Former Atlanta actor brings Ike Turner to the stage

There’s never any doubt who the villain is in the amazing life story of Tina Turner: her terrible, horrible, no good, very bad husband/Svengali/abuser, Ike.

After audiences see “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical,” “they walk away saying, ‘Oh yeah, that guy was the bad guy’.”

Credit: Handout

Credit: Handout

That’s Garrett Turner, the 33-year-old actor, formerly of Atlanta, who plays Ike Turner eight times a week in the national touring company, coming to the Fox Theatre Feb. 21 from Broadway in Atlanta.

“Ike Turner is one of the most fascinating villains I have ever researched,” Garrett Turner continues.

“But here’s the thing about villains. So many of them as played on stage or screen are made up, and they’re sadistic for the sake of being sadistic. But Ike Turner was a real guy who was born a Black man in the 1930s in the rural South. And he was up against abject poverty and rampant racism. And somehow out of that he learned how to play piano and guitar and he started a band with a group of friends, and they gained some acclaim.

Credit: MurphyMade

“And one fateful day he met Anna Mae Bullock [Tina Turner’s birth name] and capitalized on her talent. And anyone who could do that, go from Clarksdale, Mississippi, in the 1930s, to international acclaim is just an incredible force of a person. And every night, within this odd vehicle of a musical, we have these short scenes where we have to get all the story work done to bring as much complexity to this man as possible.”

“Tina” debuted in London’s West End in 2018 and moved to Broadway in 2019, where it was nominated for 12 Tony Awards. A jukebox musical built, as usual, on a scaffolding of hit songs (“Proud Mary,” “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” “River Deep, Mountain High”), it was written by Atlanta writer Katori Hall (“P-Valley”). Hall is currently directing another of her plays, “The Hot Wing King,” at the Alliance Theatre, a short stroll up Peachtree Street, and says she plans to see the show at the Fox. That news makes Turner, who has never met Hall, extremely excited.

Turner works with two different Tinas, because the title role is considered so demanding: Naomi Rodgers and Zurin Villanueva split the performances in every city. He was cast as Ike in the touring company in April 2022, and the ensemble hit the road in September.

“We’re 150 shows in,” he says. To prepare himself to be bad to the bone every night, “I have a little ritual that involves a Tibetan singing bowl and prayer before the show, and I ground myself in myself and allow myself to step into the Ike I have created. And then boom I’m onstage and I’m in it.”

Also helping him: his wife, Bonita Jackson Turner, an actress, is accompanying him on the road.

A native of Florence, Alabama, Turner moved to Atlanta in 2007 to attend Emory University. “I didn’t know I wanted to pursue performing as a career,” he recalls. “I was saying I was going to be a professor. That just seemed a lot more sane.”

After graduating in 2011, he won a Bobby Jones Scholarship to study at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, despite no golfing ability. He explains: “Bobby Jones won a lot of golf in St. Andrews. And he got a law degree from Emory. So some rich people decided to honor his legacy by having four students switch between Emory and St. Andrews every year, and I did a post-baccalaureate year and travelled around Europe.

“To go from Atlanta, the Black mecca of the United States, to a hamlet of 12,000 people on the coast of Scotland, was absolutely a culture shock,” he says. “It was an exponential international education.”

He then went on to two years studying theater as a Marshall Scholar in the U.K. “The whole time studying in the U.K. I describe as God knocking down every obstacle [to acting] in my way except for my own fear.

“Thankfully I finally had the courage to say: This is what I want to do.”