Key Takeaways
- Tommy Davidson said landing The Varnell Hill Show in his 60s confirmed that his talent and relevance never faded despite decades of career comparisons and setbacks.
- He told The Breakfast Club that he stopped complaining about other comedians’ success, studied how they moved, and committed to following his own path.
- The series revives Davidson’s outrageous Martin character more than 30 years later, with Martin Lawrence producing and reprising Martin Payne alongside Kym Whitley and Wendy Raquel Robinson.
Tommy Davidson spent years watching other comedians from his generation become bigger stars. Now, in his 60s, he finally has a television show built around one of his most memorable characters—and he is not pretending the road there was easy.
Davidson, who stars as the title character in The Varnell Hill Show, opened up on The Breakfast Club about the frustration of seeing contemporaries reach career milestones he had not. At one point, he said, the comparison game got loud enough that he had to change how he looked at his own career.
“Why don’t you stop complaining?” Davidson remembered telling himself. “Once you stop complaining about who got this and who got that… why don’t you find out what they did?”
Instead of obsessing over who was getting the bigger movie, better representation, or a hotter opportunity, Davidson said he started paying attention to how successful people moved. “There’s nothing wrong with watching the path and following it,” he said.
But he drew a line between learning from someone else’s career and trying to become them: “For me, I want my path to be my path.”
That path took a very long detour before circling back to Varnell Hill.
Davidson first played the outrageous talk-show host during a two-part Martin storyline in the 1990s. Varnell was introduced as an old WZUP colleague of Martin Payne who had escaped Detroit radio, made it big in Hollywood, and returned home with enough ego to fill the room. His success briefly convinced Martin that Los Angeles might be his next move too.
More than 30 years later, Varnell is no longer dropping into somebody else’s sitcom.
The Varnell Hill Show follows Davidson’s character behind the scenes of his long-running late-night program as he deals with network executives, unruly writers, celebrity guests and his own refusal to quietly age out of the spotlight. Martin Lawrence executive produces the series and makes a special appearance, with Kym Whitley, Wendy Raquel Robinson, Nick Cafero, Emmanuel Hudson and Chris Williams also starring.
For Davidson, getting that opportunity now feels different precisely because it did not arrive when he was younger.
“It’s confirmation, and it’s a comeback too because I get to be in front of the thing that people know me for,” he said.
Davidson compared the experience to a quarterback who loses the starting job but never stops being a quarterback. The big opportunity may disappear for a season—or several—but the skill does not.
“The opportunity didn’t come like in one day,” he said. “The opportunity came by them saying, ‘You know what? I’m going to hang in there.’”
That endurance also changed how Davidson thinks about relevance. He admitted there were times when he believed the industry had stopped recognizing his value simply because he was no longer the newest name in the room.
Now he calls that thinking “mental.” “What comes from you comes from you,” Davidson said. “This is a gift… and it doesn’t wear off.”
And after decades of waiting for Varnell Hill to get another shot? “I’ve seen greater miracles,” Davidson said. “But I’ll take this one.”
