‘Queen’s’ Dennis Haysbert Didn’t Use Logic to Get Show-Business Start

Dennis Haysbert obtained his first agent in a most unorthodox way.

“I really didn’t know what to do,” says the actor, who makes a big splash this week.

Haysbert stars opposite Michelle Pfeiffer in “Love Field,” a romantic drama set in 1963, which opened nationwide Friday. And in CBS’ six-hour miniseries “Alex Haley’s Queen,” which begins Sunday, he plays a defiant ex-slave who falls in love and fathers a child with Alex Haley’s grandmother.

While a student at Pasadena’s American Academy of Dramatic Arts, Haysbert naively picked up an agents’ guide and sent his resume to 100 agents.

“I figured the first one who called would be interested and that is who I would sign with,” he says. “I had one agent who called and that’s how I got started.”

Haysbert laughs. “It’s wild, I know,” he admits. “Who would have thunk it? If I was thinking in any kind of logical way, I don’t think I would have done it quite that way.”

He soon landed his first professional job playing a student on a “Lou Grant” episode. A regular on the short-lived ABC series “Off the Rack” and “Code Red,” Haysbert was featured in the movies “Major League,” “Navy SEALS” and “Mr. Baseball.”

In “Love Field,” he plays a man traveling in the South who falls in love with a married white woman. He admits it was frustrating that the film sat on the shelf for more than a year while Orion Pictures reorganized after filing for bankruptcy.

But he quickly realized he couldn’t sit around waiting for the film to open. “You come to the point where you do have to move forward. I just had to do (other projects) basically to keep busy. Fortunately, ‘Queen’ came my way. It was a pretty major coup. And having both of these (projects) in tandem is great!”