Sterling K. Brown, a three-time Emmy winner, opened up about his son being called the N-word and how the teen navigated the tense situation.
As People reports, during a roundtable discussion for season 2 of Hulu’s Paradise, Brown discussed how his temperament is different from that of his sons’ Amaré, 9, and Andrew, 14.
“And it’s interesting,” Brown said. “I look at my children now — my children have never been in a fight. The 14-year-old or the 9-year-old,” he said.
He continued, “My 14-year-old was in a soccer game where a young boy spat on him, and he saw the spit and he walks up to the ref and he goes, ‘Ref, this dude just spat on me.’ And the ref was like, ‘I didn’t see it, so I can’t do anything about it.’
“Then, afterwards, the young man came up to him and called him the N-word and just kind of kept it going. And my son didn’t tell me until after the game, and I was like, ‘Yo, man, how come we didn’t beat his ass?’ And he was like, ‘Because that wouldn’t have solved anything. He already did what he was going to do. The ref didn’t respond to it or whatnot. So I didn’t want to make you any more upset, which is why I didn’t tell you until after the game.’ “
“So he’s a more evolved person than me. I would’ve beat his ass!,” Brown concluded.
He added, “Being a father is the most important job that I have in my life right now. And so for the next nine years, if I can keep working in L.A. and be like the one dude who figured it out, I would be very, very excited about that, [because] I don’t want to miss too much of their growing up.”
Brown and wife, Ryan Michelle Bathe, met at Stanford University, where they dated on and off, and both attended NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts for an MFA in acting, where they were members of the class of 2001. The pair eloped in Santa Barbara in 2006, then had a larger wedding ceremony in 2007.
The couple welcomed Andrew in a “surprise” home birth in 2011, and Amaré in 2015.