The actor shared the screen with the Oscar-winning actress in the 1980 made-for-TV movie “White Mama.”

Emmy-nominated Pitt star Ernest Harden Jr. recalls friendship with Bette Davis after she cast him in his breakout role

The actor shared the screen with the Oscar-winning actress in the 1980 made-for-TV movie “White Mama.”

By Rance Collins

August 15, 2026 10:17 a.m. ET

Ernest Harden Jr. on ‘The Pitt’; Bette Davis circa 1970s. Credit:

HBOMax; Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty

- Ernest Harden Jr. was recently nominated for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series for his role on *The Pitt*.

- Decades earlier, the actor costarred with Hollywood legend Bette Davis in the telefilm *White Mama*.

- “Bottom line is, she picked me. I never had to read a script before I got cast. That was the first time I got cast on anything without auditioning,” Harden Jr. tells EW.

Ernest Harden Jr. is looking back at the long road that led him to his Emmy nomination for his performance on *The Pitt*.

By 1980, Harden Jr. was a steadily working actor on film and television. He appeared in such prominent projects as *Three Days of the Condor* and *Good Times*, and even had a recurring role on *The Jeffersons* as Marcus.

But it was a CBS movie of the week that proved to be his dramatic breakout, and it just so happened to costar one of the most illustrious of Hollywood legends... if not *the most* illustrious.

Bette Davis and Ernest Harden Jr. in ‘White Mama’.

*White Mama* premiered on March 5, 1980, and it was such a success that its star, two-time Academy Award winner Bette Davis, racked up another Emmy nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or Movie. She had won the previous year in the same category for *Strangers: The Story of a Mother and a Daughter*, which also featured Gena Rowlands. Davis herself chose Harden Jr. for the male lead.

At the time, Harden Jr. recalls he had just suffered a major career disappointment. His scenes had been entirely cut from the 1979 television film *Buffalo Soldiers. *He remembers his *Jeffersons *costar Isabel Sanford telling him, “I thought you were gonna be in this, and you got everybody to watch.”

But then his friend, Dorian Harewood, who had appeared on stage with Davis in a production of *Miss Moffat*, paid him a visit.

“He says, ‘Man, Bette Davis wants to talk to you,’” Harden Jr. tells **. “And I said, ‘Man, don’t play with me. You know, I’m not feeling that because I just got cut out of a movie. I’m depressed, man.’ He said, ‘No, no, I’m telling the truth. She wants to meet you. I told her about you, and you’re already on *The Jeffersons* [on] CBS. That’s just the perfect thing.’ And so I said, ‘Okay,’ and he set up a meeting, and I met with her at her place and on the street called Havenhurst.”

At the time, Davis lived in the Colonial House, a legendary, though quaint, apartment building (with a doorman) in West Hollywood off of Sunset Boulevard. He had expected the actress, known for her turns in *All About Eve* and *What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?*, to live in grander style.

Ernest Harden Jr. on Aug. 5.

Araya Doheny/Getty

“I thought she just owned half of the hill. I was surprised she was in a modest apartment,” he remembers. “Everywhere I looked, I saw a chalice with her name inscribed on it — I mean, B.D. initials with cigarettes in it. So she smoked a lot, and I noticed that.”

Harden Jr. continues, “She was really friendly, and then finally, after the conversation, she said, ‘So, who can we get to direct us?’ And I’m thinking, ‘*Us*?!’”

The Emmy nominee says he left the meeting on Cloud 9: “Bottom line is, she picked me. I never had to read a script before I got cast. That was the first time I got cast on anything without auditioning. I felt like a big star, and I floated out of that apartment. I knew what was happening, and it was just so unreal.”

*White Mama* is about a widow (Davis) who is barely hanging on financially when she takes in a teenage, troubled juvenile delinquent (Harden Jr.). After she helps set the young man on his life path, he is later able to come to her rescue when she is evicted from her longtime New York apartment.

“I just wanted to be on par [with Davis] or do the best I could. And she admired that. She liked the fact that I was trying to be a sponge and soak up everything that she was doing, and that’s how we became friends,” he remembers.

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In one instance, Davis — who had it in her contract that she would be wrapped by 5 p.m. — was on her way out the door when she saw that Harden Jr. was acting his closeups opposite the script girl.

“Bette Davis was walking, getting ready to go home, she had her coat on, and she passed us while we were filming. She said, ‘What’s going on here?’ [The script girl] says, ‘Well, we’re getting ready to do the scene,’ and [Davis] said, ‘Oh, what?! Oh, heck, no!’ And she pulled off her coat, got with me, and stayed maybe an hour-and-a-half later, working with that...sort of extensive scene. So she just was about the work, and I really admired that.”

For her part, Davis discussed the project in her 1987 memoir *This ‘N That*, noting that the movie “was directed with a sensitive touch by” the former child star Jackie Cooper (who at the time was known for playing Perry White in the Christopher Reeve *Superman* films).

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Davis also noted that the location shoot in Los Angeles’ Skid Row was “agonizing,” as the crew had to “walk around drunks passed out in doorways.”

“Once I had a bottle thrown at me,” she wrote.

Harden Jr.’s friendship with Davis would continue off screen.

Ernest Harden Jr. and Bette Davis in ‘White Mama’.

“Her playing my mother, she got into it so much that she was actually like my mother,” he relates. “She would come on holidays, maybe Thanksgiving, cook me Thanksgiving dinner and invite me over, all that, so we became really tight. We actually planned on doing other movies together, but, you know, she didn’t last. But we had a great connection, and in working [together], I got a chance to see Hollywood on that level.”

Harden Jr. is nominated for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series, a category that will be presented at the Creative Arts ceremony on Sept. 5 and 6. On *The Pitt*, he portrayed the recurring role of beloved patient Louie Cloverfield, an alcoholic who would regularly visit the ER at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center.

“I am enjoying the ride. I’m enjoying being on the strongest show in Hollywood, the strongest show in the world, actually, and I’m just— I feel very blessed,” Harden Jr. says.

He adds that, after Davis got Emmy recognition for her *White Mama *performance all those Emmy ceremonies ago, his *Pitt* moment feels full circle.

“I feel like 46 years later, I have some unfinished business to do, and she’s with me in spirit.”

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Source: “EW Actors”