Jeremy Tardy on the Importance of ‘Dear White People’ in Black American Culture [Exclusive Interview]

Jeremy Tardy’s acting history goes as far back as far back can go. Having done theatre since childhood, from Oscar Wilde to Shakespeare, he knows the ins and outs of inhabiting a role.

But when he was cast in the Netflix original series Dear White People, playing the Kenyan Rashid Bakr, he found a role he’s never encountered before.

I had the opportunity to chat with Jeremy Tardy about Dear White People, its success, the show’s importance in American media today, and his hopes for both the show’s future and his own career.

I caught up with Tardy on his way to two auditions and a photo shoot. “The hustle is real,” he said. Of course, he’s no stranger to the art of the perpetual grind.

Originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Tardy has been involved in theatre since he was five years old. Working with the First Stage Children’s Theatre Academy, Tardy performed his way up from childhood to high school, eventually getting accepted into Juilliard, a feat which he credits to support from his mother and grandmother.

Tardy had been visiting his old Milwaukee stomping grounds the day before receiving the fateful call to audition for Dear White People, and he said he nearly considered staying home.

“I was doing a teaching engagement [in Milwaukee] for a theatre company that I grew up doing plays with,” he recalled. “I was going to just stay in the city.  I was hanging out with my family, and I hadn’t been there for so long. But something in my spirit said, no, I had to get back to LA.”

For those who’ve only seen the trailer, Dear White People takes place on the fictional Winchester University campus and chronicles the experiences of a group of black students in a sea of white faces.

Tardy said he was attracted to the show from the beginning.

“I remember enjoying the film and thinking that it didn’t really have the time and space to explore those different perspectives and different issues for people of color,” Tardy said. “So where the series is concerned, it definitely has the space to do that, and I was excited to be a part of that.”

Tardy plays Rashid Bakr on the show, a Kenyan native who often finds himself at odds with American cynicism and still struggles to find his place in the core group.

“[Rashid] comes from Kenya, and a lot of people would make the assumption, unfortunately from ignorance, that he must come from some hut in the bush or a little bit of struggle,” he noted.

“That’s not always the case. Specifically in Nairobi. There are some very wealthy people there, and I think he comes from a level of more privilege than even the other characters would expect.”

Among the challenges plaguing Rashid, Tardy said, are the social differences in how he experiences America as an African compared to the experiences of African-Americans and adjusting to those differences.

“In Kenya, you do have the ramifications of racism through colonialism, and that’s definitely affected the whole infrastructure of African nations, but that’s different than racism,” he explained.

“When you have a majority of people who look just like you, where’s the racism where does racism operate? White people would definitely be a minority, and a political minority as well. So Rashid is coming into America not necessarily ignorant to the idea of racism or the ramifications, but I think the experience of it is totally different coming from Kenya to coming to America, having only heard about it versus now starting to experience racism for himself.”

One of the most harrowing of these experiences occurs on Dear White People Season 1 Episode 5, “Chapter Five” where one of the students, Reggie Green, encounters an overzealous campus cop with a gun, a scenario that happens all too often to Black Americans in the United States.

Though the cop was not targeting Rashid directly, Tardy said that his character, as well as many real life black Americans, felt in that moment—and continue to feel—equally as helpless.

“There’s a psychological trauma,” Tardy began. “To not only experience it first-hand, but to see it first-hand or second-hand or however far away from the actual event you may be. To actually to bear witness to it on social media, on the news, it is understated how traumatic that is. That gets into your spine, and you feel that. After shooting that scene, we had a group hug moment. We all had to come together in a way to help us heal from that.”

With the recent acquittal of the police officer who killed Philando Castile (who gets name-dropped in the show) and the recent death of Charleena Lyles at the hands of Seattle police officers, Tardy stressed how important it is that Dear White People featured this story.

“If you’re going to have a conversation about diversity and the systems that create walls for diversity, then it’s important to speak to the people who are trying to be included or marginalized,” he said. “It’s important to get their voices in the conversation.”

Though the show covers some serious territory, most episodes serve to showcase the more comedic side of Black American culture in a university setting, including weekly TV nights in the common area, and the unlikely friendships that can develop from seeing the same person in your classes every day.

Rashid finds himself exactly this type of friendship with Al, played by Jemar Michael, who treats Rashid as his own personal best frenemy.

“I have a very special fondness for [Jemar] because from the jump, he was there during my callback, and we got to riff of each other,” Tardy said. “So Justin [Simien, creator of Dear White People] told me early on that he saw their relationship throughout the series as a Laurel and Hardy situation: two characters who bounce back and forth. The humor comes out when they’re together.”

“You do get a sense of the almost xenophobic teasing that Al does to Rashid,” he added. “He’s kind of the only one that does that, if you notice, so their relationship is going to hopefully have all kinds of twists and turns going into Season 2.”

Though Netflix has yet to announce their plans for Dear White People’s second season, the show’s critical acclaim all but guarantees another semester at Winchester and Tardy says there are threads intentionally left dangling all throughout Season 1.

“Early on, in the first episode even, we set up a lot. We serve these awesome pitches that we have yet to knock out of the park,” Tardy explained. “With Rashid, we set up certain things with him and other characters that are going to have room to get played out. Even as just an audience member, the fact that he speaks five languages is something I want to see, and I want to see him speaking those five languages in the context that he would be speaking those languages.”

“I’d also love to get a sense of how he came to America and his own experiences with the culture shock and the nuances that wouldn’t necessarily be thought about from an American perspective.”

Fresh on the heels of a short film, the aforementioned auditions lined up, and in the post-production stages of creating his own production company, Tardy said Dear White People’s success hasn’t dulled his ambition. “I’m still building,” he said. “Always building.”

You can follow Jeremy Tardy on Twitter @jeremy_tardy and catch him on Dear White People, which is currently available for streaming on Netflix.

*Featured image credit: Curtis Taylor Jr.

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