Hicks is the plain man in a film full of performers. His Jamie Overstreet in She's Gotta Have It is decent, dull and wounded, and the strongest of Nola's three suitors. Independent cinema kept casting him as the sensible grown-up, rarely as the lead.
Fi1m perspective
In She's Gotta Have It (1986), Nola has three men and two of them perform. Spike Lee's Mars talks until the word please becomes a drumbeat; John Canada Terrell's Greer folds his clothes, garment by garment, while she waits. Tommy Redmond Hicks's Jamie Overstreet does neither. He sits, he listens, and when he is hurt he lets it show without making a scene of it. Lee shot the film on next to nothing and much of the acting is rough; Hicks is the exception. The scenes of ordinary tenderness, the ones without a joke attached, are his, and we went in expecting to remember Mars and came out thinking about Jamie, because he was the only person in the film who seemed to want something he could name.
Lee had already used him in the student film Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983), as Nicholas Lovejoy, and wrote Jamie for him. Hicks has said of the part: "He was not hip and he was not a Ladies man, but he was not a complete 'square' either." That is the whole difficulty of it, and the whole achievement. An ordinary man wanting an ordinary relationship is the hardest thing to play opposite a show-off, and Hicks plays him without apology and without asking us to prefer him.
The leads mostly went elsewhere after that. He became a supporting player in independent Black cinema: Mr Snead in Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust (1991), Reverend Banks in Charles Burnett's The Glass Shield (1994), Officer Patterson in The Meteor Man (1993), with television work on Seinfeld, Charmed and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Burnett cast him four times and wrote parts for him, which tells you what a careful director saw. We have not reviewed those films and will not pretend to weigh them here.
What we can say is that the parts fit a pattern. Schoolteacher, minister, police officer, photographer: the grounded professional, the man other characters behave badly around. It is the Jamie type, carried into middle age, and it suits an actor who does not ask for attention and so tends to get less of it than he deserves. That is also the honest complaint about the career. A performance this good in a film this widely seen should have led to more leads, and it did not.
He has kept working on stage in Los Angeles, as an actor and as a dramaturg and director, and no screen credit is recorded after 2018. Watch She's Gotta Have It for Mars, as everyone does. Then watch it again for the man who is not trying to be watched.
Biography
Tommy Redmond Hicks is an American actor. He made his screen debut in Spike Lee's 1983 short film Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads and played Jamie Overstreet in Lee's feature debut She's Gotta Have It (1986).
His subsequent film roles include Daughters of the Dust (1991), The Five Heartbeats (1991), The Meteor Man (1993) and The Glass Shield (1994). He has appeared in television series such as Seinfeld, Martin, Charmed and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Hicks has also worked in theatre as an actor, dramaturg and director.
