The Mellifluous Overtones of Doom.

In Diary, Gary Anthony Sturgis, left, tells his lawyers who’s boss

I was flipping channels this past weekend, saw three black men walking around the curve of a Richard Meier-esque expanse of office building white marble, above, noticed actor Steve Harris acting lawyerly, and figured I’d tuned into a rerun of The Practice.

Wrong. It was Tyler Perry’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman. Overbroad and maddeningly melodramatic, I would have immediately jumped over to some reality show had it not been for what I heard next.

His voice sounded…, well, abominable, like it was pressed directly from evil. It wasn’t just that it had the timbre of threat. It registered as though, itself, a weapon; as though, if you listened long enough, he would kill you by speaking, alone.

In one part of the scene—it starts at the 7:07 mark, here—the third actor, also an attorney, doesn’t like something the man, Jamison, has just said. “Wait a minute…are you threaten….”

He shuts him off. “Ain’t nobody talking to you.” A gun, up the attorney’s nostril, would have pressed no less force.

Whoa. Needless to say, I was stone-cold captivated. Who the hell was this actor, and why had I never heard of him?

Both questions, as it turns out, were easy to answer. His name is Gary Anthony Sturgis, right, he’s 41 and from New Orleans. The three films he’s most recently done are Diary; Daddy’s Little Girls, with Idris Elba and Gabrielle Union; and the swim team feel-good with Terrence Howard and Bernie Mac, Pride, none of which, until Sunday, I’d seen. Sturgis, as it turns out, has also made quite a career as a voiceover talent for animation and TV.

I hope he either does something Off-Broadway, that he gets cast as “Judas” in a color-correct production of The Passion, or that someone writes something expressly for this amazing talent, soon. More people need to be captivated by the power of his profound and awesome instrument.