zap2It that he had not watched the previous CSI shows, but he was delighted to be playing an educated middle-class African American character. "There are plenty of roles that are written a little bit more stereotypically about young black men who never finish high school and have made millions in hip hop or in the drug trade or some other idea of what black men are," he noted. "I know a whole lot more guys like me than I know the guys that are represented by-in-large in film and television."

At 31, Harper, a graduate of Brown University and Harvard Law School, said that he decided to pursue acting while his friends were making money in law firms because "If ever you're making a decision solely based upon money, you're making the wrong decision." He worked as a busboy before getting cast on short-lived series like City of Angels and The Court. He is not worried about screen time among the well-known cast of CSI: NY because "if somebody dies, I'm the only one licensed to look them over. I'm not a morbid person, but I just figure that the more people die the better."

In researching his role, Harper interviewed a medical examiner who worked to identify the 27,000 body parts from Ground Zero. "They identified somewhere around 1,800 people that way and allowed the families to have a proper burial," he told Entertainment Weekly. "This is the office we're going to be showing, and every character is affected by that."

Harper described the look of the show as "Jerry Bruckheimer's version of Gotham", a cold city with a lot of concrete and no sun. "New York simply lends itself to interesting characters," he noted.

To learn more about Harper's background and his Emmy hopes, see Zap2It's interview here and EW's interview here.

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