Louis Gossett Jr. on 'Roots,' Working With Sidney Poitier and His Fight Scene With Richard Gere (Exclusive)
etonline.comLouis Gossett Jr. is looking back on his iconic work. The actor sat down with ET to reflect on his most influential work, including the iconic ABC miniseries It's been 45 years since the eight-episode series hit the network and, as Gossett says, «woke people up.»The 1977 miniseries, based on Alex Haley's 1976 novel, , follows the journey of an African man who is enslaved and shipped to North America, and his descendants.
Gossett starred as an older enslaved man named Fiddler alongside a bevy of well-known faces, including LeVar Burton, Cicely Tyson, Ben Vereen, John Amos, Madge Sinclair and more.
The series won nine of its 37 Emmy Award nominations, as well as a Golden Globe and a Peabody Award. It holds the record for the third-highest-rated episode for any type of television series, and the second-most-watched overall series finale in U.S.
television history. is now available to watch on Digital, Blu-Ray and streaming on HBO Max. But before it earned all the praise and acclaim, Gossett reveals that ABC producers were apprehensive about how Americans would receive the short series.«I remember [executives] deciding that it shouldn't be on once a week because the South would object,» he recalls. «So they decided to put it on one day at a time for [8] straight days.
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