Actress With Local Ties Perform in Drama Series For Second Season

Tamberla Perry portrays Dr. Carol Pierce in NBC’s Brilliant Minds. Photo by Pief Weyman.
Tamberla Perry portrays Dr. Carol Pierce in NBC’s Brilliant Minds. Photo by Pief Weyman.

Actress With Local Ties Perform in Drama Series For Second Season

By Tia Carol Jones

NBC’s Brilliant Minds is well into its second season. The drama about Dr. Oliver Wolf and his unconventional methods of treating his patients first premiered on the network in September of 2024. Tamberla Perry portrays Dr. Carol Pierce, which is loosely based by Dr. Carol E. Burnett. In real life, Burnett was a colleague of Dr. Oliver Sacks, who Zachary Quinto’s character Dr. Wolf is inspired by.

At the end of the first season, Perry’s character found herself going through a divorce, she had been put on temporary leave from her job and was experiencing fractures in her friendships. In the second season, Perry’s Dr. Pierce is navigating the divorce and figuring out her next steps, including finding out who reported her at the hospital, which caused her to be placed on temporary leave.

“This season we really get to see how she’s handling all of that,” Perry said.

Perry auditioned for the role of Dr. Carol Pierce in February of 2023. She said she read the script and knew she wanted the role. She said the character spoke to her, as did the show and the stories it was trying to tell. She said the show featured the types of doctors that audiences would want to have treating them, doctors who actually listened to their patients and went above and beyond to figure out what was wrong with their patients.

Three auditions later, they called her and she booked the show. Because Perry’s character is loosely based on a real-life person and there isn’t a lot of information about Dr. Burnett, she had to learn about Burnett from reading books written by Oliver Sacks. Perry did a deeper dive and found articles about Burnett being a pioneer in the medical field during the 1970s and 1980s.

“It’s really an honor to be able to tell this story through our creator and showrunner’s eyes because we need to know that Black folks were out here doing stuff for a long time, in all industries, and Carol Burnett was one of them,” she said.

Perry added that playing Dr. Carol Pierce is cool because she is not completely tethered to a person, since the character is loosely based on Burnett. It gives Perry an opportunity to create who the character is and give her a life of her own through Perry’s eyes.

Each case on Brilliant Minds is taken from real life cases, studies or research done by Sacks. Episode 9, which aired on Monday, Nov. 24th, featured Eric Dane portraying a firefighter with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

It was the first acting role for Dane since his own ALS diagnosis. This was also an episode that Perry was able to shadow direct, which enabled her to act in her scenes, shadow the director and work closely with Dane. She said it was truly amazing.

Perry said that for the second season, Brilliant Minds is continuing to tell rich, heartwarming, relatable stories, in a different way. She said they want the audience to feel hopeful about whatever they might be going through and know there is a light on the other side.

“We also want our audiences to know that we see them. their stories we want to bring to light and let them know that they are not alone,” she said.

Perry said she gets so many messages at the end of the episodes telling her how much the story resonated with people. She said each time she gets those messages, she smiles and thinks to herself, "we've done it again, we've done our job."

Brilliant Minds is on NBC at 10 p.m. Eastern, 9 p.m. Central on Monday.

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