Grantham Coleman caught up in ‘Emperor of Ocean Park’ intrigue

Sunday’s “The Emperor of Ocean Park” is a propulsive, twisting and continually surprising 8-episode psychological thriller set among the Garlands, a prominent Black American family.

Adapted from Stephen L. Carter’s bestselling novel, “Emperor” begins as Forest Whitaker’s right wing, Fox News celebrity Judge Oliver Garland is found dead in his DC mansion.

The judge was celebrated as an-almost Supreme Court jurist until a scandal wrecked that possibility. Now, his daughter Mariah wonders, if he died not of a heart attack but homicide and enlists her younger brother Talcott (Grantham Coleman) to her cause.

“My dad is a judge” the Texas-born Coleman, 33, began in a Zoom interview.  “My way into Tal was meeting myself in a place where I was reading the book and hearing all these thoughts of this character Tal.

“He’s our window into the story, and I was seeing where I aligned and where I was different while just trying to meet the character with myself.

“Tal, being this kind of happy to go along, get along, law professor, thinks his life is going the way it’s supposed to. He’s doing everything he’s supposed to be doing: Listening to what his parents raised him to do. Trying to be a good dad. Trying to be a good professor, be a good husband.

“And slowly finding out that all this trauma and tragedy in the family has been influencing him and pushing him — without him knowing it.

“It’s one of those jumping points for an actor where you can just let the snowball roll down the hill — and it just builds and builds for me.”

The late judge surprises as a right-wing celebrity. Could he be perhaps modelled on a real Supreme Court character?

“I think the inspirations the book’s writer Stephen Carter was exploring is this realm we call ‘Jack and Jill kids’ — the kids in the Black community that are living in middle class and upper middle class families that do have maybe different values than the understood media perception of like, ‘Oh, Black people are liberals.’

“There’s a wide spectrum of all sorts of political beliefs and faiths within the Black community. But what shocked me about this role — and having a dad that was almost in the Supreme Court — is all the political intrigue about it.

“I’m from Houston. I didn’t grow up in DC. I didn’t grow up in any place where there’s cloak and dagger stuff going on. So having a figure that is a conservative judge, that’s not what shocked me so much.

“It was more just the mystery and the story that unfolds.”

“The Emperor of Ocean Park” premieres its first episode July 14 on MGM+