‘Found’ Star Shanola Hampton On The NBC Series’ Mission To Center Missing, Marginalized Stories

Found star Shanola Hampton wants us to see her character Gabi Mosely’s humanity and why she’s going after criminals through unorthodox methods.

Hampton talked with Blavity’s Shadow and Act ahead of the midseason finale about working on NBC’s newest hit procedural, which has been renewed for a second season. She also wants viewers to know why it’s important that the series showcases the unheard stories of missing marginalized people being overshadowed by their white counterparts.

Her character Gabi, who works on paper as a “public relations specialist” but is actually more like a hero vigilante for the people who go underserved by law enforcement, has ways of finding people that the police wouldn’t ordinarily use, including keeping her own kidnapper, Sir (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), in her basement. Hampton said that as an actor, her goal is to embody her character, not judge her for her decision-making.

“Well, one of the things that I wanted to make sure is that I never judged her and judge her choices. I think it’s so easy to automatically assume, ‘Oh my gosh, she has somebody in the basement. She’s bad.’ Or, you know, judge those actions. For me, it was really about what could be something that puts someone in the mental space where they feel like this is the choice,” she said. “And so I approached her by trying to just get into her mentals what it might be like to have been taken to lose control, but to also find her purpose through losing that control, which is a very confusing thing. You had this horrible thing happen to you, yet it’s the thing that defines your life and helps so many other people, so it kind of plays with your mind. I really wanted to get into her mindset and that’s really how I approached her and really got into her heart and what made her feel good and made her feel happy– and that was helping other people. So that’s how I approached her first, starting with the love.”

Hampton said that Gabi’s decision to find missing people her way is what separates her from law enforcement; while her methods might seem uncouth or “not by the book,” as it were, it’s these methods that give her the happy outcome she’s looking for– reuniting family members.

“Gabi could have very easily become a lawyer,” she said. “Gabi could have been in law enforcement. But in order for her to really save the people that need to be saved, need to be found…the [ones] that no one was looking for, she had to be a private a PR specialist and get people that can get things done. There’s nothing that she won’t do to save a life. And with that being her logline, she will cross every line. She doesn’t mind if she has to spend some time in jail for it, because that person is home with their family. And that’s the most important thing to her.”

The main throughline of Found is to bring to viewers’ awareness the very real instances of marginalized people who are missing going under the radar or even forgotten about at the expense of prioritizing white missing people. Analysts and some members of the media have dubbed the phenomenon “Missing White Woman Syndrome.” A 2016 paper written by Zach Sommers for Northwestern University’s Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology cited a study completed by Scripps Howard News Service, which found that in CNN and Associated Press reports on missing children between 2000 and 2004 “dramatically overrepresented white children.” The paper also cites studies that found that found that missing Black children were drastically underrepresented in news broadcasts.

Black and Missing, a website created to address the gaps law enforcement and the media have created when it comes to informing the public about missing Black and brown children, cites from the 2022 NCIC Missing Person and Unidentified Person Statistics report that out of the 546,568 people reported missing in 2022, nearly 40 percent were people of color, despite Black people comprising only 13 percent of the population. The site states that even though a disproportionate number of missing people are minorities, and despite their population percentage, many are disregarded. This is because they are either initially classified as runaways (such as like what happened in Found‘s pilot episode) and don’t receive an AMBER Alert, are classified as criminals with involvement in drugs and gangs, or the average American–in and out of law enforcement and media–is desensitized to the stereotype that those marginalized people who go missing live in poverty and crime. This makes the added weight of being missing just another part of their lives.

Hampton said that what she hopes Found can do is continue to raise awareness about this continuing problem in America.

“One of the things that I hope has already happened and that is…to start moving the needle. These are conversations that people in certain communities, my community included,…have been having,” she said. “The lack of media attention–you can have two cases of two girls the same age who are from different backgrounds and only one of them gets [coverage.] Everybody knows their name and is a hashtag and the other one who’s just as missing and has family that loves her just as much is not getting that same attention. So to have a show that’s actually dealing with finding underrepresented people and to make it more real and put it on the lips of the mouths of people who have not been discussing it before is already happening. My hopes for the show are already being realized, which is a beautiful thing because at this point, [we’ve only aired a few] episodes and yes, people are being entertained, but people are starting to check themselves as well. And I think that that’s a beautiful thing.”

“[The show] was created right to be able to have these conversations,” she continued. “There [are] so many [underrepresented people]–the elderly, people who have different sexualities, the Indigenous, there’s just so many underrepresented and we have a culture where we’ve seen a lot of one face on our screen when it comes to being missing and it’s time to change those faces and make them more real. And I think the show is doing that is adding some, some colorful faces to a really terrible epidemic.”

Hampton addressed the moment in the pilot episode when the chief of police wrongly assumes the missing person at the center of the episode–a Black girl–is simply a “runaway” who knows what she’s doing and will eventually turn up. As it would turn out, she was kidnapped and trapped where no one would find her, unless those people were Gabi and her team.

“Our writers have done such a great job of putting those different nuances in the script so you can see what the conversation really is and how it gets justified,” she said. “There’s so many things that get swept under the rug. And that’s somebody’s child and that’s why the writing is so good and so important. Even when we did the Indigenous episode, which was the last episode [at the time of this interview], that was a community of people, [the episode showed] what a reservation looks like, the different laws that go into [a reservation], [why] jurisdictions are different. That’s not something that’s common knowledge that you have to really know it. And so just even as having that episode in there with all of those tidbits of information, I thought was so great and so important.”

On the personal side, Gabi’s relationship with Sir, her former kidnapper, is one that is still developing and shows just how Gabi has and has not healed from her time in Sir’s captivity. As Hampton said, “there is no reckoning” within Gabi regarding her new partnership of sorts with Sir.

“I don’t think there’s a reckoning at all that’s happened. There’s no healing that has really happened,” she said. “There is only day-by-day survival. It’s very much, her life was rocked from a teenager by someone she trusted, and you’ll come to find out why she trusted him so much. And then her entire life changed. But what she wanted to do was turn her trauma into purpose for her. It was how do you get into the mind of a monster? Oh, you kidnapped the monster and you use that monster to help no one else have to feel the pain that you felt for the year that you were abducted. And it’s not really well thought out after that, right? It’s very much emotion.”

“Yes, there is a revenge thing there, of course, but more than revenge is the fact that she wants to turn this person that she was truly impacted by, make him feel what she felt, but also use his mind,” she continued. “Because the one thing Sir has is a great mind, and he has the mind of a maniac. Some would argue Gabi has gotten that mind as well from him, but the way that they work together in the way that they were able to solve cases is all the justification she needs for why he is down in that basement because people are going home to their families and they’re finding people before it’s too late.”

The series has been renewed for season 3, which means that it’s well on its way to becoming what Hampton hopes–a series with longevity that can tell even more stories about missing marginalized people as well as get deeper with Gabi’s feelings regarding Sir and her own captivity.

“What I love is whenever you have a series and especially a network series, if allowed to, I would like for the audience to go through their own journey of healing as Gabi is going through her journey of healing. And if you know anything about trauma or healing, it is not something that takes a week. It takes time. And then there are setbacks and there are triggers and all of that,” she said. “So what I would like for the character is by the end of it–seven years, let’s say–that she has found whatever version of a healthy healing. Even though it looks bad once you have faced the music of all of your actions, you can find some peace. That’s what I would like, [for] her to find that piece and whatever version of that looks like, but I want us to go through that journey of finding it with her. And hopefully, not only would we have bridged the gap more between what’s being recognized in the media when people go missing, but we will also have helped others on their healing journey. And those are my two wishes, as well as give you a really kick-behind show.”

Found airs on NBC and is streaming on Peacock.