Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
During a late August afternoon, after dodging those pesky summertime thunderstorms, Jerry Ferrara and I sat at a high top table, safely tucked into a corner of Mustang Harry’s just steps away from Madison Square Garden. It’s the venue where his beloved New York Knicks will resume playing next month, and just a few hours after our conversation, where Billy Joel would also be playing (the piano, not basketball). While Joel fans filled the restaurant in anticipation of the show (and his music blared in the background), Ferrara and I were there to discuss an event that occurred the week before at the World’s Most Famous Arena, the premiere of the sixth and final season of Power.
“I equate Power to basically being a live sporting event,” he said of the Starz series on which he’s played attorney Joe Proctor since the second season. “We were there with 13,000 people, and people cheered, people booed, people were shouting and heckling. It was a sporting event. I don’t know how many shows you could do that with.”
Ferrara originally met with Power creator Courtney Kemp during the show’s first season, and as he recalls, “She said to me, ‘I want to work with you, I think that there’s a lot more to you than what we’ve seen from Entourage and I want to show people that. I’m gonna write you something.’ I remember being flattered but also thinking, I’ve heard that so many times in my career, ‘Oh we should work together,’ and nothing ever really comes of it.” But, and if she hasn’t already proven this with the success of Power and its future spinoffs to come, Kemp continues to be the exception to the rule. “About a year later she calls like, ‘Hey I got this character I wrote, I had you in mind, it’s the criminal defense attorney, Joe Proctor. It’s not a lot stuff out of the gate but it is going somewhere. This guys gonna be like consigliere one day.'” Ferrara was intrigued, and she sent over some scenes he could only describe as “Courtney-level awesome.” But perhaps even better than her writing was her skill for seeing something different in him as an actor. “Sure enough, little by little, each year she increased the role and here we are now, I’ve been on for five years. She’s probably the only person that ever did the whole, ‘We should work together,’ thing and meant it and made it happen.”
Proctor’s not a typical lawyer, he’s not on great terms with his ex, and when he’s not caring for his daughter, he’s doing his best to cover his ass — and those of his clients, namely James “Ghost” St. Patrick (Omari Hardwick) who has relied on him to slip out of trouble with the law time and time again. Not many people would immediately think of the guy that played Turtle from Entourage to fill the role of a slick lawyer with parenting responsibilities on the side, but it was a brilliant and effective move and one that you can go ahead and add to the list of ways Power continues to subvert expectations.
“I think [Kemp] also enjoys spotting stuff in people and then getting the chance to show it and be like, I saw this,” Ferrara said. “And she was right. People have really grown to care about Proctor in a way I never thought was possible. I didn’t even know if I was fully worthy and capable but her confidence in me helped make me have the confidence in myself.”
An acting hurdle early on for Ferrara came in the form of “intimidating” courtroom scenes, filled with lots of dialogue containing legal banter that at times he wasn’t even sure what he was saying. “I remember calling Courtney being like, I don’t really know what prosecutorial malfeasance is.” He assures me he does now and credits her encouragement to equate those scenes with a theater performance for the lawyer. “When Proctor’s in the courtroom, he’s over the top with his performance, it’s not just making a legal argument, it’s theater. And that’s how I really started to get him.”
He also looked to co-star Lela Loren for advice, as she encouraged him to “overprepare” a word rarely used between actors. But she advised him to become comfortable enough with the challenging lines to truly make them his own. And as far as his co-star’s death in the first episode of this season? “As someone who watches the show, it’s one of the most shocking deaths in television ever, I think. It’s very rewarding on that level, but the friend part of it is like, I miss you!”
While Loren is hardly the first nor the last actor to be killed off from the show, when it comes to their own characters’ demise, Ferrara says that “I think every person who’s ever been on Power has worried about that. That’s part of what makes this show so entertaining. Anybody could get it at any time and that’s the ultimate truth-teller of the show. The cool part about it is it could be someone you love or love to root against, there are no rules. Yeah, I’ve worried about it, and pretty much from when I came on it was a thought.”
Ferrara has been a fan of the show since before he joined the cast, tuning in on Sundays to watch the episodes and following along on social media, which he says is “compelling to see their takes and what they’re responding to or not responding to. It’s really helpful as an actor and storyteller.” He also rarely sees the episodes before they air. With the exception of the scenes he sees during his ADR process, his only other insight into an episode’s storylines comes from the show’s table reads, which he describes as “very important,” and occur about a week before the episode is filmed. “You don’t miss them unless there are extreme circumstances,” he said. “Courtney and the writers and producers put a lot of stock into hearing the scripts being read, seeing what works and what doesn’t, and it’s taken very seriously. People are trying to be performance ready.” He explained that it’s not always like that with other TV shows, but that he did make a conscious effort to be on his A-game during Entourage reads as well so that Turtle’s jokes didn’t land flat and get removed from the script.
“There’s great food and everybody’s there and it’s pretty relaxed,” he said, also pointing to the event as being a chance to meet with each episode’s director. “I love the table read experience because it’s helpful for me too. You’re seeing what every character’s going through. At the end there’s an applause and then people are wiping sweat off their brow. It’s intense, we feel it.” Sometimes the gathering also serves as an opportunity to say goodbye to any characters killed off. Ferrara wasn’t in attendance (only because his character wasn’t in the episode) when J.R. Ramirez’s character Julio was killed off during Season 4 and didn’t learn the news until a week later.
“I really think it’s the best character I’ve ever had the opportunity to play,” Ferrara said genuinely of Proctor. “It’s definitely the deepest, the more layered character and it’s tremendously rewarding.” He expressed feeling more confident in the role of Proctor, knowing that what he’s bringing to the character is “real” as opposed to times during Entourage when he admitted, “I struggled sometimes thinking I could’ve been funnier.”
For a while it seemed as though the Turtle moniker would follow Ferrara around for much of his career, but he’s already seen the shift towards Proctor. “I’ll even get people in a meeting say, ‘Oh are you good with comedy, do you do comedy?’ I was on a comedy for eight years.” He appreciates the respect he gets for playing Proctor, especially compared to the reaction for his character on Entourage, which he says, “I got respect but it was almost like people didn’t think I was acting. Like, Oh you must be that guy, whereas Power it’s looked at as a performance.”
There’s no better proof of this than the day Ferrara went for a stroll in Brooklyn with his wife, actress Breanne Racano Ferrara, and was recognized as Turtle on one street, yet just a few blocks over was recognized as Proctor. Racano pointed out to him that “there’s a whole street we walk down that people didn’t know who Turtle was, they know you as Proctor. And there’s a whole street where people didn’t know who Proctor was but you were Turtle to them.” Ferrara said, “It’s cool that it happened within 10 minutes of each other and they don’t know about each other.” He’s still a bit confused as to how he’s been theoretically typecast twice in his career, as two very, very different TV characters, but nonetheless states, “I’m proud of it.”
Ferrara, 39, was born in Brooklyn and moved back in 2017, the same year he got married and just ahead of shooting Season 5, after 20 years in LA. Ferrara and Racano first met briefly in the hair and makeup trailer of Entourage when she guest-starred in an episode during Season 8. They ran into each other again over a year later at a mutual friend’s party where Ferrara confesses, “I remember thinking, Yeah, that’s a girl that’s way out of my league. I thought there’s no shot that would never happen. Dreams can come true!” It was a few months later that they met again, exchanged numbers, and this past May the couple welcomed baby Jacob. The premiere was the first night they didn’t get to put the baby to bed, but Ferrara has been thoroughly enjoying the time away from work with his son right now, lighting up when he talks about changing diapers and giving early morning bottles.
He’ll preface statements about his wife and Power, but especially about his wife, with things like “I’m not just saying this,” but it’s unnecessary. He’s a good actor, but there’s a no-BS, thoroughly New Yorker vibe about him and the honesty comes through in his voice when he tells me that she’s “definitely the better half” and that he’s rooting for her more than himself to land a role that she’s really passionate about, admiring her work ethic and admitting he’s learned a lot about what it’s like to be a woman in the industry. He even happily offers, “I would stay home with that kid, kiss you goodbye, go make that money, we’ll be here.”
Ferrara says he would love to work with his wife on-screen, and got a lot of insight into that process and how they work together as a team when they did the Bad 4 Business podcast together, put on hold about a year ago which he simply credits to his inability to multitask. His son’s birth has inspired an idea for a project he keeps “coming back to,” but his plate isn’t so empty at the moment.
He’s currently working with Kemp on a show for HBO tentatively titled “Dirty 30” which came about through their mutual interest in ’80s mob stories. “I really got to learn a lot because I saw Courtney in action before the script was written,” he said, going on to marvel at watching her “while the ideas are happening” and as she was pitching the idea to the network. They’re producing it together, and while he hopes to potentially act in the project, he’s happy soaking it all up at the moment. “It’s the first time I’ve been billed as a producer and I worked on it from the ground up, I wasn’t brought on later as an actor. She’s a force, man. I told her, I’m gaining in watching you do your thing behind the scenes, that’s really the value for me. I think it stands a really good chance of being one of the next great Courtney projects.”
For now, Ferrara is accepting the “bittersweet” process of the final season of Power. “You’re happy from what you’ve accomplished and you’re also excited for what’s next. But for me, I hope I get to feel something like this again because this is phenomenal.” He said goodbye to a series once before with Entourage, which he says he’d happily return to “for the excuse to go hang out with them and get paid” but ultimately does not anticipate will happen. “I think that we really did exhaust those characters,” pointing out that due to apps like Uber, “Turtle would be out of a job, he’s a driver!” He’d love to see an Entourage reboot with a different cast, especially in today’s world, considering social media hardly existed when the show originally premiered on HBO 15 years ago.
As he reflects on Power, he’s sure to compliment the cast, crew, and the “most intense, loyal fans,” of a show he describes as “One of the biggest success stories for any show. It took a minute, but now I think it’s finally getting its shine.” He acknowledges that for the final batch of episodes, the entire group “went into it knowing it was the last season and saying we have to go out with a bang and entertain these fans. Everybody really wanted to really stick the landing and I hope everybody’s happy. It really was a privilege to be Joe Proctor.”
