Clifford and Joyce Hardwick, he the attorney, she the educator, were more into brand name designers than off-the-rack dashikis, deeper into Black prosperity than the Black Panthers by the time their four children came along into a world that was quickly changaing, and not necessarily for the better.
Dad was Clifford Hardwick IV, rare for a naming lineage to go so deep during that time. So it must have been a difficult choice for Clifford Hardwick to snap the legacy with the naming of Malik, Jamil and Omari. There's also a Shani, the only girl.
Omari remembers how his name was perceived then and particularly how it's received now.
Few things areconsidered to be more personally revealing than a name, except, say, whether a sister's hair is straight or natural, short or long, braided or locked.
So it comes as little surprise the type of reception actor Omari Hardwick, star of the new TNT paramedic series Saved, received when he tried to get a bite from casting directors who didn't quite know what to make of him.
Hollywood is a strange, cautious, insular place where fear is factored into nearly every decision. Money is the root of daily life.
Omari was a star defensive back for the University of Georgia who washed out in the pros due to injury but wasn't limping into the Hollywood pool just to see if the strapping brother easy on the eyes (5-foot-ll, 190, little body fat to speak of) could merely shift into another on-camera career. He was one of those thespians who also played football, or a football player who also acted, depending on the day, as early as high school. He took formal acting training during his junior year at Georgia, nabbing the lead role in August Wilson's acclaimed stage play Fences at the Athens Theater Company. It wasn't the need for strutting in front of a crowd. He loved the taste of going into another character, of living lives other than his own, of saying things he normally wouldn't say.
He landed work on series like LL Cool J's series In The House, starred in several low-budget films like Circles and Within the Wall, stage plays like Michael Heath's All Good Soldiers in the West End and Shelly Garrett's famed Beauty Shop.
His first major role was as Dante in Spike Lee's Sucker Free City. He even turned up in Beauty Shop with Queen Latifah.
In Saved, a well-done drama that wants to make flawed heroes out of paramedics the way ER has done with doctors and Rescue Me with firefighters focuses on the partnership of Oman's Sack and Tom Everett Scott's Wyatt, a pair of Cowboy medics with baggage. (Wyatt is a gambler with daddy issues and Sack is a brother looking at his family from the outside in.)
Saved producers went with a more cool nickname instead of something along the lines of Oman, and that's fine with the star. It's a personal choice.
"My parents weren't hippies, they weren't into the Black Panthers," Oman says, explaining his parent's name choice. "My dad especially just wanted to get back to his ancestral roots."
Clifford Hardwick wasn't thinking that a person's name can have a subtle or not-so-subtle effect on career advance-ment because, let's face it, there are certain connotations with Katie, others with JaQuinisha, a name I heard the other day while waiting in line at the 7-Eleven.
But with Oman, "each time I walked into a casting session you could tell they were wondering about my ethnicity," says the 32year-old actor, who added that his Saved character wasn't written as a black man. "My first name tossed them; the second completely throws them off."
"You can get in the door but it's up to you to nail the audition. They didn't hire me for Saved because they think my name is intriguing."
Saved airs Mondays at 9 on TNT.
[Author Affiliation]
Ken Parish Perkins, one of the nation's top television critics, writes a weekly TV/media column for the Chicago Defender.
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