TV Jots

Roommates Star Chats Up Her New Gig

Remember Sister, Sister, the cute 1994–1999 sitcom starring young twins Tamera and Tia Mowry, alongside genre veterans Tim Reid and Jackée Harry? Although Tia currently stars on the junior CW sitcom The Game, it’s been three years since TV viewers have had the chance to watch Tamera regularly on Lifetime’s medical drama Strong Medicine, which ended in 2006. The situation is about to change, however, because ABC Family will premiere two new original comedies on March 23, one called Roommates and starring Tamera.

When the actress recently discussed the show in preparation for its debut, she gave up the inside goodies on what it’s all about, how she landed her role as Hope, and even if fans should start dreaming about a Sister, Sister-style reunion on a future episode. Read the revealing Q&A below to learn exactly what’s what.

How would you describe Roommates?

TAMERA MOWRY: Actually, ever since we shot the pilot, a lot of people who have seen the show, whether they’re in the audience or just family and friends, they compare us to Friends. And it puts pressure on us because Friends was obviously just an amazing, amazing show, but it also gives us a lot of encouragement. I tend to compare it to Friends in the sense of having five different characters meshing together and seeing how that works.

However, we’re not all friends in the beginning. We’re just roommates. The only friend that my character, Hope, is friends with is Katie, so that’s how I would describe it — just us experiencing life post-college. So, they’re younger than the characters of Friends because we’re just starting to embark on, I think, one of the most scariest moments of your life, which is basically post-college, just figuring out where do you fit in life, in general.

Since not every single character on the show were originally friends, how did they all come together to be roommates?

TAMERA MOWRY: Well, living in New York and not having much money, you tend to look for places. [Tommy Dewey's] character [James], it’s actually … his place. And Katie [Dorian Brown] and I went to college together, and we were just looking for a place to stay, and so he let us stay there. And then we just happened to have another roommate, so it was just kind of those things, you know, where you’re going through life and you need a place to stay and you see a bulletin, a board that says, “Roommates needed.” And that’s basically how it all started.

Even in real life, I know tons of people who aren’t friends with their roommates. They never even see them, actually. They wake up in the morning and they’re gone. They come back home, they’re gone. So, it’s kind of like that, but not, with this show. Obviously we’re forced to mesh us together and try to figure everybody out.

And I think that’s what makes the show so funny, because we are all distinctively different, and the casting director did, I think, did a wonderful job discovering that with these characters, because we all have something different to bring to the plate. And I think we’re all great in doing that. So, when you put us in a room, we all genuinely care for each other, so we just have fun.

Your character Hope is a career woman without a career. What is she looking to do?

TAMERA MOWRY: Well, Hope, the character, she wants to be in TV. She was a television executive. That is her ultimate goal. The thing is, Hope is very opinionated and she can be a little bit narcissistic, so that gets her in trouble a lot. So, because she really, really cares about what other people think about her, she hides the fact that she got fired and then she’s working as a barista because she wants her best friend to look up to her and she doesn’t want to lose that.

So, she definitely wants to be a television exec, and you never know. Maybe that will happen in the future, maybe not. Maybe she’ll embark on something new because you change careers maybe about eight times in your life I think they say.

How did you get the part? Did you audition for it?

TAMERA MOWRY: To tell you the truth, I did have to audition for it. I had to fight for it, but I totally believed in this character. I loved her. I loved her immediately. The first time I read the slides and I saw Hope, I was like, oh my God, I see myself, bits and pieces of myself in this character, and I know I can have fun playing her. So, I had to audition and then I had to do a test.

Auditioning is a very interesting process, but I had fun and I made the character my own because originally she was supposed to be this very mean-spirited individual, just bitter at the world. But doing comedy for years, I knew that you have to have a bit of like, a likability factor to her, so I made her fun but she just spoke her mind. And, actually, the producer, Michael Hanel, told me, he said, “That’s one of the main reasons why you booked the role. It’s because you put your own twist on it, and we saw that.”

What attracted you to the character in the first place?

TAMERA MOWRY: Well, you know what? I was really, really, really attracted to the script, mainly because I think we have a lack of the original formula of sitcoms and comedy nowadays. And I just loved Hope because she is just basically, “Miss Congeniality would like to have a word with you.”

She’s very nice, but she doesn’t take any mess, and that’s what attracted me to the character. I think she’s very talented. She just can be misguided at times, but she’s also very loving and she just cares for her best friend so much. She can be a bit overprotective, and I’m kind of like that in real life. So, I could somewhat relate to the character.

Where do you draw your inspiration from in the portrayal? Do you find a lot of it coming from your own life?

TAMERA MOWRY: In the sense that I’m just genuinely a very nice person but you just don’t cross me, kind of. And just like if you hurt my family or if you say something [about] my friends. I’m very opinionated, and I get that from my mom being a drill sergeant in the army.

So, I can draw a lot of those experiences to Hope, but a lot of the time I watched, well, Courteney Cox’s character on Friends and then Melinda on Sex and the City. So, I kind of like meshed those two characters together and drew a lot of my inspiration from that.

Since you’re filming in front of a live audience, you have their reactions. I’m sure it’s good for immediately knowing what people think, but how nerve-wracking is that?

TAMERA MOWRY: Oh, my God, to tell you the truth, I haven’t done comedy in ten years. Oh, God, that tells my age. So, going from doing [Lifetime's] Strong Medicine and doing single-camera stuff to four-camera, I literally thought I was going to throw up because you know immediately if a joke works and if it doesn’t. So, in your head, you’re like, “Oh my God, I hope this lands, I hope this lands.”

But what’s so great, I think, about our writers is they taught us to trust the material. So, they just put all the pressure on them. They were like, “You know what, just be real. Say the words, and if it doesn’t work, it’s not on you. It’s on us,” and then they’d change it. So, that helped a lot.

As we all know, you became famous acting with your twin sister Tia. How does working with your sister compare to working without her?

TAMERA MOWRY: Working with my sister, I have to say, is not work at all. We naturally have this chemistry. We always say we’ve been born with a yin and a yang kind of a thing, and we both have each other’s best interests at hand. So, we’re constantly— It’s a weird phenomenon, I have to tell you. When I’m working with Tia, it’s like she can automatically give me feedback because she’s looking at me, you know what I mean? And I’m looking at her, so we always help each other out.

We have that inside encouragement. So, if we’re doing a scene together and I feel that she needs to give me just a little bit more emotion or vice versa, we’re very, very comfortable with telling each other that whereas not working with her, I love my cast mates. Dorian Brown and I, we really clicked as just best friends, and we literally spend so much time together off set as well.

But the thing is, you have to find that chemistry at first. It’s not like just a natural thing, do you know what I mean? But I have to say, by doing other shows and working with other people, other than my sister, this had to have been the quickest that I found chemistry with the cast mates.

Did you and your sister get the lead roles on Sister, Sister right away or was it a long process?

TAMERA MOWRY: It was a very long process. However, we did pitch it. We didn’t have to audition for that role. That was one of the greatest things about meeting a producer called Irene Dreayer. She does The Suite Life of Zack and Cody. She did Sister, Sister. She did Smart Guy. She did Out All Night, and that’s where we met her because my brother [Tahj Mowry] was on that show with Morris Chestnut and Patti LaBelle, and she was like, “Okay, what do you guys want to do?”

And we were always fans of Parent Trap, the movie, and we said we wanted to do a show like that. And we looked at different twin books like Sweet Valley High. There was a show on TV at the time called Double Trouble, and we just liked the idea and pitched it to different networks at 14, not knowing what exactly we were doing, with just being ourselves and telling our life story , and just going in with our fingers crossed and prayers. And that’s basically how we got Sister, Sister.

Since you’ve been acting for a long time, along with your sister and your brother, were you ever worried about getting older and not being able to find certain jobs?

TAMERA MOWRY: Oh, yes. If anything, when you’re in it, you’re not worrying about it. But obviously, when the show ended, so did all the benefits. And people are like, “Oh, that’s the little kid from Sister, Sister,” and it was really hard to accept that.

But I’ll never forget — I don’t know if it was Tatyana Ali or Neil Patrick Harris that said you have to allow yourself to be forgotten in the sense that, live your life. Naturally grow up. So, I went to college. I traveled the world, and then when I came back, because of my life experiences, it naturally happened.

I didn’t have to take off my clothes or do something crazy in order for people to see that I’m an adult now. But it was a very hard transition, I’m not going to lie. I was out of work for at least two years, and then I hadn’t got a series in four until I did Strong Medicine.

Would you like your sister Tia to guest star on Roommates in the future?

TAMERA MOWRY: Well, my sister and I made a pact because we did a show for six years together, we’re going to leave it that way. I didn’t guest star in The Game and she doesn’t want— Well, not that she doesn’t want to. We think it’s safe for her not to guest star in Roommates. However, we want to do feature films and movies together.

Do you have any other projects coming up besides Roommates?

TAMERA MOWRY: My sister and I are doing a movie for Lifetime called The Wedding. It’s from a production company, Twilight Productions. It’ll be our first project, so we’re really, really, really, really, really excited about that.