Silver-throated thespian Keith David has been performing professionally since 1979. But with greater than 450 credit throughout stage, movie and tv, he nonetheless has dream roles he needs to cross off his want record. Becoming a member of the forged of FX’s neo-noir comedy, The Lowdown, as personal investigator Marty Brunner in 2025 allowed him to test certainly one of them off.
“One of the things as an actor that I’ve wanted to do my whole life, or at least in my adult consciousness, is play a TV detective,” says David. “I’m like, ‘Wow, here I am. This is it.’ ”
Sterlin Harjo’s screenwriting credit, which embrace the five-time Emmy-nominated comedy drama Reservation Canine, are a group of affection letters to his dwelling state of Oklahoma. His newest sequence, led by Ethan Hawke as Lee Raybon, a “truthstorian” and guide supplier impressed by real-life Oklahoman citizen journalist Lee Roy Chapman, is one other affectionate dispatch that honors Tulsa by absurdity and historicity.
Based on David, his character, Marty, is a unfastened amalgamation of males in “Harjo’s purview.” The stoic detective with novelist aspirations is the Sherlock-esque straight man to Lee’s quirky, ruffian gumshoe. Season one of many sequence, which is an element thriller, half crime thriller, follows the pair’s investigation of a land conspiracy involving the Washbergs, one of many metropolis’s strongest — and corrupt — households.
When it got here time to lastly make his mark on the basic detective archetype, David positioned the most important deal with grounding Marty in his intelligence, adaptability and sense of justice.
“I’m still wonderfully challenged by finding [Marty’s] uniqueness, what makes him tick, what makes him special,” says David. “There’s that element of being a PI [that’s] attractive to me, the fact that you can mix and mingle with all kinds of people. Obviously, I’m not in an Eddie Murphy movie, so I’m not going to disguise myself as an old white man in a barbershop, but he’s got to be able to go into different crowds and blend in. I love the versatility of it.”
Ethan Hawke (left), who stars as Lee Raybon in The Lowdown, with David
Shane Brown/FX
The Lowdown is Hawke and David’s third venture collectively, having co-starred within the 1994 romantic comedy Actuality Bites and Showtime’s historic drama The Good Lord Fowl in 2020.
“I’ve been a fan of Ethan’s for a long time,” David says. “He really is a wonderful actor. As my good friend Johnny C. McGinley would say, ‘You love somebody who throws the ball back at you!’ We just had a ball. I don’t know if we ever said the same thing twice. Sterlin is always throwing us a few alternative [lines] that wind up making wonderful sense.”
A standout second within the season comes within the finale, when Marty is grazed by a bullet after Lee makes an attempt a citizen’s arrest at a gathering of the white supremacist cult One Properly. He and Lee ransack a neighborhood feed and provide store for medical assist, which ends up in Lee doping Marty up with bovine vaginal muscle relaxers as a casual ache reliever. “Animals take medicine, too,” Lee calmly tells Marty, who retorts, “You don’t know shit about shit.” And as Harjo beforehand advised THR, “There’s just something about Keith David frustrated and cursing.” The hilarity of the scene, which was largely improvised, is a testomony to David’s self-professed dedication to not take himself “too seriously.”
David’s character, Brunner, flashes his PI badge.
Shane Brown/FX
The Lowdown, however, which landed on the American Movie Institute’s record of the highest 10 reveals of 2025, is in severe Emmy rivalry within the comedy classes, together with greatest supporting actor for David, who has received three Emmys for his voiceover and narration work in 2005, 2008 and 2016. The prospect of incomes his first performing Emmy nomination on the heels of his seventieth birthday, June 4, doesn’t faze the veteran performer.
“It’s always right on time. There’s your time, my time, and there’s God’s time,” he says. “And when you think about timing and ‘how long [it’s taken]’ and all that … time is a magazine. It happens when it’s supposed to happen.”
If something, the Emmy chatter is gas within the tank for David, who says, “I ain’t done yet,” referring again to his want record of roles, one other certainly one of which he might manifest for himself, revealing that he’s creating a narrative about previously enslaved abolitionist Frederick Douglass. He additionally wish to get in on Denzel Washington’s variations of August Wilson’s Century Cycle performs, citing his love of “language work,” and he says he would be part of his “dearest friend” and “hero” McGinley in season two of HBO’s Rooster “in a New York heartbeat.”
As for initiatives already on the docket, David will quickly be seen in his second PI position within the NBC half-hour office comedy Sundown P.I. alongside Jake Johnson and Langston Kerman, in addition to Grownup Swim’s animated Rick and Morty spinoff, President Curtis, by which he’ll voice the titular character, and the darkish comedy function My New Good friend Jim, co-starring Rob Lowe. Plus, there’s the second season of The Lowdown, which is filming in Tulsa.
“I used to want to be a preacher,” David muses whereas reflecting on his profession. “But acting is my ministry.”
This story first appeared in a June stand-alone problem of The Hollywood Reporter journal. To obtain the journal, click here to subscribe.
