GAL APPROVED! Edie Falco Finally Connects With People Of Color on Her New CBS Show Tommy! – A DivaGals Exclusive!

By Delaina Dixon | February 7, 2020 | Entertainment, Gal Approved

WATCH. Did you watch the premiere of Tommy on CBS last night? In the new procedural drama, actress Edie Falco plays Abigail “Tommy” Thomas, the first female police chief of Los Angeles. Her life is complex: she’s divorced, she’s gay and she has a daughter who happens to be a woman of color. Of course, that caught the DivaGals eye. After a private screening of her new series, we asked Edie if she’s pleased that the show has such a diverse roster. Her response was honest and enlightening… read below!

“Every time I get a job I try to get everyone I know and love on it so I suggested all my friends for the cast, and [my friends] are all mostly men, some women, white, over 50. And they said, ‘Yeah, no, there’s no room for them on this job.’ I was sort of heartbroken because they are my friends but they said this is a police department in a huge city, there’s got to be diversity.

[The show] started showing me tapes of all these people I didn’t know, people from all sorts of backgrounds. Beautiful actors. They cast them. This may be more than I should say — and I’m admitting something I’m not entirely unembarrassed about — that I have fallen in love with these people, which I tend to do when we’ve been working together for five months, and I am finding that I have not had people of color as friends. And that I do now. And that I’m embarrassed that I haven’t until recently and how sorry I am that I have been bereft of people who’ve grown up differently, thought differently about their day to day life. And I was just traveling with my little white people through my little white world.

It’s a whole faction of the world that I’ve learned to love and I’ve fallen in love with on the show. It’s been a gift to me. And course, a gift to the world because they’re so good, but a gift to me personally.”

Wow! Actors of color on the series include Olivia Lucy Phillip as Tommy’s daughter Kate; Russell G. Jones as Donn Cooper; Tonye Patano as Mrs. Gates and Vladimir “Vlad” Caamaño as Tommy’s security detail Abner Diaz.

Watch Tommy Thursdays at 10 p.m. on CBS. Fun fact, while Tommy is set in Los Angeles, the show is actually shot in New York City.

photo credit: CBS