Age: 45
male
Lance Darnell Gross (born July 8, 1981) is an American actor, producer and photographer. He's best known for his roles as Calvin Payne on TBS' House of Payne, Tyrique Freeman on Fox's Our Kind of People, Maurice Jetter on Fox’s Star, Billy Colton on the CBS remake of MacGyver, Marcus Finley on the NBC drama Crisis, Daniel Reynolds on Fox’s Sleepy Hollow, Brice in the Tyler Perry film Temptation, Sammy in the Lifetime remake of Steel Magnolias, Marcus Boyd in the movie Our Family Wedding alongside America Ferreira, and Michael Brown in Meet the Browns. He is the first actor to win four NAACP Image Awards for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series for his role on Tyler Perry’s House of Payne. Gross starred in TV One’s “When Love Kills: The Felicia Blakely Story” directed by Tasha Smith, the BET anthology series “Tales: Trap Queen” directed by Benny Boom, and BET’s “The Bobby Brown Story.” He is also the creator, producer and star of the MACRO digital series “I Turned My Camera On” on Essence, which combined his love of photography with a series of celebrity interviews. The series featured Michael B. Jordan, Omari Hardwick and Kelly Rowland, among others.
Lance Gross
Hephaestus
for Hephaestus in Aphrodite: The Architecture of Love
Suggested by mr95
A character-driven series placing Aphrodite — deeply misunderstood by popular culture — at its center, exploring her as a fully realized deity rather than a symbol of vanity. The series portrays her faithfully to classical sources: she is a goddess of genuine creative and procreative power, the force that draws things together, not simply a beautiful face. The series explores several stories simultaneously: her complicated marriage to Hephaestus, her love for Ares, her creation of Psyche's trials (examined here with genuine moral complexity rather than simple cruelty), and her role in the Trojan War through her promise to Paris. Each episode explores a different dimension of love: desire, grief, creative love, parental love, obsessive love, steadfast love. The series argues that Aphrodite is perhaps the most misread of all the gods — not superficial but foundational, the force without which nothing in the cosmos would ever reach toward anything else.
