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Common has never really been too interested in staying in one lane. More than three decades after first breaking out as a rapper and going on to win multiple Grammys, the Chicago native is still adding new chapters instead of repeating old ones. He might have first lit the flame with music all those years ago, but after a single spark led him to film, television, writing, and activism, none of it feels like reinvention for reinvention’s sake. Long before he was the calculating Robert Sims on Apple TV’s groundbreaking sci-fi, Silo, he was making songs that lingered because they felt lived in. That thread still runs through his work today.
Decked out in an all-white ensemble with a loose sweater draped over his shoulders, Common is the epitome of cool on a Tuesday afternoon in Los Angeles. Junket days rarely leave much room for small talk, but he never rushes our time together. Instead, he greets me with a warm smile, pauses before answering, and speaks with thoughtful intention. It’s even more obvious when I ask about what it means to him to create work that stays with people.
“When I first started my work as an artist, music, all I knew was the love I have for it. I was just putting in my soul and my spirit and my creativity, my imagination, my love for it as a fan of music and all types of art. But as I started to create and put music out there, I liked the way it felt when I created art that resonated with people,” Common says, emphasizing the importance of that element over any record sales. “It was more about the way people responded to the music, that light that I could see in their faces when they were at the shows, the conversations I would have with people about the music. And I think from that point, I realized the power of art; I saw what art can be.”
Listening to him, it’s hard not to draw comparisons to The Flamekeepers in his Apple TV series, Silo. While the group does persist in the deep dark silos, their sole purpose is to preserve fragments of the past so that truth survives. Common isn’t trying to archive history in quite the same way, but there is a similar instinct behind the work he has chosen throughout his career. Whether it’s Selma’s Oscar-winning anthem, “Glory,” his roles in The Hate U Give or Hell on Wheels, or the causes he lends his voice to, Common is continuously drawn to work that outlasts the individual moment in which it was created.
‘Silo’ Season 3 Finally Lets Robert Sims Out of the Shadows
If Common believes the best art lives beyond a specific point in time, then Silo has quietly become one of those rare television series doing exactly that. Fans of the Apple TV show don’t just watch it religiously; they debate and dissect every single frame. It’s that level of attention that makes Robert Sims’ evolution even more satisfying this time around, and he steps into Season 3 as one of its most fascinating and complicated characters.
With his slick black leather jacket, sharp turtleneck, and quiet evil-henchman energy that could rival even the most legendary Bond villains, Robert has spent two seasons as one of Silo’s most intimidating figures — enforcing rules, protecting Judicial, and standing firmly behind a system that rarely welcomes questions (and rarely tolerates them). But he always seems to know more than he’s saying, which is exactly what makes Season 3 such an interesting turning point for the character.
“When you find [him] at the end of Season 2, he and his wife Camille [are] going back and forth on the right way to do it. Some of the things that he believed throughout his life were being questioned, and his wife was one of the people who was bringing it to him. But internally, he was also having questions about the things that he had been fighting for and standing up for and being the head of Judicial for.”
Common never once describes his character as a man losing power, but more as someone losing certainty, and that difference matters. While Robert finds himself caught between the job he’s expected to do and the doubts quietly building beneath the surface, he is one of the people trying to keep everything together despite a cracking foundation. One of the smartest choices Graham Yost’s adaptation of Hugh Howey’s novels makes this season is refusing to turn Robert into either a hero or a villain.
“What interested me the most was the fact that this season, we get to see the human being,” Common reveals. “When you are dealing with trying to protect your son and create something right for your child… [or] when you’re dealing with a relationship, a marriage that you’ve put all your heart and soul into, and built this secure place for your family, and all that is unraveling, and you’ve got to deal with a lot of different emotions, you question a lot of things about yourself.”
For Common, Alexandria Riley’s Camille is the key to understanding Robert this season. Watching those two drift to opposite sides of the same question also gives Season 3 some of its emotional weight, especially because neither of them is acting out of spite toward the other. They’re just arriving at different conclusions, which Common views less as conflict and more as growing uncertainty.
He sees that what she’s been fighting for may not be wrong.
“You could be in a place of authority, but inside, be in a place of unknown, and really trying to find yourself and find your way.” That said, Common admits that his character isn’t “really grounded” at the start of the season, either. “That first episode, though, he has to do the job. It’s like being in a job, and you’re not sure you’re in the right place, and you’re doing the right thing, but you’re still executing it. He has a lot of questions that need to be answered and decisions that need to be made.”
One of the biggest changes Common stresses about Season 3 is how Robert and Camille are at opposite ends of what it means to protect those in Silo 18. “What’s even causing more turmoil and more of him being disgruntled is that he and his wife, the person who was the security blanket, the person who was his confidant, they’re not vibing,” he says.
That tension with his wife that also changes how Robert looks at Rebecca Ferguson’s Juliette. While originally, she represented everything he believed threatened the silo’s survival, she’s now become something else entirely. “I really think that Robert has more room for compassion for Juliette at the beginning of the season,” Common says, adding that there is an element of wonder in how Robert views her, given that she was the only person who went out to clean and came back alive. “He sees that what she’s been fighting for may not be wrong.”
That shift is part of what makes Common’s scenes with Ferguson, whom he describes as a “free bird,” feel so different this year, too. They’re not exactly playing opponents, but more so two people slowly discovering that they may have been searching for the same thing all along, even if they took different roads to get there. Robert’s question of “What is the truth?” also gives him a better understanding of Juliette’s cause.
“They haven’t had any time to communicate or bond, but he looks at her differently. He sees her differently, with more respect and understanding, and wonder.” The scenes he shared with Ferguson, Common says, had “life to them,” simply because the two were so present for each other. “It was interesting to play in the first episode because I know that Robert, as a character, was deceiving her, but I also cared about her.”
Common Has Never Been Afraid of the Risk
That kind of compassion isn’t something Common wields depending on the role. It’s actually the same instinct that’s guided him since he first picked up a microphone in the late 1980s as a student at Luther High School South in Chicago. Long before audiences knew him as Robert Sims on Silo, they knew him as a rapper who wasn’t afraid to grow beyond expectations. That willingness to move before everyone else also defined some of the biggest swings in his music career.
But before Common addresses the risk of 2002’s Electric Circus, the singer-songwriter highlights the impact his favorite artists had on him in terms of what their music could hold for others. “Growing up, it was Stevie Wonder, KRS–One, Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, and Earth, Wind, and Fire, all these artists who shaped my life and influenced me to be who I was,” he says warmly. “I realized, ‘Wow, this is something that my art can do.’”
It’s interesting that even now, after Grammys, platinum records, and an Academy Award, Common still talks about music not as a form of entertainment, but more as a responsibility. Those artists didn’t simply soundtrack his childhood, but showed him that songs could shift the way we think, feel, or even see ourselves. That’s the standard he quietly set for his own work long before anyone started calling it influential. “I just did my best, and I continue to do my best to be as honest with where I am as an artist,” he says with a smile. “I want to stay open and stay free to grow and keep the higher purpose in the work that I do. I believe that that is what will allow things to have a timeless effect, and when you put the truth into it.”
As luck would have it, that philosophy would finally be tested. By the time his fourth album, Like Water for Chocolate, arrived in 2000, Common had reached the widest audience of his career. His second single off the record, “The Light,” became a smash hit, introducing his music to listeners far beyond hip-hop’s core and giving him his first real taste of commercial success. “That was the first time I was really on the summer jams in Seattle, in Alabama, in freaking Chicago to Brooklyn, to New York, L.A.,” he reflects. The record, which was also produced by J Dilla and Questlove, is one he looks back on fondly as “really soulful and different.”
But while the easier decision would’ve been to make Like Water for Chocolate all over again, Common went in another direction with his sound. After listening to artists like Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Radiohead, and Stereolab, the artist wondered what those sounds would become through his own perspective. “What does that sound like coming from me, coming from this Black man here from the South Side of Chicago? How do I interpret that music that’s inspired by that?’ And that’s what Electric Circus became,” he says. “And it was very risky.”
Risk, as it turned out, came with consequences, as Common admits. “At least from the hip-hop audience, they were like, ‘Oh, we don’t like this.’ The critics didn’t dig it,” he recalls with a laugh. “Man, it was a tough time, to be honest.”
Time, however, has a funny way of changing the conversation. In the years that followed, the resurgence of the album on streaming would find fans calling it a cult classic. “That album was labeled as one of the most innovative and creative and classic albums of that time period,” he grins. “People to this day come up to me and say, ‘Man, one of my favorite albums of yours is Electric Circus.’”
Common doesn’t tell that story like some kind of victory lap or sign of personal vindication. If anything, he sees it as proof that chasing the truth is usually worth the wait. “As an artist, you gotta go where you are, the love, what you care about,” he adds. “There’s something in creating something from a truthful place that at least allows it to have a timeless effect. It might not always, but it will at least be allowed if you create it from a place of truth. So, that was my truth at that time.”
‘Hell on Wheels’ Taught Common to Trust the Journey
After the creative gamble of Electric Circus, Common found himself searching for another place to grow, and as luck would have it, he found it somewhere he never expected. “My first acting class was like, ‘Wow, I feel that freedom. This is what it should be. This is what I believe God wants me to do, also.’ So I did.”
Never wanting to be “put in a box as a musical artist,” Common now admits he needed to express himself in some artistic way, where he could “feel free.” That sentiment eventually led him to Hell on Wheels, where he spent five seasons playing the incredibly layered former slave turned Chief of Railroad Police, Elam Ferguson. Looking back almost 10 years to the date of the series finale, Common doesn’t simply remember his time on the award-winning drama as another acting credit. Rather, he talks about it the way someone remembers the place where everything finally clicked.
“Hell on Wheels, man, that was like a really great college for me,” he smiles, reclining slightly as he reflects on how the AMC series both taught him to work and be present. “It was a real lesson because it was the first time I was working that consistently, and I got to stay in a character and learn more about that character.” For the first time in his career, Common wasn’t just building a character over the course of a few weeks with various crews and directors, but rather over years. As it goes, TV forced him to embrace something he already learned about in music, which is that you can’t always know where the journey is headed.
“When you read a movie script, you know where your character ends, you know what your character may be doing in Act Three. In a TV series, you don’t, so you have to be open to where they take you. They also build on what you bring into the character,” he points out.
Listening to him talk about the show, it’s easy to understand why Silo’s Robert Sims has been such a natural fit across three seasons. There’s a visible pleasure in the way Common describes that process, as though the uncertainty is part of the appeal. He doesn’t seem interested in deciding who a character is before he steps into their shoes. For him, the work is in the discovery.
My first acting class was like, ‘Wow, I feel that freedom. This is what it should be. This is what I believe God wants me to do, also.’
“I always have to go to what the truth of the character is,” he says. “I always have to go to that character’s purpose in the story, and how they serve the story.” That answer leads me to another question, about something I’d noticed between Elam and Robert. On paper, they’re worlds apart. One has spent years fighting against an unjust system, while the other devotes himself to protecting a version of the same. But beneath those differences, both men are trying to light a spark in worlds that ask impossible things of them.
Turns out that Common has been thinking about that connection, too. “I saw some similarities,” he says, almost squinting. “Initially, playing Robert Sims, I was like, ‘Man, me, Rashid, Common, is not the type of guy like Robert Sims. I’m not that type of person.’” But then, as he puts it, Robert began changing for him. “Elam had to fight against that. He had to buck the system in Hell on Wheels early because he was a Black man in the 1800s. But Robert discovered that this system that he was fighting for or standing up for, there’s no truth in that. So now, he is becoming closer to what Elam is in that way.”
What stayed with Common most about Elam wasn’t just that he fought the system; it was that the world never fully hardened him, even after everything it put him through. “One thing about Elam that I really did my best to bring to the character was, as much as this Black man during that time had been through, he still had love in him. He still had compassion and cared about people.”
It’s an observation that says as much about Common as it does about the characters he chooses to play. Whether he’s stepping into a Western or a dystopian sci-fi series, he isn’t interested in people who already have all the answers. He’s drawn to the beats of confidence that lead to curiosity, because that’s where the humanity lives.
Common Is Still a Student of the World
If Hell on Wheels taught Common anything about himself, it was that growth doesn’t end once you’ve found your footing. In fact, it becomes easier to recognize all the places where real evolution comes from. When I ask how all these chapters of his career have shaped the artist he is today, he laughs. “Oh, man, I’ve got so many different eras. It’s fun sometimes to look back and see pictures of myself or even hear myself on albums, and I’m like, ‘Wow, I said that?’ But the thing that I embrace is being open to the growth and being open to the eras.”
Common doesn’t talk about those branches in time as though they’re versions of himself he’d rather leave behind. Instead, he carries all of them with him, even the difficult ones. “All these different facets of life that I’ve experienced definitely helped shape where I’m going now, and I don’t forget those things. Like the shows where people were throwing pennies at me in New Jersey, at this club where I’m opening up for KRS. I don’t forget that.”
The triumphs matter, too, and Common humbly admits he doesn’t forget the “good moments.” He smiles while recounting one conversation in particular, when Prince walked up to him after hearing “The Light,” which was an experience in itself that later led to a collaboration on Electric Circus for the track “Star *69 (PS With Love).”
“When Prince came to me and said, ‘Man, the song, ‘The Light,’ I really dig that song, man. It’s a major chord.’ I didn’t know music theory like that, so I was just agreeing with Prince, like, ‘Yeah, it’s a major chord!’ Those things gave me fuel,” Common says, laughing. It’s a funny story, but it reveals a lot about how he moves through the world. Along the way, success hasn’t dulled his curiosity, but rather sharpened it.
Similarly, almost 20 years after appearing in Ridley Scott’s crime epic, American Gangster, alongside Denzel Washington and Ruby Dee, Common talks about the experience not through the lens of standing alongside Hollywood legends, but as someone still taking mental notes of everything he witnessed on set. “The times in life when I’m sitting on a set and watching Denzel and Ruby go to work… I’m like, wow, I’m picking up all these things,” he recalls. “Even from some artists that may not be as well known, but I still see them at work. All those things and people help shape and form me and inspire me.”
While watching Hollywood icons work is one classroom, life has always served up different lessons for Common. Some of the people who have left the deepest impression on him aren’t your regular Grammy winners or Academy Award nominees; they’re people he’s met while visiting prisons, where conversations have stayed with him long after he walked back out.
“When I visit people who are incarcerated, and I go there and just have conversations with the women and men who are incarcerated, some conversations make me who I am, like the talks I have with them,” he says with a pause. “Or seeing a guy who taught himself piano on cardboard because he didn’t have a piano in prison, and now he can play piano. That’s inspiring to me.”
It’s also one of the clearest insights Common offers into how he moves through life and contributes to it with several nonprofits he also supports, like Imagine Justice, Common Ground Foundation and Free to Dream. He never ranks where inspiration truly comes from — because, between Prince and a man teaching himself piano on a piece of cardboard, they occupy the same space for what’s possible when we refuse to stop growing. “I feel like being open to life and seeking, as you say, curiosity,” he says. “I’m a seeker. Those things really help inform my eras, you know?”
Common’s Most Important Life Lessons Were Learned at Home
Common might call himself a “seeker,” but long before he was learning from legends or individuals in prison, someone else had quietly shaped the way he sees the world: his mother, Dr. Mahalia Ann Hines, an educator and former principal in Chicago. When asked how his definition of creating an impact has changed over the years, he immediately turns to the foundation his mother laid out for him.
“My mother’s a teacher. She got a doctorate in education,” Common shares. “From the beginning, as long as I can remember life, I’ve seen her looking out for people. It wasn’t always in a formal way, but it was like, sometimes students she had, on the weekends, could come to our house and eat or whatever. I’ve seen her taking care of family too, in certain ways, and making sure they were okay, or helping friends get summer jobs.”
Yet he also admits it was never like philanthropic work; it was more for the community and “doing for people that you’re around who are in need.” He knew he wanted to continue with the same call to action he saw from his mother growing up. “Whether it was my homies, my good friends, that needed something, I would try to provide, or I would be a connector to help them get to a certain place in their lives. Whatever they wanted to pursue, I wanted to do that.”
Listening to Common, it’s clear that instinct never disappeared. Instead, the audience just got bigger, and he got more creative with it. “When I got out there as an artist, I still wanted to be that connector, but now for a bigger amount of people,” he says thoughtfully. “Now, it’s, ‘Okay, how can I connect these kids that come from where I come from, or any pocket on the earth, with people who have high potential but don’t have the access, how can I provide to them?’”
When I got out there as an artist, I still wanted to be that connector, but now for a bigger amount of people.
As he talks, the word “access” keeps resurfacing, proving this is a characteristic that is ingrained in every fiber of Common’s being. As his career expanded, so did the knowledge of what he could offer others through his successes. Mentorship became one part of it, but introducing young people to careers they may never have imagined became another.
“The blessing of certain things being successful or certain things getting out there, like winning an Oscar, was like, ‘Oh, these different people now I can make a call to,” he says most confidently. “I can make a call to the CEO of a company and say, ‘Hey, man, we need to do this,’ and we come up with a 10,000-job initiative in Chicago.”
As he puts it, “it evolves” across the board. “Now I know what a gaffer is. Now I know there are people that do sound on the movie,” he says. “It’s 200 people working on this set… They might eventually say, ‘Oh, I want to be a makeup artist. Well, I want to actually be a director of photography.’”
There’s something quietly consistent about the way Common describes all of it. Whether it’s music, acting, or even advocacy, success for the multifaceted artist only seems valuable if it creates another opportunity for someone else. “At some point… I felt like as much work as I put into my acting and into my music, I wanted to have that same type of work into the activism and the philanthropic work I do, meaning have structure and be strategic and be creative with how you can help people.”
Common’s Found Purpose Beyond Purpose
For every road that Common has taken across 30 years, it’s striking how often they lead back to the same place. Music became acting, while acting expanded into activism, and activism grew alongside service. None of it seems driven by his personal pursuit of another accolade; instead, there’s only the desire to leave something behind that genuinely matters.
While Common began our conversation by talking about work that reaches people long after it’s made, by the end of it all, he admits his journey is still just getting started. “I feel like I’m on a quest to be impactful as an actor and be as inspiring and mood-changing and life-changing as an actor and storyteller as I’ve been as a musician for some people,” he says. “It’s about picking projects that resonate with you. Of course, as an actor, you’re like, ‘I want to work! I want to work!’ But you have to still be aware and conscious and mindful of the projects you choose.”
That mindfulness feels like the quiet ember under everything Common does. He doesn’t pretend there’s a secret formula to building a career that lasts, either. “To me, there’s no formula, but those are the only ingredients and things that I can say I’ve put in that have blessed me and allowed me. Obviously, the power, the Most High, and the purpose of what God has put me here to do is allow me, but my consciousness of it and applying it has been those things.”
It’s a sentiment that quietly reframes everything we’ve spent the last hour talking about, as Common admits he doesn’t see art as something to consume or even create. “I’m grateful that you say that I’m a part of art that is lasting, because that’s one of the ways that you can give to the planet.”
That, more than anything, seems to be the driving force Common keeps circling back to — not legacy as a trophy case or a time capsule found in silos hundreds of years later, but as something passed along. By the time our conversation winds down, the question no longer feels like what Common has been chasing, but what has been carrying him all along.
“I hope [others] feel my driving force was about purpose, about spreading joy, about having a connection to God, to a higher power, and seeing the God that exists in all human beings. That will translate into love, so I hope that they feel like, ‘Man, one thing we got from Common’s acting, from his music, and from the work he did for people was that he put love into it, and he had love for them, and I think it was a funnel of the love of God.’”
Photography Credits: Photographer: Gina Gizella Manning | Production Assistance: GIZELLA | Lighting Director: Mike Pecci | Digital Imaging Technician: Mike Tran | Grip: Lance A. Williams
Styling Credits: Barber: Daronn Carr | Grooming: Tasha Brown | Styling: Kate March
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https://collider.com/common-silo-season-3-actor-rapper-career-interview/
Tania Hussain
Almontather Rassoul
