Beyond acting and music, Omari Hardwick is a man with a purpose and he leads by example, which is why he was the perfect person to be the special guest for United Way of Greater Atlanta’s African American Partnership 8th annual AAP Leadership Luncheon.
Hardwick is known for his work in the megahit “Power” series, but he is also a musician, poet, and spoken word artist. He hosts the “Poetics” podcast where he has in-depth conversations with rap stars from around the world.
Hardwick spoke with rolling out about “Power,” and the dynamic between characters Ghost and Tariq.
What are your thoughts on “Power” when you look back?
It was Shakespeare. I used to say to interviewers, during that time, and I said to Naturi Naughton very early that “Power” is Shakespeare. If you go back and [listen to] my interviews, I said it a lot. I equally wanted our faction of producers, execs, fans, and other races of people, particularly White, to understand this can be programming that is fully laden with Black and Brown people, but that the lead guy sees it as Shakespeare. Think about how educated we are, as opposed to how educated we’re not, right? We’re equally as educated and Courtney Kemp created Shakespeare in that component and many other components of the show.
How did you feel about Tariq and Ghost dynamic?
I had no issue with Ghost dying. I had an issue with the way the story started going. That’s not the way to start. He was originally the anti-hero’s hero. He was an anti-hero hero. He started becoming non-heroic, which wasn’t what I signed up for. It took a direction that I wasn’t too keen on and many of the fans obviously have spoken and were not too keen on it. 50 Cent gave this beautiful gift of a character. What he did was he made this character have a few negative turns in life. … Had he not gone on those left turns and gone on the right turns, this dude would be someone who’s doing the things he’s trying to rightly do. Ghost was in his own way. But he was the parent who actually was trying to be the great parent. So you don’t have him shot. You don’t have Naturi Naughton’s character shot. You have no one shot by a child. That one got [to] me as Omari. You got me here speaking to young kids. I had no problem with Ghost [being taken] off the board, but it was the way he was taken off [that bothered me].
Eminem rapped about putting his mom in the trunk. I don’t mind him doing that but as Black people, we’re not rapping about putting mom in the trunk. Even if moms have done worse than him … we don’t do that. Watching young beautiful Michael Rainey Jr. as a character having to take that on, and then he caught s— in the street for that as Michael. That’s someone I helped raise. I was like a father to the kid. That was a lot for me. That’s when fiction meets reality kind of too aggressively.
