The Wind in the Reeds by Wendell Pierce

Author:Wendell Pierce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-08-16T16:00:00+00:00

MY PROFESSIONAL MILESTONES didn’t always come wrapped in such noble mantles. There was the time I acted a fool and humiliated myself in public and spent the night in jail for my troubles—and it led to the role of a lifetime.

In 2001, shortly after the September 11 attacks, my agent passed to me the pilot script for an upcoming HBO series called The Wire. It was the creation of David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun police reporter who had made his professional reputation with his nonfiction book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, which became a crime drama on NBC in the 1990s. With The Wire, Simon wanted to do something more ambitious. It wasn’t going to be simply an exceptional Baltimore cop show; Simon had already done that for NBC. He was going to attempt to create a visual novel, in which the storytelling arc would be much longer than a standard television drama, and the plotting would be far more complex. Simon felt that audiences were smart enough to stick with it for the payoff.

David—we would become close friends—hit his mark. The show ended its five-season run in 2008 as one of the most critically acclaimed dramas in television history. As the journalist Jacob Weisberg said after three seasons, The Wire “is surely the best show ever broadcast in America. . . . No other program has ever done anything remotely like what this one does, namely to portray the social, political, and economic life of an American city with the scope, observational precision, and moral vision of great literature.”

All that was in the future. I could sense something big coming when I first laid eyes on that pilot script. It was like nothing I had ever read. The character for which I was auditioning, Bunk Moreland, a brilliant homicide detective known for his hard drinking, caustic wit, and natty taste in clothes, struck me as startlingly genuine. In fact, the realism of the entire program blew me away. The Wire was really an investigation of human nature. That was the key to my approach to acting. Plus, as in August Wilson’s plays, The Wire would go deep into the heart of an African American character rarely if ever seen in drama: a black cop.

I was born to play Bunk, I thought. This is one role I cannot miss.

Days before my Wire audition, I got into a New York taxi in Midtown, headed to a screening at a hotel in SoHo. The cabdriver didn’t want to take the route I asked him to follow. Instead, he went right through Times Square during rush hour. Traffic was at a standstill, and I was running out of time.

“Listen, I’ll just get another cab,” I said, then opened my door to exit.

“You’re going to pay me for this,” he said, and jumped out.

“Hell, no,” I shot back. “I told you not to come this way, but you wouldn’t listen.”

We stood there in the middle of a Times Square traffic jam, arguing.

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