This article first appeared in Watch!.
TYPE THE WORDS “Simone Missick” into Google and the first prompt you’ll see is, well, “Simone Missick.” The second result is “Simone Missick, arm.”
Let us explain.
For two seasons on Netflix’s Marvel’s Luke Cage, Missick played Misty Knight, a New York cop whose arm is gorily (and kind of gloriously) amputated in an epic battle; she receives a bionic replacement infused with all sorts of superpowers. But to hear Missick tell it, the two-pound prosthetic didn’t make her feel very forceful.
“It was the most painful process!” she remembers. “They had to remake that arm about 20 times because I was like, ‘Guys, I can’t move my elbow. How am I going to punch people if I can’t reach for my gun?’ So we went through several generations. It’s like the iPhone. They just kept upgrading the arm.”
Now Missick, 37, is doing some upgrading of her own, throwing her weight behind a black robe to star in the poignant, topical, and very funny CBS legal drama All Rise. Missick plays Lola Carmichael, a former district attorney who is elevated to a judgeship at the Los Angeles Superior Court. Dubbed “The Lolacoaster” by judicial assistants, Lola is fast-talking, whip smart, dedicated—and a little uncoordinated: This is a woman who trips over her robe as she’s climbing to the bench for the first time. In fact, she may remind you of another iconic legal heroine, Ally McBeal. “I grew up loving these shows that had fast-paced characters who think fast and speak even faster. This show is that,” says Missick, who, dressed in a light coral dress, gold hoop earrings, and flip-flops, looks impeccable even after a long day of work. “This is a woman who’s strong and capable, yet awed and clumsy,” she continues enthusiastically. “She’s got the heart and passion to make a change in her community.”
All Rise’s tone is as intricate and nuanced as the legal system it explores. The pilot alone featured a courtroom shooting, a thwarted theft, a defendant hell-bent on self representation, some police corruption possibly aided and abetted by Lola’s boss, Lisa (played by CSI vet Marg Helgenberger), and lots and lots of coffee. Aside from the cases of the week, the series, created by actor-turned-producer Greg Spottiswood, explores the foibles and personal lives of the judges and attorneys who inhabit the courthouse each day.
This tonal hybrid means that Missick might be called on to portray, as she says, “seven different types of emotions in one scene. We have comedy and we have drama in the same moment. I think those are the things that make this show stand out. For me it’s like Christmas every day when I come to work,” she continues. “I went to school and studied theater. This is the show that’s the closest that we’re going to get to it in primetime television.”
MISSICK IS BEING INCREDIBLY MODEST. SHE DIDN’T JUST go to any school to study theater; after graduating from Howard University, she attended a British American Drama Academy program in Oxford, England, where she took classes from the likes of Alan Rickman and Ben Kingsley.
She then returned home to Detroit to scrape together enough money to move to L.A. The actress, whose mother is a retired social worker and father is a retired adult education teacher, still has close ties with the city: Her cousin lives in the house Missick grew up in, and her sister resides in a nearby suburb. (She also has a brother and nephew in Burbank, and her parents and aunt relocated to the L.A. area, which means family is nearby.) “Growing up in Detroit, there’s a certain level of strength and confidence that I was given in a community where people embraced me for who I was, and that confidence is something that all the characters I keep coming into contact with have,” she says.
Missick arrived in L.A. in 2005, finding personal fulfillment more quickly than professional success. She and her future husband, actor Dorian Missick, met at an audition in 2009. “He was behind the table. He was helping a friend who was producing a web series in which he was going to direct an episode. I didn’t get the job, but I got the man, so I’m good,” she laughs. The two wed in 2012.
Almost 10 years to the day after she moved to L.A., Missick landed her first major role—that of Luke Cage’s Misty. She moved to New York City for four years to play the part on Cage as well as its sister series, Iron Fist and The Defenders. For those not versed in comic book lore, this casting was a huge deal.
Misty was the first African American female superhero ever created—in 1975 by Tony Isabella and Arvell Jones—and Missick was the first actress to play her on live-action TV. No pressure there, right? “Misty was such a gift,” Missick says. “To be the first person to give her voice and to have this built-in network of fans that have been around for 40-plus years waiting to see her come to life was amazing.”
The character is so beloved that the pesky bionic arm has been put up for auction and is predicted to fetch between $10,000 and $12,000, according to Marvel’s auction site. “If I had known they were going to sell it for 10 grand, I would have taken one and said, ‘You guys have three or four more!’” she jokes.
Cage became a personal show for Missick, as it allowed her to act opposite her husband, who played an ex-felon named Cockroach. But to hear Missick recount the story, that collaboration wasn’t exactly a high point of their marriage. “Dorian and I have extremely different processes. And we were playing different characters. His character is this loud, bombastic gun seller. To get ready, he’s listening to a lot of hip-hop and rap. My character just lost her arm. She’s no longer a cop. She’s grieving. So my husband is like, ‘I want to come hang out in your trailer before we start filming.’ He’s in there playing music, and he’s loud and obnoxious, and I’m just getting angrier and angrier.”
Their first scene together required Missick to slam Dorian against a gate. “I think I tried to break his arm because I was like, ‘You were too loud in my trailer,’” Missick jokes. “Irrespective of him being my husband, I think he’s a wonderful actor, so it was great to play opposite someone I could trust.”
Once Luke Cage wrapped, Missick wasn’t necessarily looking to play another badass, so of course that’s exactly what happened: She landed the role of Trepp, a tough bounty hunter on Netflix’s futuristic sci- series Altered Carbon, after taping an audition from her basement. “This was the first situation where I would get the scripts and I wouldn’t have any thoughts or notes. Partially because it’s set 400 years in the future and you’re like, ‘Well I don’t know if people would actually do that,’” she says. “Then the other part was a testament to the writers. They were always on set if something didn’t make sense. To me that’s the testament to great television. People who want to tell great stories recognize you can’t just tell these stories in a vacuum. You can’t just say, ‘Well, I came up with this episode, and I wrote it seven weeks ago, so you have to just stick to what I said.’”
BACK IN THE PRESENT, Missick realizes that All Rise—or more accurately, her lead role in it—wouldn’t have existed as recently as eight or nine years ago. After all, when Kerry Washington took on the part of Scandal’s Olivia Pope in 2012, she was the first African American woman to lead a primetime network TV drama in almost four decades. “Thank God for [Scandal creator] Shonda Rhimes and Kerry Washington, and [How to Get Away with Murder’s] Viola Davis. Had it not been for Kerry, and Viola with her Oscar showing you what was what, we would not have these opportunities,” says Missick. “But I’m also thankful for CBS and Greg Spottiswood and our producers, who said, ‘You know what? They had something good going on over there. Let’s bring that to our audience.’”
The success of Washington’s and Davis’ shows has not led to a boom of TV programs with African American female leads; even seven years later, Missick is just one of a few who have had the opportunity to helm a series—a responsibility she takes very seriously. Missick says she created a character “bible” for Lola that contained biographical information, a career backstory, and thoughts about her family—although the family parts were quickly thwarted. “In episode 2, our writer had Lola call her mom ‘Mother,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a different type of relationship. That’s not ‘Mom’ or ‘Mamma.’ So I called Greg, our creator, and said, ‘What’s up with this?’ He told me the idea that they had for who my mom is and the kind of woman she is. It’s not at all what I thought.”
She has looked to the real world for inspiration, too, studying up on Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who was name-checked in the pilot, but to our knowledge has never tripped on her way to the bench), as well as Vonda Evans, a recently retired judge on the Wayne County Circuit Court in Missick’s native Michigan, who is known for her fiery opinions. Missick is heartened that All Rise feels incredibly current and rooted in real-life events, thanks to the 2018 midterms, when a group of 19 African American women were elected to judiciary posts in the Houston area. “We have never seen a black woman on TV like this,” Missick says, “and I relish being able to do it.”
