LaMonica Garrett Talks Lioness New Season, 1883, 49ers, SlamBall, More w/Rich

LaMonica Garrett has one of the more improbable resumes in Hollywood, and it starts with a FedEx route.

Before he played Tucker on Lioness, before 1883, Garrett was delivering packages to the Warner Brothers lot. Everybody Loves Raymond. ER. Friends. He kept headshots in the back of the truck, just in case.

"Everyone loves the FedEx guy," Garrett said. "I'm bringing all the props." Nobody ever asked him to read for anything. Years later he was working on that same lot, and the security guards were the same guys.

"Man, you did it," they told him.

The path there ran through a sport most people have forgotten. Garrett played college football, worked out for pro teams, and when that did not happen he moved to Los Angeles. He answered what he assumed was a casting call for a TV show and discovered it was Slamball, an actual new sport looking for actual players.

"I still got the bug in me," Garrett said. "Let's do it." He earned the nickname the Machine, which he attributes to a relentless motor and a fondness for hitting people, having played linebacker.

Then came the part that sounds invented. His first television role arrived because One Tree Hill wrote a Slamball arc into the show and needed actors who could be taught the game.

"No, no, no. Like, I already play Slamball," Garrett recalled telling them. "This is why I'm here. Let me audition." He got the part, dunked on Joe Manganiello and put him into the glass, and never played Slamball again. The career started from there.

These days he belongs to the most exclusive repertory company in television. Rich pointed out that the Lioness premiere alone featured several actors pulled from Yellowstone, Land Man and 1883, and asked what it is like to be one of the people Taylor Sheridan trusts.

Garrett put it in company he considers appropriate. Christopher Nolan does it. Scorsese does it. Judd Apatow and the Farrelly brothers do it.

"They know the temperament of the actor. They know the work ethic of the actor and they know the talent," he said. Sheridan takes it a step further by writing for specific people, asking first whether they want the role, then building it.

The social version of that is a ranch. Sheridan hosts events where casts from all his shows turn up, and Garrett described a charity cutting event in Fort Worth where actors from every series were on horseback in front of an arena.

"It's like we all went to the same high school. Just different years," he said.

Getting in was not casual. Garrett sent roughly ten audition tapes over four months before landing 1883, a grind he credits with changing his trajectory entirely.

He also calls it the hardest job he has ever had, and probably ever will have. For the first month of shooting, nobody ate modern food. Biscuits, gravy, beef, period appropriate, straight through cowboy camp. Two weeks of learning to ride, four or five hours a day, plus wagon training and roping, all during COVID on a ranch nobody could leave.

The gym was a bright spot, mostly because of who was in it. Tim McGraw brought a mobile setup with flat screens, treadmills, a sauna and a cold plunge, and opened it to the whole cast. Three people used it.

"Say we had to be at work at like 6:00 in the morning, we're in there at 4:30 getting after it," Garrett said, naming himself, McGraw and Sheridan. Sheridan boxes first, then hits the weights.

Saturday karaoke taught him a different lesson. Garrett brought Redman and Method Man to a country music crowd, and the speakers mysteriously died during his turn.

"I see what I'm dealing with here," he said. "This is a no hip hop zone. All right, I get it. I adapted."

The story he tells about that shoot, though, is about Sam Elliott. Fort Worth, 110 degrees, wool jackets and leather chaps, 26 wagons and roughly 300 background players, everyone miserable. A production assistant brought Elliott one of those misting fans.

Elliott asked whether there was one for everybody. Told no, he handed it back.

"Well, when you get one of these for everyone, you come back and give it to me last, because we're all in this together," Garrett remembered him saying. Elliott, who had not been on a horse in 20 years before filming, was also first in the saddle every morning.

"He set the tone," Garrett said.

The work matters to him beyond craft. Garrett comes from a military family, with a father who served in Vietnam and relatives who served in the Gulf War, and he visits bases and talks to troops.

"It's a fictional show, but these are real stories for a lot of people," he said. "So it's important that we get it right."

He gets similar messages about 1883, including from burly men who insist they are not criers, and from Black cowboys thanking him for a representation they never saw growing up. One in every four cowboys back then was Black, Garrett noted.

"Thank you for allowing me to be the vehicle to tell the truth for a lot of people," he said.

His own origin story carries a contradiction he cannot escape. Garrett grew up in South City, right behind Candlestick, a Niner faithful whose son is named Montana. His own name comes from Daryle Lamonica, the Mad Bomber, who was not a Niner at all.

"It was a Bay Area kind of thing," Garrett explained. His father came home from Vietnam, went to Mississippi, got his mother, and moved to the Bay when Lamonica was, in Garrett's words, like Tom Brady back then.

He is bullish on the 49ers if they stay healthy, likes the receiver room with Deebo back and Stribling having a strong camp, and is glad to see Greenlaw returning. He also does the playoff hype videos for the Niners and the Warriors, which he would apparently do for free.

"Local kid made good," he said. "Just where we doing this?"