With a career spanning four decades, Shemar Moore is no stranger to television viewers.
He first came to national exposure on The Young and the Restless, but there's a lot more to
learn about him. Keep watching to discover the truth about this wildly popular star.
Shemar Moore had an
unorthodox childhood. As he explained in a 2013 Shemar Moore Unplugged interview,
he was born in Oakland, California, but only lived there for about half of his first year of life.
He was still an infant when his parents split up, and his mother, Marilyn Wilson Moore,
was able to secure a teaching job in Europe. Moore said,
"So at six months old I left the country,
and I lived overseas until I was six-and-a-half years old."
The first country they lived in was Denmark. Moore said his first language was
Danish, but he has retained next to none of those language skills.
He clarified that he did remember a single Danish word:
flytte, which translates into English as to move or relocate.
As for why that's the sole Danish word to remain stuck in his memory, Moore said,
"My mother was kicking my backside and trying to get me to do this and do that, and she was always
saying, "Flytte, flytte, flytte Shemar, flytte' — for whatever reason I remember the word flytte."
Spending his early years in foreign countries proved to be a formative time for Moore.
Moving back to the land of his birth, however, was not without complications.
In an interview with BET, he said,
"I grew up outside of the country, first in Denmark,
then Bahrain and Ghana. When my mother moved us back, it was a very difficult transition."
He added that it was in the US that he first experienced racism, saying that he still
remembers the first time someone used a racial slur against him. He said of the experience,
"I was six, and I remember how different everyone made me feel
when I was in school. 'Why does your hair look like that, why is your skin that color,
how come your mom is white, how can you be cousins with so-and-so?'"
However, that childhood bullying also taught Moore an important lesson. Whenever he found
himself under attack, he realized that he had the ability and the wherewithal to respond in kind.
He recalled,
"That's how I learned I was good at baseball, because kids would chase me after school,
so I started picking up rocks and throwing them to fight back."
Shemar Moore isn't one of those Hollywood types who grew up obsessed with acting
and becoming a star — it just sort of turned out that way.
He told BET,
"I could describe my career in two words: who knew."
As he told The Boston Globe, he could throw a 93-mile-per-hour fastball and
wound up being drafted by the Baltimore Orioles and the Boston Red Sox. That,
however, was when his mother — a professional educator — stepped in and put the kibosh on a
pro sports career right out of high school. His mother told the outlet,
"He was not going to complete college without having at least one degree."
Moore was able to heed his mother's advice to get an education while pursuing his
athletic dreams when he was accepted to Santa Clara University on a baseball scholarship,
but he was later injured. At this point, he began modeling, and after scoring gigs with
major brands, he began leaning on his theater training as he set his sights on acting.
When Shemar Moore decided to set his sights
on becoming an actor, he headed for Hollywood. He told BET that his family was skeptical, saying,
"When I decided to move out to L.A. to try acting, nobody was betting on me, not even my family."
But it didn't take Moore long to make an impact. In 1994, Moore's big break arrived
when his modeling work led him to be discovered by a scout from The Young and the Restless, cast as
Malcolm Winters. He stayed with the hit soap opera until 2002, winning a Daytime Emmy along the way.
"Get out of here, the only thing beer about this is this six pack
I got going. Count 'em: one, two, three, four, five, six."
When he exited The Young and the Restless, with his character killed in a car accident,
he revealed in an interview with The Baltimore Sun
that he was more than ready for a change, telling a reporter,
"I left the show after seven-and a-half years. I did it 50 weeks out of the year. I felt like I did
all I could with it. Although, they didn't find the body, so never say never. Malcolm may return."
It took more than a decade, but his prediction eventually came to pass
when Moore returned to the show for a 2014 guest-starring stint.
While he's dated a lot of women over the years,
Halle Berry was Moore's first serious love. In the late 1990s, Moore began dating Berry,
who was then at the tail end of a high-profile divorce from baseball player David Justice.
Moore told BET in 2013,
"She was the first woman to really knock my socks off. I fell hard for Halle."
While their past romance is now common knowledge,
he recalled that they kept it quiet at the time because Berry had only recently divorced Justice.
The two eventually emerged out in the open as a full-fledged couple when he
accompanied her to the 1997 Golden Globe Awards.
Explaining that they bonded over being biracial, Moore said,
"I'm still grateful for that relationship. I was smitten not just because of who she was,
but because we were so similar in so many ways. [...] She was kind of
going through the same things I was in Hollywood."
Looking back, he told BET that his relationship with Berry,
quote, "made me much stronger as a man, and knowing the caliber of
woman I want in the future."
When Shemar Moore was part of the Criminal Minds cast, his character, FBI Special Agent Derek
Morgan, had a special bond with technical analyst Penelope Garcia, played by Kirsten Vangsness .
"All I need is 15 seconds on the phone to nail this skeevy perv."
As fans of the hit procedural crime drama will recall, Morgan had an affectionate nickname
for Garcia: baby girl. What viewers may not know, however, is that the
line was ad-libbed by Moore on the set before becoming an indelible part of Criminal Minds.
It was early on in the first season when he found himself shooting a scene with Vangsness.
As Moore recounted in an Instagram interview,
when the director called "action," Moore improvised, saying,
"Hey baby girl, listen, I need you to work your magic."
The line was not in the script.
Moore said,
"I said something and I just completely riffed it, and I was waiting for the
producers or the director to be like. 'OK, alright, I don't know what that was,
but we are going to go back the other way.' And then they ended up keeping it in the episode."
In a subsequent interview with TV Guide, Moore noted his phrase quickly took off with fans.
"Hey, I need you baby girl." "I need to be needed."
However, he explained that once he began using the phrase, he was very
cognizant about using it sparingly and not beating it into the ground.
"Once 'baby girl' became a thing, I didn't want to overdo it."
In 2015, Shemar Moore went public to reveal that his mother was battling multiple sclerosis.
He told People that when his mom was first diagnosed with MS in 1999,
his first instinct was to downplay the reality of the situation. He said of the experience,
"I went through the whole denial thing for a couple of years. I was like, 'Take a couple
aspirin and go to sleep. […] You'll be fine. You'll be fine. Go get a massage and slow down.'"
However, as the years passed and he witnessed the effects of the disease on her — and recognized
his own powerlessness in helping her — he came to an epiphany. He told People,
"I just had to check myself and say, 'Listen,
she's scared and asking for help, so let's help her turn in the right direction.
I've just been learning about the meds and learning about how it affects different people.
Five years ago, we thought she was going to be wheelchair-bound. Then, by just doing some
homework and really seeing what MS was all about, we learned that MS is affecting her,
but not entirely. We were able to be specific about the MS and other factors in her life."
Marilyn Wilson Moore died on February 8, 2020. Shemar Moore went on to create his
own Baby Girl clothing line, inspired by his famed Criminal Minds catchphrase. Part
of the proceeds were donated to the National MS Society to fund research.
Back in 2017, Shemar Moore was honored by being featured in People magazine's annual
Sexiest Man Alive issue. While Moore wasn't the Sexiest Man Alive — that
year it was deemed to be Blake Shelton — he was proud just to be included.
Moore made that clear when he paid a visit to The Late Late
Show with James Corden, telling Corden jokingly,
"My mama said, I only made one baby, but I sure made a pretty baby."
Asked if he was happy with how he was featured in the magazine, Moore insisted he was.
"Just to be in there. I'm 47 years old,
I'm trying to keep my Black from cracking and they put me in the magazine?"
While the traditional move is usually to downplay the tribute to one's sexiness,
Moore took the exact opposite strategy.
"You know what? I'm supposed to be humble about it? Hell no! I'm in the magazine,
go get it! I still got my sexy on!"
That wasn't Moore's first time being singled out by a magazine for his sex appeal. In 2012,
Essence declared him to be its Sexiest Man of the Year,
gushing that, quote, "no matter what Shemar Moore did this year, he looked amazing doing it."
Somewhere during the course of his career,
rumors began to circulate that Shemar Moore was a closeted gay man. He set the record straight,
so to speak, when confronted by those rumors in an interview with BET, saying,
"I just think it's all silly. If you're gay, you're gay. I'm not,
and I know that and I'm very comfortable with who I am and I love women. I've dated plenty of them."
He asserted his own sexuality even further by issuing a challenge:
"If you think I'm gay, send your girlfriend over to my house for the weekend and see what happens.
For real. You can call that arrogant if you want to. I just call it confident.
You can call me whatever you want, but you don't know me."
He theorized that the rumors may have started because he has a large gay
fanbase, with whom he has no problem engaging, saying,
"I have fans that are gay, men that come up to me, and they're inspired by me, or they like
me as an entertainer, and when they want to give me a hug or take pictures with me, what,
am I supposed to not put my arm around them or stand next to them, and if the man next to me in
the picture is gay, that makes me gay? That's just simpleminded ignorance, and I don't play that."
"Homies, fans and baby girls, what's good? What's good?"
Having been steadily employed as a TV actor since the 1990s, Shemar Moore has amassed a fortune.
During his years on Criminal Minds, he earned $175,000 per episode,
according to the Denver Urban Spectrum. While his salary on S.W.A.T. hasn't been publicly revealed,
he's also a producer on the show, which would certainly result in an additional producer's fee.
He's also ventured into movie producing, serving as producer and star of the 2016
feature The Bounce Back. In 2018, Moore was signed by a new agency, UTA, while he
and producing partner Ray Brown reportedly had a deal with CBS and Sony Television.
Having made all that money, Moore decided to spend some of it in 2020 when he purchased
a $5.8-million, 9,055-square-foot mansion. Before pulling the trigger, Moore told People,
he needed the approval of mom Marilyn Wilson Moore. He told the magazine,
"I brought my mom to the house. She looked around and then she said,
'This is my son's home. I'm proud of you, Boo. And I hope it gives you a great life.'"
Moore's purchase of the home proved to be
bittersweet when his mom died just a few days later; as he admitted,
"My house is beautiful, but it's empty without her. There's always going to be that void."
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