Playing Big Mike is Mark Christopher Lawrence, an easily recognizable character actor who has appeared in a variety of television shows, as well as the cult classic mockumentary Fear of a Black Hat. We recently talked with Lawrence about Chuck¸ the Tijuana Boys Club and the possibility of a NWH reunion.

Where are you originally from and where do you call home now?
I'm originally from Compton, California and I call San Diego home now.

How exactly did you get into acting, and when did you decide this is what you wanted to do for a living?
Wow, it's a long story. I grew up in Compton, as I said. My English teacher in the 10th grade and she actually ended up being my English teacher for all three years of high school taught speech and debate and she ran a speech team for my high school.

I was playing football and in my fifth period class I had a teacher who was the football equipment manager and he was the drafting teacher. And I wanted to really be an architect and so me and two other friends would get there early and we were way ahead of pretty much all of his classes in drawings and all of my work was A/B work. When grades came out, I had a D and I was shocked.

I went and told my mother, so we went to the principal to have a conference with this teacher, brought my work in and basically, his thing was he thought that I talked a lot in class. And, what it boiled down to was that he didn't like football players in his class because he sees them after school and that was the thing. And so I got out of his class, I was totally disillusioned from wanting to be a draftsman, architect and all that and I didn't have a fifth period class. My English teacher said to me, "You can take my fifth period class," which was the speech and debate class.

Once I was in there, she said to me, "You can't pass this class without going to tournaments." And I did that and loved it. From there, she talked me into doing a play - she was also the drama teacher. And our school was a small school in comparison to other schools, so we didn't have a theater. Plays were produced in a double room sort of configuration - two rooms that didn't have a wall between them. So in the three years in high school, I did two plays. One of the plays we took to the literary Olympiad and I won best actor in the Compton Unified School District.

And then, I went to college at USC on a debate scholarship and at that point I decided I was going to be a lawyer. Clearly, debate was the tool that was going to teach me to do well in court and I took a voice class for speaking and centering and the professor talked me into the acting program at USC and at that point I was already a junior. So I auditioned probably thinking that I wasn't going to get in because it was one of the harder programs to get into in the country at the time and I got in. And they put me in as a sophomore, so it added two years to my graduation.

That same year, I started working professionally. Clearly, the bug had bit me at that point and there was no looking back.

Once you made the decision to go for it, how tough is it to break into the business?
I was in the program - that same year, I started doing an underground play called Tracers, I say underground in that it wasn't part of the school curriculum, so we would put it up in a different building every night and it got to be so huge that the security guards would tell us what buildings we could use - you know, "If you got to this building at such and such a time, you can set up your lights and all that stuff and do your play here." And so, it became a huge thing that lasted all semester. There were several letters that we sent out just trying to get a little funding to help this thing along to draw some attention to the play itself.

And, in the process, what we did was send a letter to John DiFusco who originally wrote the play and was in it off-Broadway. He and Merlin Marston came to see our first preview of the play and Merlin asked me if I did Shakespeare. I said, "Yeah." So he gave me an address, which was the address to the Los Angeles Theater Center, which at the time was being run as a theater company. So I go over, do the audition and get a job and proceeded to do probably 10 plays at the Los Angeles Theater Center between that audition and the year after I got out of college. So theatrically, I worked right away. And then the next year, one of my debate coaches was friends with an agent and he brought her to see me in a play at USC and she said to me, "Come and meet me at my office tomorrow, we should have a conversation." We talked and she became my first agent, sent me out the very next day for a part on Hill Street Blues and I was hired. So I started working immediately.

Here's the thing that I always tell kids - if you're going to be an actor, know that there are going to be good times and bad times. Before I got home from the audition, the message was already on my machine that I had gotten this job.

So then, after every audition for the next year, I rushed home to check my machine - and I didn't work again for a year. And then it hit me, which was great.

It was the best thing that could happen to me because now when I go to auditions, I let it go. It's like I do it, if I get it, I get it. If I don't, I won't.

So now I go to an audition and I'm very comfortable with the fact that I may or may not get this job. No matter how well I do, sometimes it has nothing to do with me.

You have been a bit of a journeyman actor, appearing in small roles in a variety of popular television shows, including Seinfeld, Murphy Brown, Martin, Malcolm in the Middle and 3rd Rock from the Sun. What was it like appearing on so many different popular shows and what stands out to you from those experiences?
I think the thing that strikes me about my career is that I haven't been sort of pigeon-holed as a certain type. I'm truly a character actor in that I'm not just the guy who plays the drug dealer or the pimp. Early in my career, I think part of it was that at the time that's the sort of thing that was available to black actors, but at the time, I had such a sort of baby face and such a likeable demeanor that even if I go in and knock that audition out of the park, they look at my face - in fact, Gail Levin said to me one time, it was a part for a drug dealer in some gang movie, she said, "Clearly, you were the best actor in the room, but I just want to hug you. So they're going to go another way, but we wanted to tell you that, wanted to let you know that it has nothing to do with your acting." I was like, "Okay."

So, I think it's been great that I haven't had to play the drug dealer or the pimp again and again and again and again and it opened up doors to me to play things that are real life characters that you would see every day because not every black person is a drug dealer, not every black person is a pimp. So the experience has been wonderful in that it allows me to really stretch and grow because every time you do the homework to learn about what this character does or who this character is, you'll learn something that you didn't know. And so, it's been fabulous.

You played Tone Def in the underrated film Fear of a Black Hat. How much fun was it working on that film?
Fear of a Black Hat is probably the only thing I've ever done that I watch and I have no regrets. Sometimes you watch something and you go, "Ah, I should have done this, I should have done that, I should have said this line like that," and I watch that and just laugh every time.

It's funny, Rusty Cundieff and I are still good friends. We've been friends since the 11th grade. He was a frat brother of one of my mentors. In fact, he and I just got back from D.C. doing one performance of his play Black Horror Show and he and I were actually talking about possibly touring during the strike as NWH. Right now, we are kind of looking at colleges and seeing where to go. We screened Fear of a Black Hat here in San Diego at UCSD last semester and the response was so huge that we thought, "Wow, there's a whole other generation of people that are starting to see this movie," so we thought while the writers' strike is going on, it could give us something to do.

We're seriously rolling it around - trying to figure out how to do it. My original idea was, "We should do Fear of a Black Hat the musical and put it up like a play." Then that morphed into, "Let's just tour," which morphed into, "Well, we could tour and kind of have some theatricality by adding in some sketches that sort of resemble what these guys are like in the movie." And then we decided we'd have to travel all these people, so what we'll do is maybe shoot some sketches and then as we do numbers in the show, we'll show a sketch, then do another number. We're still working out the details, but I think it's going to happen. We'll probably call ourselves FNWH - formerly NWH - because we don't own those characters.

How did you land the role of Big Mike on Chuck, and how was the character explained to you initially?
Well, it's interesting - Chuck came along right at the end of this past pilot season and I was up for a series regular on about five other shows and Chuck wasn't my highest priority in studying for because it was just a guest spot with possibly reoccurring.

It was literally within the last week and a half of pilot season, all of the sudden I was out every day going to producer, the next day going to studio, next day go to network and it was five pilots and right away two of them got weeded out. Then I was down to three and then Chuck came along and my agent said, "Well, it's just reoccurring, but you should just go in there anyway."

So I go in, do the thing - I didn't even read the script. I just read the sides and just from what was given in the sides decided that I knew who this guy was and went in, auditioned and actually, when I went in to read, I read for the role of Harry Tang.

So, I finished up these other auditions over the next week and a half and then I was sort of in vacation mode. I was like, "Okay, I'm going on vacation - get out of here and I'm going to let this crazy sort of half-baked pilot season go," because I had all of these pilots rolling around and dropped them all.

So then, I get a call, "Hey, they gave you a job on this thing Chuck. It's not the role that you originally read for; it's the role of Big Mike."

I was like, "Oh, okay." So I literally came in, worked one day on the pilot, drove to San Diego that night at like three in the morning and was on a plane to Maui at 6 a.m. out of San Diego, so I had to drive home and fly. I really just let it go, I didn't even think about it.