Wayne Brady Takes Up Villain Gravedigger Role On ‘Black Lightning’

Wayne Brady is parting from his comedic host persona as he steps into Black Lightning’s third season as the DC comics villain Gravedigger. According to The Wrap, the Emmy award-winning host of CBS’ Let’s Make a Deal will make his first appearance on the CW show in early 2020.

In the series, Gravedigger, whose real name is Tyson Sykes, is a World War II U.S. military soldier transformed into a superhuman weapon through secret experiments. These experiments gave him pretty much everything you’d want in a supersoldier including enhanced strength and agility, hand to hand combat expertise, and tactical genius. It might’ve also given him some sort of longevity considering he’s survived from that era to the current time period in pretty much the same state. However, after the war, instead of returning to a segregated America, he defected to the rogue nation of Markovia. There, he plans to build a sovereign land for metahumans which naturally puts him in direct line against the ASA and Cress Williams’ Black Lightning/Jefferson Pierce.

Wayne Brady’s Gravedigger Ups The Stakes in Black Lightning

Brady’s role as Gravedigger comes as the perfect lead to the upcoming conflict with Markovia that pulls the Pierce family apart. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly in September, Williams explains that the family is the most disjointed the show has ever seen. “It’s the whole Markovian conflict. It’s pulled everyone in different directions because they’ve gotten a little bit divided, in the sense, there are just different focuses that they have and different motivations that they have,” he said.

He also continues that this conflict brings the show to a larger scale. “It’s larger,” Williams said. “Each season we’ve progressively gotten bigger. So we’ve moved onto an even bigger scale now that we’ve added like Markovia into everything. It’s still about Freeland, but it’s almost more of a global scale and scope.”

As it turns out, this isn’t Brady’s first DC comic-inspired role. He actually voiced Micron on Batman Beyond and he also guest-starred in the 1990s Superboy episode “The Sons of Icarus.” In terms of his other projects, Brady is also known for his stint on Whose Line Is It Anyway? He has also shined on Broadway starring as Lola in Kinky Boots and as Aaron Burr in the Chicago production of Hamilton.