You know our next guest from "The Vampire Diaries",
"How To Get Away With Murder",
and has role as Nathan in HBO's "Insecure."
(audience applauds)
Please welcome Kendrick Sampson!
(Kendrick laughs) (audience cheers)
Thank you very much, thank you, Drew.
It feels so weird,
'cause this was not like our vernacular back in the day,
but I was binging you all last night.
(Kendrick laughs)
I wanted to catch up
on everything that's happening in season five in "Insecure".
We're approaching the season finale.
The season finale is comin' up, series finale!
(audience applauds) I was just gonna say!
Yeah, series finale.
You guys just do such a phenomenal job
at showing how human beings function.
Yeah.
What's so beautiful about "Insecure"
is it's baked into the title.
You have to explore those gray areas that make us human.
And that is the best part of it to me.
(audience applauds) That is, you know.
That's so well said.
You know what I'm saying?
It's beautiful to explore that, that is our humanity.
I feel so connected to,
I don't even want to say their characters.
Also, she does that brilliant Judd Apatow thing,
where, you know, you use like real names,
so it kind of transcends.
You're like, who's the real person,
who's the character? Right, right, right.
Which is great, because I mean,
there's a reason that people do that,
because you wanna break down the barriers
of the sort of fraudulence of acting,
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
and make it more realistic and relatable.
And you guys do that so well on this show.
Yeah, you know what, I think about her a lot
with, you know, Will Smith, right?
With "Fresh Prince", because it was his name,
That's right. and we were trying to,
it had a hard time dissociating,
you know, him from the character.
And I think that's bled
into all the other characters as well,
because I get called Nathan all the time.
It's usually somebody yellin' at me
for what I did to Issa, and then I have to remind them
me and Issa have a great relationship.
Well, you know, we text all the time, we're good.
You know, I'm not Nathan, please don't.
But also, okay, like, you ghosted her.
Is that what they're upset about?
There's ghosting, there's bad communication,
there's also just the fact that people have teams,
you know, relationship teams.
You know, but then it's like,
she put you in the friend zone,
when she cries into your mouth,
by the way is like one of my favorite things in the world.
I don't know what it is about women,
but if it's like been a while or like we're just vulnerable,
like we usually cry like during a make-out,
and we're just, I know we all want to say like,
I'm sorry, this isn't representative
of all the feelings I'm feeling.
You're like, I'm feeling so many feelings.
It's a little awkward, it's a little awkward.
How do you navigate it, you wanna be--
It doesn't happen every time, but it does happen.
Right, right.
And I was happy to see that represented in a show.
I don't normally see that it's like, the hot sex scene
is not how it goes every single time, I'm sorry.
We're humans, they're so complex.
It is, yeah.
We're such intricate creatures.
I don't even know how we keep ourselves uncracked
like a little egg every day.
I think that's beautiful, that's the, again,
that's the essential part of that show
that makes it so beautiful, is those realistic situations
where you feel like it's a voyeuristic experience
and it's always gonna be what you don't expect.
Well, I root for you too,
because your backstory really spoke to me
as someone who started young in this business,
hello, diapers. (Kendrick and audience laugh)
When you were 10 years old, you told your mom something.
Mm. (Drew laughs)
Yeah, I told my mom I wanted to act.
And she was like, uh huh. (Drew and audience laughs)
Here's the Houston Chronicle, find an agent.
So I flipped through the newspaper
and I found some ads with agencies on 'em.
I called 'em up and they called back,
my mom obviously, 'cause I didn't have my own phone.
And were like, "Your ten-year-old son
is setting up an appointment to come in and interview
for an agent, you know, is this okay?"
And she's like, "Yeah, as long as he does the work."
And that's how she's always been.
She says, "If you do the work, I'll support it."
And I did.
And then you moved to LA and you struggled.
Oh yeah.
When I was 18, I moved to LA,
and I got all my ducks in a row.
I was like, I'm gonna get this apartment,
I'm gonna get whatever.
It wasn't an apartment, it was a room in somebody's house,
which was very weird for me coming from Texas.
But I got kicked out.
I got kicked out within a month, not even a month,
and I had to live out of my car for a couple months,
going from place to place, on people's couches,
you know, whatever, had my whole life packed up in this,
in the back of my car.
And finally, you know,
I had met this woman in church,
who a lot of people think is my biological grandma
because we look just alike, you know?
And we've spent so much time together.
I lived with her for five, six years,
and she was my roommate.
Met her in church, she knew I didn't have anybody.
I might shed a little tear.
'Cause she passed last year because of COVID in December.
So it's comin' up on the anniversary,
but I didn't have anybody to celebrate my birthday with.
So she made me a meal for my birthday
and that's when she offered to,
if I could stay with her for a while,
while I get back on my feet.
And you know, then it was five beautiful years after that.
That was my roommate, my 88, 89, 90 year old roommate.
And it kept going, and. (audience applauds)
And what is her name? Yeah, so--
You called her a name, but she has another name.
So, her name, What was your name for her?
Her name is Honora, but she told me,
and this is the funny thing, she told me when I moved in,
I'm trying not to cry.
She told me when I moved in
that I couldn't call her by her name.
I had to call her something else.
Everybody else calls her Mom
or has some sort of endearing nickname for her,
I'm from the country, you know, I'm like, all right.
It took me forever, and she also couldn't remember my name.
So she would just sometimes look at me and go.
"Mm."
(Drew and audience laugh)
She called me Kenneth, she called me Kendall.
She called me Henry.
She called me everything,
and I would just do the same thing,
'cause I didn't know what to call her but her name.
Miss Honora or, Mrs. Honora, or something, you know?
So I would go, "Mm.
Scuse me?"
You know?
And then finally I thought about it, and I'm like,
I'm country, you know,
my grandma had passed a couple years before, so,
Mawmaw was freed up, and I started calling her Mawmaw.
And now there are so many people in LA
who don't know her name, they just know Mawmaw.
Mawmaw. Yeah.
I think your mom and Mawmaw (audience applauds)
are these wonderful angels. Oh yeah.
Who gave you these incredible values.
Yeah.
And we root for you all the more,
because you took not the path of least resistance.
You took the hard road.
I was, I'll say this, when I moved to LA,
I had a intention of connecting with black folks more
because there was so much racism in the industry
and in Texas.
And I thought I was going to get to LA
and there would be no racism or less racism.
I was fooled, but I was surrounded
by all these amazing black women who introduced me
to black male figures that would, you know,
inspire me and make sure that I was fed
and introduced me to families and such,
and it's exactly what you said.
I learned nothing more than
you have to be really intentional
about building your community around you,
based in good values.
Because all their whole,
and it has to be rooted in liberation,
because their whole objective with me
was to make sure that I was fed, that I was cared for,
and that I was more liberated than they were coming up.
And there's nothing else that I could,
I have nothing else to credit to my success
because they created the environment that I could grow in.
Thank you. (audience applauds)
Thank you for sharing that.
Thank you for teaching us, so much of it is again,
sharing our stories and matriculating that life experience.
Everybody has a story to tell,
thank you for sharing every bit of yours
(Kendrick laughs)
and we are rooting you on alongside of it.
(audience applauds)
Thank you so much. Thank you.
For coming on. I appreciate you.
Kendrick Sampson, the final episode of "Insecure",
the groundbreaking show, the goddess Issa Rae,
will air next Sunday, December 26th on HBO
and it's available to stream on HBO Max, of course.
Oh, I don't want this show to go.
I'm so glad it gave us all these years of what it did.
(feel-good soft-rock music)