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You are here: Home > Interviews & Print Media > Carl Weathers Slows Down in the 'Heat'
Dallas Morning News | Sept. 23, 1993
In the 1987 movie "Action Jackson," a young woman is asking Carl Weathers what he has done to deserve the name "Action" when a cab comes bolting out of nowhere, heading their way. Weathers scoops up the woman and dives over a parked car, barely missing a startled elderly woman and an amazed little boy in a baseball cap.
Weathers leaps up, dusts himself off and politely excuses himself to "catch a cab" before dashing off. He not only runs the cab down but also leaps on the moving vehicle, riding it like a steer.
Now languishing on the twilight side of 40, Weathers, who always had this thing about doing his own stunts, aches at the thought of such a scene.
Movement these days is deliberately slow, even though under a tight-fitting cream-colored suit he looks fit enough to wrestle alligators in a Louisiana bayou.
True to form, Weathers, whose acting career was once bolting like a runaway cab into the action genre, still pumps iron five days a week and considers himself in better shape than the average Joe.
But for Weathers, who spent two seasons as a hard-nosed detective in "Street Justice" but will forever be recognized as the "Rocky" films' so-bad-he's-good Apollo Creed, the action stuff is, for the time being anyway, shelved.
On his new television series, "In the Heat of the Night" (7 p.m. Thursdays, CBS-Ch. 2), the Carroll O'Connor drama about a police department in rural Georgia, Weathers moves about as fast as grass.
"We had a scene the other day where someone shot someone, and I guess you could say I did a fast walk," says Weathers, who plays a former Memphis lawman who takes over as police chief of the fictional Sparta. "This show is not about running and jumping over cars."
In "Heat," which started its sixth season last week, its second on CBS, Weathers plays Hampton Forbes, the new replacement for Bill Gillespie (Carroll O'Connor), now county sheriff. Townsfolk don't like him much, and the cops are just as suspicious, thinking he has arrived for all the wrong reasons.
The show is filmed in the tiny town of Covington, Ga., about a 45-minute drive from Atlanta, and the parallels of its on-the-set fiction and off-the-set facts are all too obvious.
Word trickled out earlier this year that O'Connor, executive producer of the series, had hired Weathers to replace Howard Rollins (chief of detectives Virgil Tibbs), whose career has been hanging by a thread because of cocaine addiction and run-ins with the law.
As soon as Weathers stepped on the set, inquiring minds wanted to know: Was he just a safety valve with a one-year contract?
"Everything was totally aboveboard because Carroll was 100 percent forthright with me," Weathers says. "I told him what I didn't want. He told me what he was giving. I told him I did not want to come in and feel like I was replacing someone. And he assured me that was the way it was. So I trusted the guy. Everything he said he would deliver, he has delivered."
Weathers says he wasn't aware of the specifics of Rollins' well-publicized troubles ("I've been living in Vancouver the past seven years"), but his new employer "gave me the scoop" before he signed on.
"They told me what the situation was," Weathers says. "And Carroll also told me, to his credit, he didn't want Howard to feel that he's being abandoned and that I'm coming in to replace him. Howard will come back and do the show. Howard has come back and done the show. Probably after the break, he'll come back and do more shows.
"But candidly and frankly, Howard had to take care of the responsibility he had with the judicial system. He's done that. As far as I know, the slate's clean and everybody's back ready to go."
As far as Weathers is concerned, Sparta is big enough for both of them. He says Hampton Forbes is the kind of role that could reignite a career, especially his, which has been "kind of running in place lately."
Although many black actors cringe at being offered too many comedic roles, Weathers hasn't been able to shake the other extreme: the he-man image. A guy with a big gun, a swift kick, an incredible left hook.
For a long time he attributed his one-dimensional roles to being a former football player (Oakland Raiders, British Columbia Lions of the Canadian Football League) who couldn't get respect from Hollywood.
Apollo Creed, his shining moment, only gave Weathers scripts of the same stripe. He followed the "Rocky" movies with "Force 10 From Navarone," "Semi-Tough," "Predator," "Action Jackson." Fed up, he left "Street Justice" after its second season.
"The disappointment was that the show never lived up to what it could be," says Weathers, who grew up in New Orleans and started acting in grade-school plays. "It could have been a lot more meaningful, if you will. The hard thing to do is to get something that is story-driven rather than stunt-driven. The `Rocky' series had a lot of action, but it wasn't driven by action."
It's not "I'll Fly Away," but "Heat," based on the 1967 social thriller about a black detective (Sidney Poitier) and a white sheriff (Rod Steiger) in a small Southern town, has been successful by keeping the undercurrents of class, race and community at its core.
"I think it's a very positive show; it says something about people working and living together and getting beyond some of the madness we've held on to for so long," Weathers says.
"It's rewarding for me. There's a scene that Carroll wrote where they are showing me around Sparta, and we come to the Bottoms, where poor people live. It's predominantly black. And I get out of the car and walk into this church where this woman is rehearsing a song.
"Someone has put up a photograph on the wall. I won't tell you what's in the picture, but they see what I've just seen. It's a chilling photograph. I say nothing. I don't move."
Sounds like the kind of cinematic moment you rarely get on network television. Especially for a guy nicknamed "Action."
"For me to play it," Weathers says, "it's just touching stuff."