Thoms, Tracie

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Thoms, Tracie

1975—

Actor

Tracie Thoms won one of the most coveted roles of 2005 when she was cast in the film version of the long-running Broadway musical Rent. The Pulitzer-winning story garnered legions of fans after its 1996 stage debut, and Thoms was among its most ardent admirers. Like many who saw the play several times and memorized every song lyric, she liked Rent's multicultural tale of struggling artists in New York City. "Rent is not a play Blacks and Latinos generally think is for them," she pointed out, however, to Essence writer Tracy E. Hopkins. "They think it's rock music." As a Howard University student back in 1996, Thoms had that very reaction when she first heard the original cast recording. "I didn't like it," she confessed, but "After I saw the play, I couldn't stop listening to the soundtrack."

A native of Baltimore, Maryland, Thoms was born on August 19, 1975. As a youngster, she was fascinated by the junior version of Star Search, a weekly television series of the 1980s based around a ruthless amateur talent competition. "I watched it and thought, ‘I could do that,’" she told Beth Stevens in an interview that appeared on the Web site Broadway.com. By her teen years, Thoms was an accomplished enough singer,

dancer, and actor to win a spot at the local performing arts high school, the Baltimore School for the Arts. After graduation 1993, she headed to Washington, D.C., to enroll at Howard University.

Moved to New York City

It was during Thoms's time at Howard that she first saw Rent, driving up to New York with her boyfriend to see it. The musical opened in early 1996 and went on to win several Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and even the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for drama. Based on the well-known 1896 opera La Bohème from Giacomo Puccini, Rent featured the same struggling community of artists Puccini sketched in his 1830s-Paris-set work, but Rent's decimating disease became AIDS, not tuberculosis, in the modern version, and its young, impoverished idealists were denizens of New York City's East Village. The rock musical was a tremendous hit, and it quickly developed a cult following—Thoms among them. "It was the fact that there was this group of people who loved each other and they were like this makeshift family, dealing with issues that were present at the time," she explained to Los Angeles Daily News journalist Evan Henerson about the pull of the story on her at the time. "They just came together and worked through it."

After graduating with her B.F.A. from Howard University, Thoms participated in a drama program in England, which led to an invitation to apply to the Juilliard School. Considered one of the top performing arts graduate schools in the world, the New York City institution has rigorous entrance standards and an accomplished faculty. Her experience there was crucial to her early career, she told writer Sabina Dana Plasse of the Baltimore magazine Smart Woman. "They really tried to keep me grounded at Julliard and taught me how to be my own best critic of what I do," she explained. "Everybody has their own journey, and I had to learn to be really honest with myself when I felt like I was copping out. I was challenged in a way that I have never been challenged."

Rent, meanwhile, was still running on Broadway, and Thoms auditioned several times when she learned of an open slot in the original production or for the national touring company. She never made the cut, however, but she did begin to land other work in television and film. After appearing on a short-lived UPN sitcom called As If in 2002, she had similar luck with a Fox series called Wonderfalls that debuted in 2004. In the latter show, she was cast as the best friend to the lead character, played by Caroline Dhavernas, who works as a cashier in a tourist souvenir store at Niagara Falls. That job and their friendship were complicated when inanimate objects in the store begin talking to Dhavernas's character. Critics liked Wonderfalls, but it was axed by the network after its first season.

Won Dream Role

Thoms made her feature film debut with a small role in an acclaimed independent film project, Brother to Brother, in 2004. The film's story centered around a young man, played by Anthony Mackie, who befriends an elderly fellow who was part of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. Thoms knew Mackie from their days together at Juilliard, and she appeared with him again in her Broadway debut, Drowning Crow, that same year. The play was an updated version of Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, with the setting changed from late nineteenth-century rural Russia to the present-day Sea Islands of South Carolina. She played the drug-addicted girlfriend of Mackie's C-Trip; their relationship is tested by a visit from his meddlesome mother, a famous television star played by Alfre Woodard.

Thoms finally received her chance to appear in Rent when she was cast in the 2005 film version as Joanne Jefferson, the lesbian attorney who becomes romantically involved with Maureen, a performance artist who leaves her filmmaker boyfriend for Joanne in one of the show's central plotlines. All of the original Broadway cast members appeared in the film except for Fredi Walker-Browne, the original Joanne, and Daphne Rubin-Vega, who played Mimi the stripper and drug addict, a part offered to Rosario Dawson. The two newcomers, Thoms and Dawson, quickly bonded during shooting and became close friends, spending their free time hunting around Internet chat rooms devoted to the cult-favorite musical. "Tracie and I were on those fan sites all the time," Dawson told Henerson in the Daily News article. "Our issue was being new and the fans being so voracious and such fans of what originally was, and not wanting it to be touched."

The film version of Rent earned some dismal reviews, with most critics faulting producers for keeping an original cast that was well into their 30s by that point, which seemed to diminish the believability factor in reprising their roles as young, struggling artists. The movie did open other doors for Thoms, however, and she began appearing on the CBS detective series Cold Case as narcotics agent Kat Miller in late 2005. In 2006, she had a supporting role in The Devil Wears Prada, the fashion-magazine comedy that starred Anne Hathaway and Meryl Streep; Thoms played Hathaway's on-screen best friend. She and Dawson appeared together in the 2006 drama Descent, and Thoms won her first starring role in Jimmie in 2007. Jimmie is a romantic comedy about a woman who chooses to forge ahead with her career after one particularly devastating breakup, and is stunned to find that same ex-boyfriend is her new boss several years later. Thoms also appeared in Grindhouse, a 2007 joint effort from directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez.

At a Glance …

Born Tracie Nicole Thoms, August 19, 1975, in Baltimore, MD. Education: Howard University, BFA, 1997(?), Juilliard School, MFA, 2001(?).

Career:

Stage, screen, and television actress, 2002-.

Addresses:

Office—c/o Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), 51 West 52nd St, New York, NY 10019.

Thoms lives in Harlem, but has returned to her hometown on occasion to help with benefit events for her alma mater, the Baltimore School for the Arts. She was happy to have been so busy during the first decade of her career, but looked forward to more challenges on both the stage and screen. "My dream role has not even been written yet because there are so many stereotypes out there," she told Plasse in the Smart Woman interview. "[When] you see black women in TV and film or theater, we have two extremes of experience—we still have the ghetto chick around and then we have this new thing which is a fierce fabulous altogether woman—the super-woman—the lawyer, the doctor who always tells it like it is and doesn't take anything from anybody. In the middle, lies a person—a human being."