She parachuted into "Drop Zone" with Wesley Snipes and waded through a Louisiana bayou with Jean-Claude Van Damme in "Hard Target." But strangers still mistake Yancy Butler for a long-lost high school buddy. Or was it college? "I just give up and say, 'I'm an actress,'" says Butler, 27. "I don't mean for it to sound like an apology, but it always does."
Those awkward apologies may be at an end. Butler has landed a high-profile gig as hardworking officer Anne-Marie Kersey on CBS's gritty ensemble cop drama Brooklyn South (Mondays, 10 P.M./ET), the newest take on life on the beat from producer Steven Bochco (NYPD Blue, Hill Street Blues). "I think Anne-Marie is a tough cookie," says Butler. "But she's also vulnerable. She brings a woman's perspective to a cast that's mostly men."
In the debut episode, that meant jumping straight into an emotional crisis when her fiancé died from a massive -- and graphic -- head wound, an event Anne-Marie will continue to deal with during the season. The harsh footage earned the show both controversy and a stringent TV-MA rating. "Yes, it's shocking," says Butler, who rode in a police van in Brooklyn's 76th precinct to prepare for the role. "But so is the violence of a police officer's job."
She's sitting in the booth of a Hollywood deli that reminds her of her native New York City. At a trim 5-foot-7, with striking green eyes set beneath heavy dark brows, Butler looks like she could perform a lyrical dance or a lethal headlock with equal ease. Her unique name, culled by her parents from a baby book, derives from the Native American pronunciation of Yankee. But her most distinctive feature is a cool, gravelly voice that suggests both Bacall and Bogie.
"I love her voice," says Bochco, who first saw Butler in a cameo as a junkie on NYPD Blue. "I wish I had her voice. Yancy has this natural strength and authority. And she's beautiful without being cupcakey. She makes an entirely credible police officer."
Her own background is decidedly artsy. Butler grew up in Greenwich Village, the only child of Joe and Leslie Butler, who divorced when she was 12 but remain close friends. Boomers may recall that Joe was the drummer for the Lovin' Spoonful, the '60s band that had such hits as "Do You Believe in Magic?" and "Daydream." The band broke up just before Butler's birth, and after a stint in the musical "Hair," Joe found work in construction. Her grandmother was a Broadway actress, and both her grandfather and mother were in theater management. Butler herself studied dance at the Joffrey and Ailey schools and acting at HB Studios and Sarah Lawrence College, where she graduated in 1991.
As for her streetwise persona, it's Joe Butler who provides the revealing information: Yancy once whacked a boy over the head with a tennis racket after he'd tried to do the same to her. She was banned from eighth-grade graduation after brawling with a classmate. And she's universally friendly. And she never gives up. "Yancy has always been tenacious," says Joe, currently on tour with a reunited Spoonful (sans John Sebastian). "If you're the dog who eats Yancy's homework, you're a dead dog."
Although her family warned her away from a life in the arts and insisted on a college degree, even her father had to concede she had the right stuff. "It's hard to be objective when it's your own kid," he says. "But I saw the video of one of her college plays and thought, 'Wow. She has tremendous charisma.'" Still, when Butler started acting professionally, it was not out of a deep creative longing. "I was too short to model," recalls Butler, who studied child psychology as a backup. "So I turned to acting to help pay off my student loans."
A bit part on Law & Order got the attention of the show's executive producer, Dick Wolf. In early 1992, just six months after Butler's graduation, Wolf called to offer her the part of an android cop in NBC's Mann & Machine. "And then, literally 10 minutes later, [then CBS entertainment president] Jeff Sagansky called to offer me a deal," she recalls. "The rule is that you go with the first boy who asks you to the prom. And I did. My career has had its ups and downs, but it started on a big up."
But Mann & Machine barely chugged through the first season. Wolf followed up with a role for Butler in the short-lived South Beach. Television had become the dog who ate her homework. So Butler tumbled into action films opposite Van Damme and Snipes. "I didn't grow up as a weakling," she says. "But I never expected to be jumping out of planes with Wesley. Action-adventure is fun, but you can't play G.I. Jane forever."
It took Bochco to entice her back to TV. "I don't normally toot my own horn, but bringing her on the show was my idea," boasts Bochco. "And the moment I had the idea, I knew I was right."
A nice accolade, but the stress of a big-budget series is intense. Thankfully, the show's four-day shooting schedule allows Butler a measure of personal freedom. She spends off-hours with boyfriend Michael Wiseman, 30, an actor she has dated for almost a year. She sticks to a brutal daily workout on a treadmill set at a 20 percent grade. She even has time to fret over a mangy stray cat who meows around the backyard of her small house in the Hollywood Hills. But if Brooklyn South takes off, one thing Butler won't have to worry about anymore are those student loans. "There's still a balance due," she admits with a smile. "But I've never missed a payment."
Dirk Mathison is a writer whose work has appeared in Time, Life, and Parenting.
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