Danielle Pinnock Thought She'd Never Sing Again Before Becoming Ghosts' Alberta
Danielle Pinnock took an unusual road to stardom. According to IndieWire, the actor earned her MFA from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. For her dissertation, she put together a one-woman show called "Body/Courage," which was based on her interviews with 300 different people and landed her a role at Chicago's Second City. "When I moved to Los Angeles, I felt like I was in the Atlanta Olympics," Pinnock said. "I've realized even though the industry will say you have to get on social media, you have to do X, Y, Z, I didn't want to follow in those footsteps. I wanted to do my own thing. I wasn't in it to garner 100 million followers. I just wanted to be able to create."
And create she certainly did. Pinnock and her friend LaNisa Frederick created "Hashtag Booked," a series of sketches parodying the struggles that Black actors go through trying to build a career in Hollywood. In an interview with CNN, Pinnock explained that showbiz is easy to make jokes about because of how seemingly random it can be. "You could be auditioning with someone who was a season regular on 'Living Single' and somebody that won a cinnamon challenge on YouTube. There is no rhyme or reason to this industry."
Despite the lack of rhyme and reason in acting, there's no lack of rhyme and rhythm in Pinnock's role as 1920s jazz diva Alberta on the hit CBS sitcom "Ghosts," the American remake of the popular British show.
Danielle Pinnock almost lost her voice in high school
In a recent interview on "The Talk," Danielle Pinnock was asked if she had had any vocal training to play Alberta, which involves a good deal of singing. She explained that she now does work with a vocal coach because she doesn't want to make the same mistake twice. "I used to do musicals in high school, but I was never trained," she explained. "And so when I was in high school, I actually ended up getting vocal nodules, which are basically polyps on your vocal cords, and they're very dangerous. So I said, you know what, I'm never going to sing again. ... Cut to now this role. And so I said, 'This is an opportunity of a lifetime. I want to play Alberta. I want to pay homage to all the 1920s Black artists that came before me. Let me get trained.'" So the "Ghosts" star started taking singing lessons to ensure she didn't run into the same problem again.
In the summer between Seasons 1 and 2 of "Ghosts," as part of an extensive promotional campaign, the show released a Broadway-style song that made some wonder if the show is gearing up for a musical episode. That's something that Pinnock told PopCulture she wants to see happen. "Oh my gosh, listen, [the showrunners] — they don't tell us much, but I'm hoping that this [track] is a tease and that we'll get to have a musical episode. That's my secret wish." Now that the suggestion has been made, it's certainly going to become the wish of many fans as well.