The series finale of black-ish premiered Tuesday night, bringing a close to the extremely popular, successful, and influential ABC comedy starring Anthony Anderson and Tracee Ellis Ross that grapples with success and being Black in America, and most importantly, family.
Anderson recently opened up about being very emotional while filming the eighth and final season of the show in an interview on an upcoming episode of The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
Anderson reflects on emotional filming
When asked by DeGeneres if he cried during filming Anderson replied, ‘I did. I didn’t cry as much as Tracee Ellis Ross, though. She cried every day.”
He continued, saying that he was not expecting to be so emotional.
“Actually the last day, I think I cried a little bit more than [Ross] did, and I didn’t think it was going to hit me the way that it did,” he said. “Because we had been working up to that moment — we knew what the last day was. I had been prepping myself for it, and in the last scene on the last day is when I lost it, and it was unexpected for me. I didn’t expect to lose it the way that I did, but that just goes to show how much I love what I do [and] love doing it with the people that I did it with for the last eight years.”
Anderson also commented on the creation of the show with Kenya Barris and the show’s impact on the television landscape.
“When Kenya and I sat down almost 10 years ago now, we looked at what was missing from the landscape of television for us — he and I as viewers — and we wanted to make an important show that had an impact,” he said. “We took a page from Norman Lear‘s book with The Jeffersons, Good Times, All in the Family, and we wanted to do a show like that — a show that had social commentary, with unapologetic lead characters — and I believe we were successful.”
Anderson racked up seven Emmy nominations for best lead actor in a comedy series for his role as Andre “Dre” Johnson.
The series was nominated for Best Comedy series four times during its run. Ross spoke out last week about her own emotional experience saying goodbye to the beloved series, saying to DeGeneres:
“The whole season, I knew was the end, so I was very present and sort of aware of endings, even the things that bothered me but the last week I really said to myself, ‘Just let yourself feel whatever comes up,’ and I had a lot of tears. And it was also really wonderful to be able to take a moment. I was just talking to everybody and hearing their experience in the eight years and what about it was so special for them because we’ve been the same family for eight years, most of our crew is the same and everything’s so very emotional.”
The series finale of black-ish is now streaming on Hulu.
