Long before creating television, Deji LaRay was learning it from the inside. At 13, the Atlanta native was on stage in The Shadow Box, guest-starring on New York Undercover, and flying to New York solo for auditions. Three decades later, the résumé includes The Shield, Charmed, Without a Trace, and Bosch, but the most compelling chapter is the one Deji wrote.
In 2017, frustrated by how rarely television showed Black men with nuance, Deji and Thomas Q. Jones split the cost of an independent pilot for Johnson, a series about four friends navigating love, mental health, and accountability. When interested platforms suggested recasting for bigger names, the pair declined, keeping every actor who had worked on the pilot for next to nothing. Johnson went on to run four seasons, and Deji says the most meaningful response came from men who wrote in, sometimes paragraphs long, about how the show inspired them to repair relationships with their wives and fathers.
Today, Deji is the creator behind Grits and the Omarion-led assassin drama Wild Rose on ALLBLK, the streamer recently acquired by Macro. In our conversation, Deji reflects on Hollywood before self-tapes, an industry still settling after mergers and strikes, why vertical dramas haven’t found their footing yet, and why a story only matters when a human being is behind it.