Sterling K. Brown, known for his Emmy-winning turn on This Is Us, makes a bold return to television with Hulu's Paradise, a gripping sci-fi political thriller that reunites him with creator Dan Fogelman. Playing Xavier Collins, a Secret Service agent framed for the murder of the president, Brown steps to the to of the call sheet and sheds his sensitive-dad persona for a high-stakes, action-packed role.
Sterling K. Brown had been reluctant to return to TV — network TV at least. As he knew from logging 10-plus hours a day for six seasons on NBC's family drama This Is Us, such blessed opportunities do come with costs, like lengthy stretches away from his wife, actress Ryan Michelle Bathe, and his sons, now 9 and 13, whom he calls the center of his world. Considerations about his career arc also factored into his hesitation. It's a stretch to say Brown had been running from Randall Pearson, the sensitive and charismatic father figure known for activating viewers' eye sprinklers nearly every week. But, he tells emmy, he has intentionally distanced himself from Randall, the character that won him an Emmy in 2017 for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series.
"I really do try," he says, at home on a break from shooting the sci-fi action thriller Voltron in Australia. "People come up to me all the time like, 'Oh, man, you made me cry.' So, yes, I actively try to surprise people. It's fun for me — for people to think they have me figured out, and then I show them something different."
Brown has, in the years since that win — the second of his three trophies — proved his range. He was the sinister prince N’Jobu in Black Panther in 2018. Playing no nonsense music manager Reggie in Prime Video’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel earned him an Emmy nom for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. (He has 10 Emmy noms in total.) And then portraying a newly out gay man snorting and sexing his way through a midlife crisis in American Fiction nabbed him his first Oscar nomination in 2024. (Brown’s first Emmy win was for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or a Movie for his role as Christopher Darden in The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story. His third Emmy win was for Outstanding Narrator on CNN’s 2021 six-part series Lincoln: Divided We Stand.)
Only one force was strong enough to lure him back to episodic TV, in the form of Hulu’s Paradise, which has been renewed for a second season. The sci-fi–flavored political thriller stars Brown as Xavier Collins, a Secret Service agent who becomes the prime suspect after President Cal Bradford (James Marsden, Jury Duty) is murdered.
“Dan,” Brown says. “Dan asked me.”
That Dan is of course Dan Fogelman, the This Is Us boss who created Paradise — without consciously picturing Brown as its lead. “Dan was like, ‘I’ve been writing this thing. If you respond to it, let me know.’ I read it,” Brown recalls, “and was like, ‘This is dope! How can I be down?’”
It wouldn’t be the first time while creating Paradise that Fogelman would see glimpses of the future.
“It’s a pretty weird time for the show to be coming out, honestly,” Fogelman says flatly, slightly underselling Paradise’s prescient plotlines. “Our writers have a group text chain, and every time somebody comes across a news article that’s timely, we just go, ‘Holy shit. What is going on right now?’”
Paradise — big spoiler here — takes place in an imagined present day, where a tech billionaire named Samantha Redmond (Julianne Nicholson, Mare of Easttown) has constructed an entire town underground amid a climate catastrophe. Having orchestrated an election to install the immature, unqualified and low-key bigoted Cal in the White House, Redmond spends ungodly sums to engineer an underground idyll that resembles Anytown, USA, with a massive screen simulating blue skies and speakers pumping in the comforting buzz of insects. Its 25,000 residents wear microchip bracelets permanently affixed to their wrists.
It’s in this pseudo-utopia that Cal intends to spend his presidential twilight, with Xavier as head of security. Those plans meet a tiny hiccup when Cal is murdered; likewise, Xavier’s plans for a quiet life with his two kids get derailed after he discovers Cal’s body and is identified as the last person who saw Cal alive. After surviving the cataclysmic event “above ground” that plunged the world into chaos, Xavier fights to clear his name, find Cal’s real killer, keep his family together and, in effect, save their underground paradise.
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This article originally appeared in its entirety in emmy magazine, issue #2, 2025, under the title "Dream State."
