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This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross.

It looks like my guest Sterling K Brown is about to be in the cultural zeitgeist again.

He co-stars on the new movie American fiction, which is on many critics tend best lists and

is likely to be nominated for Oscars.

In the popular mini-series, the People versus O.J. Simpson,

about one of the most controversial trials of the 20th century,

Brown played Christopher Darden, one of O.J. Simpson's prosecutors.

Brown won an Emmy for that performance in 2016.

He won another, the following year, for his performance in the popular NBC series This is Us. That series brought many

viewers to tears. While shooting this is us he managed to get away long enough to

play a small but important role in Black Panther.

He was nominated for an Emmy for his guest appearance on an episode of the popular

comedy series Brooklyn 99, which satirized TV series about police detectives.

Let's start with his new film American fiction.

It stars Jeffrey Wright as a college professor and novelist who's black.

He writes fiction that's pretty obscure like a novel based on the Greek tragedy The Persians by

Escales. No one wants to publish his new novel. It appears 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. So under a pen name he writes a book conforming to those

...