Heroes star Leonard Roberts has revealed the racist origins of his character, D.L. Hawkins. The NBC series about ordinary people who developed superpowers starred Milo Ventimiglia, Hayden Panettiere, Zachary Quinto, Masi Oka, and more. The show was a juggernaut hit in its first season but lost steam after the 2007 Writers' Strike cut season 2 short. The show was still popular enough to generate a rebooted miniseries in 2015, five years after the original series went off the air.
Roberts appeared in season 1 as D.L. Hawkins, Niki Sanders's (Ali Larter) husband, and Micah's (Noah Gray-Cabey) father. The trio was one of several super-powered families in the series; Micah could manipulate technology, while Niki had a super-strong alter ego. D.L. could phase through solid matter, which helped him escape prison, but unfortunately didn’t save him from being shot and killed off early in the second season.
In an essay for Variety, Roberts explained the behind-the-scenes tensions that lead to his exit from the show and gave insight into the original intentions for his character. The actor explained that an early draft of the pilot described D.L. as "a white man’s nightmare." Variety obtained a copy of the draft and confirmed the description.
Roberts doesn’t elaborate on this early iteration of D.L., but he did recall finding "a connection to the character that didn’t traffic in stereotypes" during the audition process. However, as the series moved into production, his introduction in the pilot was pushed off to episode 2 and eventually delayed to episode 6. As the season went on, the role "kept getting smaller," and Roberts experienced other microaggressions, like being "relegated to the back and sides of photo after photo" in promotional materials.
Eventually, D.L. was fatally killed by a gunshot wound, a plot point Roberts found "as perplexing as it was ironic" considering his superpower should have allowed the bullet to pass through his body harmlessly. His character’s permanent death is all the more perplexing considering how many times his onscreen wife was killed and yet still managed to return to the show, sometimes as a whole new character.
Of course, Larter was a "hot blonde," as one of Roberts’s castmates pointed out, and so Niki was treated very differently than D.L. The Variety essay makes clear that not only was Roberts mistreated as an actor, but D.L. was also mishandled as a character because of his race. While Heroes creator Tom Kring still touts the series' diversity and inclusivity, it’s obvious the writers and producers had a glaring blind spot when it came to their Black characters.
Source: Variety
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