Watch actor Sterling K. Brown, and one of the first things you may notice is his eyes.
In a scene from the last season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Brown plays Reggie, a hard-nosed manager. His language is rough, but his eyes reveal something more: he's feeling guilty and defensive. Or look at his work on NBC's hit drama This Is Us, where Brown plays Randall Pearson, a black man adopted by a white family. Again, Brown's eyes reveal a lot.
Those two performances have allowed Brown to make Emmy Awards history this year: nominated as best lead actor in a drama series for This Is Us and best supporting actor in a comedy series for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Amazon's Prime Video.
Grateful as he is for his nominations, Brown also sees the record number of black performers nominated for Emmys about 34% of acting nominees this year—as a welcome reaction to the civil rights reckoning and Black Lives Matter protests of the summer.
The actor says it's also part of a long march toward recognition for black performers, held back by oppres-sion in Hollywood back to the early 1900s, when white people wore black-face to play black characters in films.
Brown has made history at awards shows before：in 2018, he became the first black man to win best actor in a drama at both the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild Awards.
With degrees from Stanford University and New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, Brown has spent about two decades appearing on TV shows like Lifetime's Army Wives and his first series regular role, playing a cop on FX's short-lived 2005 drama Starved.
These days Brown is excited about the new season of This Is Us, which will begin with two episodes ad-dressing both the coronavirus pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests.
