Samantha Walkes in Cross, a new Amazon Prime Video series based on the James Patterson books.Keri Anderson/Amazon Prime
Samantha Walkes has seemed steps away from crossing over into stardom a couple of times before.
Now, the Canadian actor is on that precipice again thanks to her magnetic performance as Elle Monteiro in Cross, a new series from Amazon’s Prime Video based on James Patterson’s wildly popular thrillers about the Washington detective Alex Cross.
Showrunner Ben Watkins’s fresh take on the iconic Black policeman – shot in Toronto, with the Ontario capital standing in for the American one – dropped all eight episodes of its first season on Nov. 14.
Elle, a former athlete and educational charity executive director, is more than just the girlfriend of Cross, who has been played by Morgan Freeman and Tyler Perry in past films, and now is incarnated by the Straight Outta Compton actor Aldis Hodge.
“I was quite fearful when I first got the material that it was just a typical Hollywood love interest role, who doesn’t really have a life of her own that really truly sings,” Walkes says.
But she was pleased to discover Elle was one of a number of women in family man Cross’s life and work who exist as their own entities – and that she was written in a relatable way. “The complexities of being a woman, first, and then a Black woman in society – navigating that is always turbulent,” Walkes says, of what she felt she had in common with the character.
Alex Cross was first created by Patterson in 1993 – and has survived battles with baddies through 31 more novels that have sold more than 100 million copies since.
Watkins’s new TV version of Cross lives in a D.C. where contemporary racial politics are very recognizable. The first season opens with the death of a Black community activist – and, in between a hunt for a perverse serial killer, the characters engage in debates about defunding the police (which Elle, despite dating a cop, supports).
“My hope as Samantha, as an artist and as an activist myself, is that we continue the conversation,” Walkes says. “You bring it to the dinner table, and you continue to have these kinds of conversations that help us expand our knowledge of them – and, sometimes, not make it so heady and intellectual.”
Born and raised in Hamilton, Walkes is the child of immigrants – a mother from Guyana and a biological father from Barbados; her parents had a daunting 32-year age gap, which was one of the reasons their marriage didn’t last.
While she describes her mom as having essentially been both of her parents, Walkes’s initial artistic impulse came from her father, a honey-voiced soloist at her church, who, she says, sang like Nat King Cole.
Walkes began singing at church, too, and later went to Westmount Secondary School where she performed in high-school musicals. She was playing Maria in a community theatre production of The Sound of Music when her first big break almost came.
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?, a 2008 CBC reality competition in which Andrew Lloyd Webber searched for a lead for The Sound of Music, was auditioning – and her castmates encouraged her to apply. “I did tell them that I don’t think Canada is ready for a Black Maria,” she recalls.
And Walkes, just 19 then, was right. She was the only Black woman to make it to top 20, and there were no visible minority contenders in the top 10 – hard to imagine just 16 years later.
While Walkes has mixed feelings about that show, it was part of the impetus for her to study at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in L.A. and New York. A career primarily in theatre followed – with stints everywhere from the Shaw Festival to Halifax’s Neptune Theatre.
By 2020, Walkes’s musical-theatre career seemed like it was going to take that next step: She was living in Brooklyn, making her Broadway debut in The Book of Mormon and the producers of Moulin Rouge! had scouted her as a replacement for the female lead Satine; she had a chemistry read booked the week stages shut down.
“You go through all of that, you work so hard for that silver lining,” she says, recalling the disappointment.
Walkes – whose visa could not be renewed if she wasn’t working – picked herself up and, with her husband, returned to Canada, where she sought out additional coaching to pivot toward screen-based acting. “I wasn’t sure I could translate the way I tell a story on stage into film and TV,” she says. “It’s so much more intimate.”
Giving herself three months to audition before going to teacher’s college (she shares a passion for education with Elle), Walkes found work fairly quickly – as the recurring character Cassiopeia Bright on CBC’s Murdoch Mysteries, and on The Kings of Napa, a prime-time soap set in California wine country (but shot at Château des Charmes in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.) on OWN.
Now there’s Cross, which, if the popularity of the books translates to the small screen, will bring a whole new level of fame. A second season has already been shot – and it seems that Elle, unlike Cross’s wife, who dies in the opening moments of the show, is going to survive as Walkes is hopeful for a third season.
“Fingers crossed,” she says.