Shanola Hampton is known for playing Veronica Fisher in the hit Showtime series Shameless. But now, the 46-year-old actress is making her way to network television, landing the lead role as Gabi Mosley in the new NBC series Found. Earlier this year, PopCulture.com visited the set of Found in Atlanta and spoke to Hampton about what drew her to the show and the character.
“I came from a world of streaming, as you know,” Hampton told PopCulture and other reporters. “Network television is something that’s very new to me. I really met with [Nkechi Okoro Carroll], not to be on her show, but I wanted to direct one of the shows that she produces All American and All American Homecoming. …But when I met with NK, her energy and her vibe and everything. I was like, ‘Oh, she’s my people.’ It is the way she speaks and the way she carries herself. We got in this discussion about how we’d like to lead with love. Then she said, ‘Are you still acting?’ I was like, ‘I still got to pay the bills. Yes, I am. I’m still acting.’”
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Hampton went on to say that Carroll had a script for a show on NBC. She revealed she already had an overall deal with the network but was hesitant to read the script at first. Carroll told her that she thought that she would like it. “I read the script. I knew that I wanted to do it, my next project, something that had meaning or purpose,” Hampton explained. “As I’m reading it, I’m like, ‘Oh, this says something. Oh, sugar. Oh, this says a lot. Oh. Oh.’ Then the end came and I was like, ‘Oh. Count me in.’ Because the twist, I could not see. I don’t know if you know what the Twist is.”
In Found, Gabi is a public relations specialist. who is the head of a crisis management team looking for the forgotten missing people. More than 600,000 people are reported missing in the United States, and more than half that number are people of color that the country seems to forget about. Gabi went missing when she was younger, so the issue is very important to her. But little does anyone know, Gabi is hiding a deep secret of her own.
“I feel like now’s the time for Found,” Hampton said. “Also, it’s just all the characters, not just Gabi Mosely and not just our mission. It is really a statement on every single person deals with trauma, but every single person deals with trauma differently. We as a society will sometimes judge the way someone has dealt with a traumatic experience. We’re very much a get over it.
“We are starting to go into the normalization of what it is to have therapy and to seek help as we’re seeing more and more mental illness really just take over. But that’s still, in some communities, not a normalized thing. It should be as normal as pass the salt, right?”
Found premieres on NBC on Oct. 3 at 10 p.m. ET with new episodes airing every Tuesday. Hampton stars in Found along with Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Kelli Williams, Brett Dalton, Gabrielle Walsh, Arlen Escarpeta and Karan Oberoi.
