‘Deputy’ star Danielle Moné Truitt shuts down haters labeling Fox show too political: ‘Life is political’
Fox’s new show 'Deputy' is already making waves after its premiere this past Thursday, and actress Danielle Moné Truitt, who plays Deputy Charlie Minnick on the show, had the perfect response to the online trolls and haters. In an interview with MEA WorldWide (MEAWW), the actress addressed the show’s controversial topics head-on.
She told reporter Alana Jordan, “People were so mad! We were on Twitter, and oh my God, people we so mad. They were like, ‘we’re not watching this show! This is Leftist’, you know whatever. And ‘this show is political!’ It’s like, this show is not political. It’s not political. Life is political. If the show’s political, then life’s political because we live in the world, and politics is a huge part of things that are affecting people’s lives every day. We are affected every day by politics, so to say that the show shouldn’t be political when we’re talking about enforcement, that’s crazy. That doesn’t even make any sense. But whatever. The show is beautiful in the way that it does address a lot of things that people find important in the world, and everybody’s not going to agree on it.”
Despite the controversy, Truitt hopes people can enjoy the show and maybe even allow it to make a deeper impact on the way they choose to view certain things.
“That’s the beauty of art and of television to be able to talk about things and maybe even help people understand things in a different way than they did before and opening up their hearts and their minds to the opinions of different people and the lifestyles of different people, and the mindsets of different people because I think that’s the way we unify our country and our communities. If you are only open to your way of seeing something or of doing something, then you’re living a very, very small life. So I think the beautiful thing about our show is that it does touch on a lot of different things,” she said.
According to the actress, the show also has taken great efforts not only to be entertaining but also as accurate as possible: “We also have some really awesome tech advisors from the sheriff’s department and from major crimes that come. They’re on set all the time to make sure that the things that we’re doing are in line with what would happen in a real situation, what deputies would really do. And you know, of course, it’s television, so certain things are heightened but at the core, we do have people from the sheriff’s department and we do have people from major crimes who have been working those departments two or more decades telling us this is the way things would happen and down to ‘this is the way you hold a gun, this is the way you take it out of the holster, this is how your positioning should be, this is the way you move down a hallway with your partner.’ It's great. I’m always learning. And a lot of us did ride alongs with sheriffs, and so we’re getting a lot of inside information, and I think it’s helping to shape our characters.”
Truitt already had ample experience playing a law enforcement officer, though, after she played the title character in BET’s cop-centered drama, 'Rebel.' She explained, “My role as Rebel definitely prepared me for playing Charlie. There’s a lot of physical activity that happens when you are playing a police officer, or a deputy or a private detective or whatever it is. So for 'Rebel', I had a lot of fight training and got a lot of knowledge on what it means to hold those type of.., to be an officer of that sort. And just being on a series, being a lead character on a series, it does takes a lot of work, a lot of stamina, a lot of preparation.”
However, she didn’t want to bring “cop energy” to her audition, and instead focused less on her on-screen police training and more on the emotional aspects of the character. “I know that Charlie is a cop, or a deputy, but when I went in to audition, I just wanted to make her a human being. She’s a person. Her being a deputy is just what she does for a living, you know what I mean?" Truitt said.
"It’s just like me. I’m an actress for a living, but Danielle is an actual person that feels things, that struggles with things, that goes through a lot of things, and I think more than trying to play a cop, or play a deputy, it’s trying to tell a true story of an actual human being that people can relate to in different ways, you know? So it takes the.., it demystifies the job of being in law enforcement, and it breaks those characters down to just being human people that we all can relate to in a lot of ways. So I think that’s what I focused on more when I went in to the audition is like, ‘what does she want? What’s important to her? What makes her tick?’ And not judging her for anything but just playing her authentically as a person,” she added.
You can catch Danielle Moné Truitt as Charlie Minnick on 'Deputy' Thursday nights on Fox.