Essandoh started acting on a dare while he was getting his BS in chemical engineering at Cornell University.
He studied acting at New York Citys famous Acting Studio.
On TV, Essandoh did turns onLaw and Order,Third Watch,Royal Pains, andChappelles Show.
He played the series regular Reverend Darnell Potter onBlue Bloods.
His breakout role was as 19th Century doctor, Matthew Freeman on the BBC America TV seriesCopper.
He also played Alfredo Llamosa on the Sherlock Holmes seriesElementary.
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But Essandoh may be best known for his turn as DArtagnan in Quentin TarantinosDjango Unchained.
It is still good for laughs and Essandoh laughs easily.
He plays a guitarist, but is also an enthusiastic music fan who knows his way around the frets.
Hi, Im so glad to be talking to you.
Ive been enjoyingVinyla lot.
Ive been watching your fingers and realize you must be a guitarist.
Yes, I am.
I am an amateur guitarist.
Ive been playing guitar for about almost ten years.
So Im a little excited and a little scared and its like So what the fuck am I doing?
[Laughs]
How do you get around the fingerings on the show?
Do you have a coach or do they give you charts or you figure the songs out yourself?
I figured it out on my own.
They didnt know that I could play the guitar when they cast me.
So going through it they figured out I could play.
It was great to do that in front of Martin Scorsese.
It was actually one of the greatest times of my life to be able to pull that off.
Have you been steeping yourself into the music of the period?
Yeah, I grew up listening to that stuff.
Im more of a Hendrix fan and more of an old blues fan and also the Stones.
I dont have to study anything, I already know a lot of it.
Except for the punk.
Where did you see the Stones?
I want to say Shea Stadium.
With Living Colour opening?
I will never forget that concert.
Living Colour was opening for everybody that year.
I saw them open for Eurythmics and maybe four more times.
I was steeped in Living Colour.
I loved you guys, you were incredible.
I met him and talked with him and it was really cool.
Its more the early blues.
Everything musically for me, theres two kinds of music.
Theres Prince and Jimi Hendrix and then Miles Davis and everything filters through that.
So the early blues stuff, like John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters, all those guys.
I love all that stuff.
I found them when I was ten, I didnt know what it was.
But I found Lightnin Hopkins.
Theres no way that what Im about to listen to is gonna be awful.
It changed my life.
I discovered the blues and shortly after that Jimi Hendrix started to come into my life.
That was how I went down the classic rock track.
I know Ty Taylor from the band Vintage Trouble does the singing for your character.
How do you work together?
He is one of the most giving people I ever met.
On the pilot, theyd worked everything out already.
When they hired me they told me they already got somebody recording the music.
He was giving me his trade secrets on how he approaches stuff.
Youve heard the voice, its really incredible.
That band is incredible.
He is what I would want to be if I was an actual musician onstage.
Ive always loved a great band leader and he is one of those people thats just electric.
Not just his singing voice.
Hes got all these acrobatic jumping moves and hes singing.
I felt like I was getting away with murder, getting the real jewel of talent from Ty Taylor.
I thought the scene where you burned those reels was heartbreaking.
Do you have any lost performances?
Especially as you do a lot of live theater.
I remember a show I did on stage calledStreamers.
It wasFive days of Rabeat the Roundabout Theater.
I played this crazy, absolutely out of his mind, soldier about to go into Vietnam.
It was a performance I would love to see again.
It was one of my favorite-ever performances.
Maybe its in some kind of archive, but Ive never seen it.
Id just love to see what I did with it.
Do you think you would have enjoyed personally enjoyed the party atmosphere of the seventies music industry?
Yeah, well I would have if I didnt have the knowledge that I have now.
I dont think they knew much about sexually transmitted diseases back then.
They were kind of cool with the drugs, you know what I mean?
I think now that weve seen the effects of all that stuff, no way.
Is Lester a sellout for doing the Cha Cha Twist song?
I was just having a discussion with one of the writers about this yesterday.
What Lester is is a pure musician.
Hes a pure blues man and thats all he cares about.
What hes not is a business person.
Theres some dues that you just have to pay in life.
He looks at himself as a sellout but its actually a good business move to do something like that.
Thats just what it is.
If you dont, then you walk away.
So when Lester tells Kip to fire the guitarist, what is Lester thinking?
So yes, hes got to be looking at himself saying Im becoming what I hated Richie for.
At the end of the day, its not Richie who broke Lesters voice.
It was Richie who made a business decision that would enhance himself.
Thats not right and thats not wrong.
Who do you see Lester being based on historically?
They took the music and those guys never got compensated.
I think that Lester represents a lot of those musicians who have gone through that.
And now he, unlike they, have a chance for redemption in a way that they wouldnt have.
Mick Jagger is a blues purist historian.
Did you get to sit and rap with him about the history of the blue or anything?
They bought all those records and would do what I do.
Right now I have Clarence Gatemouth Brown on my record player and I play along with it.
How do you feel about how Vinyl is treating early rock and roll and exploitation?
I think its pretty accurate.
Again, its a business and these people are trying to make money.
Theyre taking advantage of people who are just expressing themselves through this new music.
They see themselves as visionaries but they also see the paycheck thats involved.
I think thats a pretty accurate for what I know of how people behaved back then.
It still happens today.
The music industry, like every industry, has a problem with exploiting artists.
Of course the corporations are making shit tons of money but the artists are being shafted.
Thats always going to happen, unfortunately, until the artists are able to take more control.
So you have somebody like Jay Z building titles.
He went from a scrappy musician and suddenly hes in the business.
I heard you do impressions.
Did that play into how you created Lesters broken voice?
But I knew that dramatically, obviously, you need something that symbolizes what happened.
His life, his voice was literally crushed.
I was thinking about, one of my favorite musicians, Miles Davis.
He had a degenerative vocal cord disease.
Its kind of easy to manipulate my vocal cords to do that without actually injuring myself in real life.
I feel it was really effective.
Its kind of an ugly voice.
Interestingly enough, its a blues voice as well.
Howling Wolf certainly had a very raspy voice, but I think it symbolizes where Lester is.
Because perhaps when Lester could sing, his voice would be completely different.
It would have a different tone.
He is a purist.
He looks at himself as, he could have been Sam Cooke.
Why would he go to any other voice besides the one he had?
That is just a human foible, a human tragedy and thats why Lester is such a great character.
Well, not really.
Its not just the voice, its a full-body expression.
Theres no way, for example, that you could do Satchmo without smiling and doing his facial expressions.
You have to do it, and thats the magic of it.
Its kind of odd.
I just watched Jay Pharoah fromSaturday Night Live.
He does unbelievable impersonations.
I have the utmost respect and jealousy for people who do impersonations.
Thats how I got into acting.
I used to impersonate people and it was just a goof.
Ive always tried to work on President Obama, and theres a thing that I cant get.
[Laughs] Well the best thing was I got to get a hit.
InVinylI got to get up and got to get a real crack before they took me out.
I had some power there, whereas inDjangoI was helpless.
Are you sick of being asked about dying onDjangoor is it still good for laughs?
Its good for laughs, but now the laughs are like, come on this is four years old.
There are people still tweeting me asking do you know that somebody thought that you died on Django?
Lets get with the program.
You worked with both Scorsese and Tarantino.
Theyre known for their encyclopedic knowledge of arts.
How are they similar as directors?
To me, theyre similar because they both seem to genuinely love working with actors and love actors.
Quentin, more than Marty, is hysterically funny.
Hes more like a comedian on set.
And its like Im just here, man, Ill do whatever you say.
Because hes in my top, at least five directors, if not number one or number two.
No, hes number one.
Im trying to get rid of my CDs.
Im trying to copy them all onto my iTunes and theres something wrong.
But Im trying to get rid of them and make room for my vinyl.
I have about 400 records at this point.
