Anthony Anderson takes on aliens — on film

Miki Turner Entertainment writer

LOS ANGELES - Six years ago, when a still virtually unknown Anthony Anderson was shooting scenes for a forgettable comedy called “Kingdom Come” in South Central Los Angeles, the chubby gap-toothed actor came barreling into his dressing room past me and the film’s publicist moaning and groaning.

“You’ve got to wait a minute,” he said. “I’ve got to go to the bathroom. I ate some bad (stuff).”

Craft Services can be a little harsh on the digestive system.

These days, however, Anderson has his meals catered in posh, five-star suites, and has appeared in more memorable films such as “Barbershop,” “Hustle & Flow,” “The Departed” and his latest, “Transformers,” which hits theaters July 2.

If you have no idea what that big-budget Michael Bay film is about — which is understandable since there’s been so little buzz about it — longtime “Transformers” fan Anderson is more than happy to fill you in.

“It’s about me saving the universe single-handedly with a few of these robot things,” Anderson, 36, joked during an exclusive interview over lunch in his hotel suite.

In actuality he had some help — lots of it — from Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson, Jon Voight, John Tuturro, Rachel Taylor and others who played a role in helping the Autobots recover their “Allspark” (life source) from Earth before the enemy Decepticons could use it against them. Anderson plays Glen Whitman, a computer geek who has been recruited by a co-worker (Taylor) to decipher the Decepticons computer lingo.

“I had to be a part of this movie,” Anderson said after taking a bite of his grilled vegetable panini. “I grew up playing with Transformers — Optimus Prime and Megatron and all these guys. This is like pop culture iconoscism to the nth degree.

“Plus it’s an action film with two brothers in it and neither of us die within the first five minutes! But they killed the black robot! They killed Jazz. So a brother did die!”

From flatlands to hills of Beverly
The flesh and blood brother Anderson was referring to is Gibson, his homeboy from South L.A. Although they had no scenes together, the two friends spent their down time talking about how far they had come since the days of their transformation from the inner city flatlands to the hills of Beverly.

“We sat and talked about the dream that both of us have had respectively, coming from where the both of us come from — him from Watts and me from Compton, and where we are in our careers now and where we will be. How can we take what we’ve accomplished and what we have yet to accomplish and bring that back to the hood in a grassroots type of way to foster the young community there now?” Anderson said.

This month Anderson will move his wife and two kids into a new community. The Howard University alum is relocating to New Orleans to shoot his new Fox drama “K-Ville.” In it Anderson plays a cop distressed by what’s going on, as well as what’s not going on in his lower Ninth Ward neighborhood in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It doesn’t help that he’s patrolling those dangerous streets with a partner who has a rather dubious past.

“K-Ville” is actually Anderson’s second foray into series television. His first show, a semi-autobiographical sitcom he created called “All About the Andersons,” was cancelled by The WB after only 16 episodes in 2004.

“I initially got back into television because I felt like it was something that I wanted to do,” Anderson said. “And I didn’t feel like I quite did it the way I wanted to do it with ‘All About the Andersons.’ The wrong network, the wrong time for that show. So, I created another show and sold it to Fox and we were going down the development road with that. They didn’t pick it up, but they gave me K-Ville.

“And so, it’s a one-hour drama. It’s something different for me as the lead on that show. I was part of a drama with ‘The Shield’ but you know, it was time to show a different light and this was the best opportunity. I wanted to do television just because you can have a life.”

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