On TV, 2006 Carnegie Mellon University musical theater grad Patina Miller is best known for playing a press secretary on CBS’s “Madam Secretary.”

On Broadway, she won the Tony for lead actress in a musical in 2013 for a revival of “Pippin.”

In Starz’s “Power Book III: Raising Kanan” (8 p.m. July 18), Miller plays a significantly different character, breaking bad as drug queenpin Raquel “Raq” Thomas, mother to a teenage Kanan Stark (Mekai Curtis). Set in 1991, this prequel explores the youthful years of the character played by Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson in the original “Power.”

Raq is cutthroat, and she means business (wait until you see how she gets revenge on a rival in the premiere episode; viewer discretion is advised for pet aficionados in particular).

“You’re always trying to find new and exciting ways to do what you love to do and to take on characters that have something to say, characters that are grounded and just raw and real and three-dimensional,” Miller said in a Zoom interview earlier this month. “And unfortunately, those types of characters don’t really exist as much for people who look like me.”

While this character may be furthest from her personality, Miller said she’s still able to relate to Raq.

“Being a mom and the energy of wanting to be your boss and have this passion and grit and thirst for more, to be successful,” Miller said of ways she could relate to Raq. “I know what it’s like to have people depend on you. I know what it’s like to be in a home that has a young mother and a child. My mom was 15 years old when she had me. … I don’t know if we’d ever be rolling in the same (crew) ’cause I’m not a crime girl. I’m a good girl. But I respect her.”

Just this week Starz renewed “Power Book III: Raising Kanan” for a second season ahead of its first-season premiere.

Although she hasn’t returned to CMU physically since her graduation, Miller has done virtual visits with students, offering advice about life, acting and singing.

“It always feels so good to be able to share what I’ve gone through, my experience, in hopes that it would help the next young performer coming up,” Miller said.

“Carnegie Mellon really helped me to work on my technique as an actor, figuring out how to build a character and really just acting one on one and the basics, talking and listening. I really just used all of the things that I learned from school, my tool belt of all of my different things I was waiting to be able to use, and luckily all of those things really aided me in really just going as far as I could with this character to make her three-dimensional, to humanize her, to really get at her essence and her core.”

Just don’t expect Miller to start singing in this one.

“No, no, sorry,” she said. “Singing and acting are both really big loves of my life. And I don’t like one over the other. It’s so cool to be able to do both.”

Copyright ©2025— Trib Total Media, LLC (TribLIVE.com)