What's in store for the music, TV, and film industries for 2025? We don't know, but we're making

some fun, bold predictions for the new year. Listen now to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR.

This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. Happy New Year. We're continuing our holiday week series,

featuring a few of the 2024 interviews

we particularly enjoyed. Today, it's an interview with actor Sterling K. Brown. I've admired his

work since I first saw him in the miniseries, The People v. O.J. Simpson. He played Christopher

Darden, one of O.J. Simpson's prosecutors in one of the most controversial trials of

the 20th century. Brown won an Emmy for that performance. Since then, he became well known in the popular

NBC series This Is Us, a show that brought many viewers to tears, and won him another Emmy. He took off

long enough from that job to play a prince in Black Panther.

He's also appeared in comedy, including a memorable Emmy-nominated performance in Brooklyn Nine-N-Nine.

He was nominated for an Oscar last year for his role in the Oscar-winning film, American Fiction.

We started our interview talking about American fiction. It stars Jeffrey Wright,

as a novelist who is black. He writes about fiction that's pretty obscure, like a novel based

on the Greek tragedy, The Persians, by Escalis. No one wants to publish his new novel. It seems to him

that the only books white publishers want by black authors are books about being poor or in gangs or addicted to drugs or being a pregnant teenager.

To prove his point, he writes a book conforming to those expectations, using a pen name to disguise his identity.

He's offered a huge advance, the book becomes a bestseller, and he gets even

more money when the film rights are sold. But the pseudonym leads to unexpected trouble.

Sterling K. Brown plays the writer's brother. He's a plastic surgeon who's currently having

money problems because his wife has left him and has taken half his practice after discovering he's having a gay relationship.

He's just come out as gay and is going a little overboard in reconstructing his identity.

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