Victor Williams has played the role of Deacon Palmer on the CBS sitcom The King of Queens for seven seasons. His many television appearances span such hit series as The Practice, Homicide: Life on the Street, Law & Order, The Jamie Foxx Show, as well as a recurring role on the NBC drama ER.
Victor has also been seen in such feature films as Cop Land, Penny Marshall’s The Preacher’s Wife, and A Brooklyn State of Mind. His stage credits include Troilus and Cressida at the New York Shakespeare Festival, Ohio Tip-Off at the Dallas Theatre Center, and numerous productions in New York University’s graduate acting program, including Summer and Smoke, Dancing at Lughnasa, King Lear, and Othello.
Victor graduated with a Master’s of Fine Arts in Acting from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and with a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre from Binghamton University. He is the founder and artistic director of the New American Theatre Company in LA. More information is at https://imdb.com/name/nm0931879.
Probably my junior year in college. I went to Binghamton University in upstate New York. I was supposed to do the whole Political Science into Law School thing. The seed was planted my senior year in high school. I’d pretty much taken all of the required classes and there was this woman I knew who was the high school actress queen. She was really cool. She said, “Hey, there is this English class you should take. It’s like you read plays and at the end of the semester you do scenes from plays.” I didn’t have a crush on her or anything, but she had something. I thought, “Yeah. I’ll take this class.” It was fun. It was a great English class. At the end of the year, we did this scene. I didn’t think anything of it but the response in class was amazing. She was a great actress, and I guess I hung in there well enough with her. The reaction was so great. It was such a great feeling that when I started college, as I was rounding out my schedule, I started taking acting classes. By my junior year, I realized I was taking just as many Political Science classes as I was Theatre classes. But more importantly, I was like a 2.3 in my major. I said, “There’s something wrong here.” I was like a 3.7 or 4.0 in Theatre classes. I knew there was something wrong. More importantly, I dreaded looking for the classes in Political Science. I was having a hard time finding a class that I liked. I was taking a lot of classes I didn’t like. It was always easy to find a Theatre class I wanted to take. It was in my junior year I realized that clearly this is something I enjoy doing much more. I wound up getting my degree in Theatre.
Was your family supportive?
It’s great now because my father is my number one fan. But it was tough. He was a History professor and he had his eyes on my going to Law School. He had this standard of education that he wanted both me and my brother to maintain. We stopped talking for a couple of years. He picked me up from school and Binghamton is a three-hour drive from New York and my parents had just moved out to Long Island so it was now like a four-and-a-half-hour drive. I decided that was when I was going to tell him. That was the longest ride of my life. After that, I went into my senior year.
I knew I wasn’t ready to go out into the acting world with just the undergrad, so I applied to a bunch of graduate acting programs. My father was making it clear that he wouldn’t provide me any financial support. “If you go to Law School, wherever you get in, I’ll support you. If you go to actor school, you’re not going to get anything.” So I had to proceed to get financial aid. There’s a point where you need your parents’ information and he was sabotaging that. I remember I applied to Yale, and Yale was like, “We never received the information.” I asked my father and it got nasty. “Are you calling me a liar?” Eventually he had to find himself compromising.
There’s this thing called URTA where a whole bunch of colleges across the country do one big audition for all of the member schools. I did the two two-minute monologues: one modern, one classical. I was really interested in the University of Minnesota and the University of Washington and my father said, “At least go to school a little bit closer to home.” So, I auditioned for Yale and, thankfully, I got accepted. With that, I overcame all my father’s obstacles. He started accepting the fact that it was a possibility. In his mind he was trying to find compromises: “I feel comfortable telling my colleagues and family members that my son is going to Yale.”
At the beginning of the auditioning process, I didn’t know anything about any of the schools. One of my teachers was like, “Where are you applying?” I said, “Oh, I’m applying to Rutgers, University of Minnesota, Florida State, Penn State…” and he said, “You need to be more specific.” He had taught at New York University. He felt strongly and he was someone whose opinion I valued highly. At the last minute, I was able to audition for New York University, which wasn’t a part of this URTA thing. Thankfully I got in. And thankfully they gave me money. Actually, I got the money because the professor at Binghamton told me, “Hey, this is really competitive. You need to sort of negotiate and haggle.” I had gotten accepted to Yale but the problem was, because my dad screwed up my financial aid, I got no money, so I couldn’t even consider Yale because I couldn’t afford it. Well, NYU wasn’t giving me any money either then, but NYU was in competition with Yale. So my professor said, “Even though you know you’re not going to Yale, tell them that you’ve been accepted.” So the head of the NYU program, Ron Van Lieu—an amazing acting instructor who is now at Yale—was like, “We don’t have any money.” I said, “Well, I was accepted to Yale.” Can you believe it? I got a full scholarship to NYU. I was like, “Wow! This is how this business works, even on a collegiate level.”
What was your first paid gig?
My first paid gig was definitely Shakespeare in the Park, New York Shakespeare Festival. I was the understudy for Ajax and Achilles in Troilus and Cressida. I got paid three-hundred dollars a week. How better to start your career off than in New York in Central Park in the summer, outdoors, getting high after every show? I graduated in May and got the show in June. It was a great cast. The biggest name at the time was Stephen Spinella. Also Tim Blake Nelson, Steven Skybell, and Paul Calderon, these great theatre actors in New York. It was a great ensemble, but the reviews weren’t that great.
My first movie gig was Cop Land. What was great about that and what was great about Troilus and Cressida was being around these actors who people in the know—whether they were casting directors or directors—knew these guys were phenomenal. To me, coming in, “phenomenal” meant, “Oh, you must be Meryl Streep. You must’ve made it.” But these were actors who were working consistently who get so much respect throughout the business—but you don’t necessarily know them by name. The lesson right away with those two projects was, “Yes, you can have a very successful, solid, well-respected career reputation and not necessarily have your name up in lights.” It was great to start out that way, with those particular projects.
What do you consider your first break?
It had to be Homicide: Life on the Street. To me it was a break simply because it was a critically-acclaimed show. It felt like it helped a lot to have that on the notorious reel. To me, a break also has a lot to do with what is a confidence builder. Kathy Bates directed that episode of Homicide. Kathy Bates chose me. My thing all along has been—even when I was in undergrad, when I first started acting—that you have to take with you your successes because there’s always going to be some rough times. So, “Crystal from high school put me in this class. She was the best actress in high school and she thought I was worthy of doing a scene with her.” I even took that with me. And then one of my professors who taught at Juilliard, Yale, Carnegie Mellon, and NYU thought I was worthy of going to NYU. So I remembered that. And then Ron Van Lieu accepting me. And then Kathy Bates casting me in what I think was her directorial debut. There’s tons and tons of rejection so I always draw from that. When times are rough or I don’t work for six to eight months, I say, “Kathy Bates wanted me to play this particular role.” So, the big breaks are to be able to say that I worked with these people who I respect and I can say that I was deemed worthy of working with them.
What do you wish someone had told you at the beginning of your career?
There’s a casting director named Rosemarie Tichler who was the head of casting at the Public Theatre. She taught an audition class at NYU. At the end of our three years, she would bring us into her office and say, “These are things you need to work on. This is how I see you.” This was just to give us an idea—going into the business—how we’re seen, how we’re viewed, what she thinks our strengths and weaknesses are. She told me something that I didn’t apply.
I’m six-five, and I was six-five when I graduated when I was twenty-four years old. And I’ve always had a deep voice. She said, “Victor, you’re twenty-four years old. When you get out, you’re automatically going to be going for roles that are like thirty, thirty-two just because of how you are, physically. You need to fight against that because there’s an energy, there’s an excitement, there’s a joy in playing roles when you’re in your twenties that you’ll never get again. Once you get older, you’re going to be playing fathers. You’re going to be playing police officers. You have to allow yourself the opportunity to be that young, energetic, somewhat naïve young man. You have to fight against people, whether it’s your agents or casting directors, putting you in that box.”
I took that information, but for me, I was like, “Well, I want to work! I don’t care about that!” So, of course, I went down the path of going for these older roles. The catch is that I never quite got the roles. I would compete for the roles and at a certain point, they’d realize, “He’s young.” So that sort of locked me out of certain roles. Now that I’m thirty-four, I’m going after roles that are more like forty. It’s always going to be a thing for me now. In hindsight, I do wish that I fought against it a little more because now that opportunity is gone. Whether the character is a kid fresh out of college or in law school or the young love interest, how possible would it have been? I don’t know. It’s bad enough that the business will sort of put you in a box, but I put myself in a box a little bit as well. I regret that. I understand it a little better now.
There’s a kid that I’m mentoring now who’s twenty-four. There’s an energy and excitement that you have, coming fresh out of school. You don’t get that back. I got The King of Queens when I was twenty-seven. Clearly, the role is of a guy with a wife and kids and they’ve been married for a while. They thought I was thirty-three all along. It’s fine, but I think that I should’ve fought a little bit, at least to say that I tried to buck the trend, whether I’d succeeded or not.
What is your favorite thing about being an actor?
I’m sort of in a transition now. We all have our insecurities and with actors it’s definitely magnified. Maybe it goes back to the physical obstacles I faced, growing up. There are so many obstacles to being too big for your age. I always had a problem fitting in in certain ways. I was supposed to play basketball. I was supposed to be really great at it. And I wasn’t. People thought I was older and I really wasn’t. I grew so quickly that I was a little uncomfortable in my body. All those things sort of made me feel awkward and socially inept. I think that there was something about being able to play other people and represent other people outside myself; I felt that these people had much more interesting lives and things to say. These characters who had social difficulties or inability to be heard: I was like, “I’ll speak up for you.” It was always that what I enjoyed was representing a writer’s vision or representing a character’s voice. It was never about me. And I think I still feel that way. I think that’s what I like.
I think the obstacle I have now, in Hollywood, with the audition process and all, is that in a lot of ways, that goes against what this city is about. It has been difficult to say, “This is ME. There’s nothing put on. There’s no voice, there’s no character creation. There’s no voice I’m putting on. It’s just me.” You’re allowed more flexibility and leeway with theatre to sort of create these characters; whereas more often than not, what you’re bringing to the table and who you are is vital to success in TV and film. I’m trying to sort of embrace that more and be more comfortable and confident. But it’s an ongoing struggle. I think I’ve always been drawn more so to theatre than film and television. I’m definitely more passionate about theatre. I can sort of engulf myself in it. The process of rehearsal, I adore. It’s very tough to just get a script and say, “You just have to know your lines by this day.” I definitely enjoy theatre much more.
What made you choose Los Angeles?
That goes back to another lesson. The one thing maybe that I should’ve learned sooner was patience. I graduated in ’95 and I did Shakespeare in the Park in June and in September I did a play at the Dallas Theatre Center. And then for the next year and a half, I got no theatre. As much as I loved it, I was so frustrated I wasn’t getting theatre work. I was impatient. In hindsight, it was just a year and a half. But at the same time, I was getting these TV roles and these movie roles and these commercial roles. I was getting Homicide and Cop Land and Stouffer’s Lean Cuisine and Downy commercials. My whole thing was, “Well, fine. If theatre doesn’t love me, I’ll go where I’m respected.” It was a business decision but also sort of an emotional decision. I wanted to work. I wanted to feel wanted. And when I looked at the resume, I was getting some TV, film, and commercial work. So, I needed to move to LA then. I was with an agent that saw it was time too. Ambrosio Mortimer was a very good, small, bicoastal agency at the time that was very supportive of me moving out to LA. Meg Mortimer, who was my agent, was phenomenal. I think she’s a manager in New York now.
How did you get your first agent?
What’s great about a program like NYU is, they come to shows all the time. When we did our showcase, I think we had about six-hundred agents, casting directors, and managers show up. You can’t ask for better than that. That’s a tough thing. When people ask me how I got an agent, well, the people who really went through it and got an agent the really, really hard way, those are the people you need to talk to. Me? I was smart enough, lucky enough, whatever you want to call it. The best decision I probably made was knowing I wasn’t ready to go into the business and that I needed to go into a training program.
Do you ever feel like giving up?
No! No, no, no. No! Going back to Ron Van Lieu, he said something to our class. First: The reality is, the majority of great actors don’t go to training programs. Robert De Niro, Denzel Washington, they didn’t go to those programs, so it’s not to say you have to go to a program. Some people just need it. You need to be able to know who you are and what you need. Okay, so there was this one thing Ron Van Lieu said in class. It was a bad day. The scenes were bad in class and he was frustrated. Someone said something about, “Oh, this is so hard,” and he said, “Okay, look. How do you think I picked you guys? We get a thousand applicants and we accept twenty people each year. Do you really think you’re the best twenty? You may have been the best one hundred but from there I consider the chemistry in combination with what the needs of the school are. Honestly, there are certain people who applied who don’t need to be in this program so they weren’t accepted because they’re ready. When it came down to making the final decision, I have a vision. The question I ask is, ‘Who is going to be doing this forty, fifty years from now?’ I don’t know. I make the best guess I can possibly make. So, I don’t want to hear, ‘This is hard.’ Because if you tell me it’s hard, I start to think I picked the wrong person.”
It stood out to me. He’s saying, “I see you as people who, through all the adversity and through all the obstacles, will still be doing this fifty, sixty years from now.” And when he said that, I said, “Yeah, that’s me. I’m going to be doing this. No matter how hard it gets, no matter what level it’s at, I’m not going anywhere!” You have to sort of make that commitment. You’re not a failure if you decide to walk away from it, but you have to start out truly believing that this is what you want to do for the rest of your life.
How do you choose the material you work on?
I don’t know if I have much choice. I have yet to be in a position where I can get to really choose the type of stuff I can work on. What I tend to do, if I get a script that I don’t like or I don’t think I’m right for, is I go in and say, “What is the vision of the writer? What’s the vision of the director? How can I fit into that?” If it’s something I feel extremely uncomfortable about, if I don’t believe in the material, I will then put my own vision on it. I will say, “This is what I think I bring to the table.” I’ve blown a lot of auditions for that, but my feeling is I have to feel comfortable doing it. Specifically, as a black actor I say that because there have been times you get the material—and I think every actor experiences this, not just black actors—and it is extremely stereotypical and you don’t feel comfortable doing it. My feeling is, “Well, okay, you wanted a thug from Brooklyn? Flatbush? Fine. I grew up in Flatbush. I grew up around it. I know what it is and it’s not that. So, this is my vision of what I experienced and if it’s not thuggish enough for you, it’s not gangsta enough for you, then I’m not the guy.”
And if I lose the job, that’s fine. I’m at a point where I can’t be too picky. You’ve got to stick to your guns but you also have to choose your battles. I’m still trying to establish a film career so anything goes. I just did two lines on Bewitched. They’re like, “Are you sure you want to do that?” I’m like, “Look at my resume. I only have two feature films on there. So, I’ll do it.” There’s only a handful of actors that have the ability to do anything they want. And even those actors, they have an arc as to when they can choose whatever they want. Going along the lines of longevity and consistency, I have to be open to anything and everything. Obviously, at a certain point, you have to say, “This goes against my beliefs,” or “I don’t think this will advance my career right now.” You make those judgment calls but for the most part you have to be open for everything.
I’m not very good at identifying what a good script is. With The King of Queens, honestly, I thought, “There’s no freakin’ way The King of Queens is going to make it on air.” I did think it was going to suck. We did the pilot and I thought, “Fine, it got made, but it’s not going to get picked up,” and then it got picked up and I thought, “Fine, it’s not going to make it past a year.” All along, I had friends who came to the pilot, friends who watched the entire year and said, “Hey, you know what? This show is really, really good.” And I just couldn’t see it. That was probably the biggest lesson I learned.
Now, when my agent or manager calls and says, “This doesn’t look good. This really sucks.” I’ll say, “Hey, let’s go on in anyway.” You don’t know. Based on that experience, I clearly had no idea. I’m always very, “Let’s just go for it.” I’ve done independent films for no pay which I’ve thought weren’t going to do well and they’ve done well on the independent film circuit, so honestly, I have no idea what’s good material and what’s not, so I just go in and do it.
What’s been great for me on The King of Queens is the fact that a lot of black audience members say, “Wow, there’s not a lot of black characters like you on sitcoms. You’re just normal. You’re not like jive talking or whatever. It’s nice to see.” And it’s a really simple thing. What they do is they don’t write me as a black character, they just write the words.
Had you done a pilot before The King of Queens?
I had done a pilot in ’97. I got on The King of Queens in ’98. But in ’97 I did a pilot that had two working titles: Bakershift and Seattle Emergency. Basically, it was Third Watch set in Seattle for the WB. The process was great. The casting director was Lisa Miller Katz. It was cool, because even though I had some credits coming from New York, it is very difficult to come out here and get that far when people don’t know you. I’ve always been grateful to Lisa because she had no idea who I was. She was very happy with the audition and I met producers and that went well. It came time to test and when you have the material that long it can be such an empowering thing. It doesn’t have to be something that knocks you out; it’s like it’s great to get the opportunity to do it twice or three times. You really feel more and more comfortable no matter how many producers are in the room. When it came to test time, I don’t think I’ve ever auditioned for that many people. There had to be twenty-five people in an office space. By the time you get there, it’s empowering to accept that there are things out of your control in terms of physical attributes and age, how they match up with the other needs. Each of the guys I went up against was clearly different, physically. So, it was like, “We have no idea what they want.” It’s out of your control, so you just go in there and do your thing. All you control are the words on the page and taking the direction. There’s nothing else you can do. It was a great experience.
The thing about The King of Queens—and why I always say you never know where your opportunities are going to come from—is because that year there were three pilots that every black actor wanted to get in on. There was Sydney Pollack’s Bronx County, John Wells’ The Advocate, and there was a pilot for ABC called Cupid. All three had really good black roles we were all trying to get in on. I couldn’t get in on any of them. I was so upset. The King of Queens came along and it was a guest star for the pilot. It wasn’t even a series regular. And I was like, “This really sucks. Fine, whatever.” I was still longing to be on The Advocate, Bronx County, Cupid, but I did the pilot, whatever, and then The King of Queens got picked up and they were like, “Congratulations. We want you to be a regular.” I was like, “That’s cool.” Next thing I know, Cupid made it one season and it was done. Bronx County and The Advocate didn’t even make it on the air. You can’t tell. You fit in where you can.
How do you prepare for a role?
It depends. I’ve been accused of overpreparing. It depends on the project. When I think of the first pilot I did, Seattle Emergency, I was playing a paramedic so I read these EMT books and stories and such. They put us through a crash course to know what it is to be an emergency medical technician. What I’ve learned is, you have to be flexible in what your method is depending on the project. I didn’t need to go and work on how it was like to be a delivery guy for The King of Queens. Knowing that job doesn’t make a difference, for that type of show. That preparing had more to do with getting well-versed in sitcoms. It came down to learning and understanding and studying the formula and the timing and just sort of boning up on my sitcom knowledge just by watching and then specifically understanding the producer who had written for Family Ties and who created a show called Ned and Stacey. Learning and understanding what his sensibilities were and what type of humor he likes allowed me to discover he’s not an over-the-top guy. He’s a very witty, very smart, very subtle-humor kind of guy. This sort of knowing and understanding the environment is very important. It’s like being on stage and walking the space to understand the environment, the world of the sitcom. What’s the tone of the writing? What’s the energy? Sitcom isn’t always over-the-top and knowing specifically what the writer’s vision and temperament is was the process with preparing for this particular project. At times you have to decide it’s a character study and at times you focus on what the environment of the project is. And at times you focus on the past work of the playwright or the screenwriter.
What is your least favorite thing about being an actor?
Being out of work. Technically, we do twenty-five episodes a year. Even when you’re a working actor, more often than not, you’re not working. I work twenty-five weeks out of the year, but I still have twenty-seven weeks to try to find other work. I’m still out of work half the year! There are times when you need time to yourself. This is your instrument so you have to go out there and experience life so you can bring that into your audition. Travel, take classes that have nothing to do with acting. History of China was a class that I took. Don’t know why. I just picked it. You should, as an actor, at some level know a little about things outside of the realm to round you out, make you more versatile. There’s a time to do that. Just don’t get stale. There’s an actor named Cedric Harris from Juilliard (I can’t believe I’m quoting Juilliard actors—that’s another story), who said, “The cream always rises to the top. Just make sure it’s not sour when it gets there.” You have to be ready. Whatever form it takes, everyone will get an opportunity. You have to be ready when it’s there because you have no idea when it’s going to come. Be ready.
Who are your favorite actors?
My favorite actors tend to rotate. Every year I pick a new favorite actor. Lily Taylor was it in ’97. Before that it was Emma Thompson. Last year it was Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep—I went old school a little bit. I’ll see them in something and go, “Oh my God, you’re so amazing.” Right now I worship Zach Braff. I’m not even that familiar with his work. I saw Garden State and I’m crazy about him now. He’s an actor who took control of his career. He put his heart out there. He clearly laid it out there. On top of that, based on that same film, Natalie Portman is a favorite simply because I wasn’t really well-versed in her before. Those are my flavors of the year so far. I want to see what else they’re doing based on those performances.
This interview was conducted on October 7, 2004, and it originally appeared in Acting Qs: Conversations with Working Actors by Bonnie Gillespie and Blake Robbins, available at Amazon.