Skye P. Marshall was 27, she’d done the sensible things — gone to college, paid for by a stint in the U.S. Air Force — and now she sat in a cubicle in New York City, a tiny cog in a pharmaceutical marketing behemoth.
Is this all there is? she wondered back in 2009.
So the Chicago native prayed. Her answer came in a “crystal clear” dream, she says.
“It was me acting and it was in L.A.,” Marshall recalled.
She headed west, invigorated but worried that she was throwing it all away to “play make-believe in La La land.”
Marshall needn’t have been. She’s had steady work in Hollywood since 2017 and is now starring alongside Oscar winner Kathy Bates on CBS’ “Matlock,” premiering at 8 p.m. Thursday on WBBM-Channel 2 after a preview episode drew strong ratings last month. It’s a kinda-kinda-not reboot of the 1980s TV show of the same name.
That isn’t the Hollywood ending, though (more on that later).
Like all intriguing plots, Marshall’s life has lurched and veered. Her childhood was a “riches to rags” story. She was born in the Uptown neighborhood but soon moved to the East Coast, her father working as a doctor and the family often the only Black one in whatever elite neighborhood they called home.
When Marshall was 12, “we lost it all,” she says.
“My father just was not mentally capable of managing the finances properly because he had a head injury,” Marshall said.
Her mother brought Marshall and her two siblings back to Chicago, where Mom taught school.
“The only option she had was to return back to her family in Chicago and she had to start from scratch,” Marshall said.
Don’t worry, her mother said, one day we’ll live in a house again. But that didn’t happen, Marshall says. An apartment was all they could afford.
Marshall declined to say more about her father’s circumstances, other than that he still lives on the East Coast in Virginia.
Marshall’s performance bug played out in hip-hop dance troupes that battled other groups in school gymnasiums and elsewhere across the city. Her troupe even opened for rappers Missy Elliott and Lil’ Kim.
Marshall graduated from Lincoln Park High School, where she was prom queen in 1999.
“I actually thought that was going to mean something in life,” she joked.
When she quit her corporate job in New York after just two years, she wasn’t entirely new to acting. She’d studied theater in college. She took classes at Stella Adler Center for the Arts in New York as well as a Second City workshop in Chicago.
“It was a hobby and it was a therapeutic release,” she said.
Marshall often talks about the challenges of being Black in Hollywood. Harder still, she says, is landing desired roles when your skin is darker than, say, Halle Berry’s.
“I lie in the sun to see how dark I possibly can get,” Marshall says. “But it wasn’t always like that. There were times when I was 12, 13 years old, using lightening cream … because I was tired of young boys saying to me, ‘You’re pretty to be so dark.’ “
She honed her craft as a “background” actor for several years. The #OscarsSoWhite social justice movement helped open doors, she said.
Her first starring role was in 2010 in an indie horror film called “Reservation.”
She remembers having a “chemistry read” with Kathy Bates for “Matlock,” and looking around at the other actors in the room vying for her role — actors with more impressive resumes.
Marshall took a chance, she said, asking before the audition if she could hug Bates.
“I said to myself, ‘If she could just feel my heart pounding out of my chest … if she could just feel that I was made for this character,’ then maybe they could overlook (the thin resume),” Marshall said.
Marshall got the hug and landed the role of Olympia, a corporate lawyer who — against her wishes — takes on a new subordinate, Bates’ character, Madeline Matlock, a 70-something lawyer who needs a job at the firm (for reasons that become clear later in the show).
“She’s a master class of my craft,” Marshall says of Bates. “She’s an incredible human being.”
It’s less acting and more of a conversation when she’s in a scene with Bates, Marshall says, describing her as the “easiest” actor she’s ever worked with.
It’s been a hectic — and heartbreaking — few months for Marshall. She lost a number of good friends from the acting world, including Richard Roundtree, most famous for the “Shaft” films. He died in October 2023.
She recently wrapped up filming the (hoped-for) first season of “Matlock.” In June, she married fellow actor Edwin Hodge.
And earlier this month, her mother, Patricia Marshall, finally moved into a house purchased by her daughter in the Oak Lawn area, after so many years in apartments.
“It was a 30-year goal and, thanks to ‘Matlock,’ I was able to accomplish it,” Marshall said. “It was such a confirmation for me that everything I did led to this moment and, as a daughter, I’ve completed my mission.”