Later on, Dom was working with him on Chicago and they’re looking at each other. They’re so different, and Dom’s like, “What were they going for?”
That’s kind of how casting is sometimes. You go in one direction. You find out you’re on the wrong track or circumstance thwarts you, and you end up going in a different direction.
DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): To read, I was given one scene from the pilot and nothing else, and I put myself on tape. I didn’t think much of it, but it got too late in the night, and they wanted it the next day, so I got my girlfriend to read the dialogue. It was a scene between McNulty and Bunk, and she read the Bunk part and I held the camera and I did McNulty. She couldn’t stop laughing at my accent, so I sent her out of the room and I had no one else and it was late, so I just left a gap for when Bunk spoke and reacted to whatever he was supposed to be saying and sent it off to them.
David Simon said he found that it was so funny, this fool reacting to complete silence, that he thought we’d better get him over and have a laugh.
DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): I had never seen an audition tape like it. The camera was on him, and he was reading and then he was leaving the pauses for the other actors, who didn’t exist, and he was reacting to the lines. A lot of acting is reacting, and to see somebody doing it to nothingness is a pretty unusual audition tape.
We fell around the room laughing, like, “What the…?” Then, we sat down and watched the tape, and the accent was slipping. It was his first time trying an American accent, and it seemed to be there were shades of sort of New York De Niro–isms. But it was really good acting. He was a good actor, and the reacting to nothing was a tell. Of course, we knew that McNulty would probably be sort of a guy with unrelenting vices, sort of his own worst enemy. Dom had that. You could see that even in the audition tape.
ALEXA L. FOGEL (CASTING DIRECTOR): He was too young. He was too attractive. I’m not sure that anyone else knew this at the time, but he was really well educated. I didn’t let everyone know where he had gone to school, because it wasn’t important. He understood the guy.
DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): I went to New York and I met Wendell Pierce, who was the first person to be cast, and we hit it off pretty well. So, I think that’s what kicked it all into start.
WENDELL PIERCE (DET. WILLIAM “BUNK” MORELAND): I’m from New Orleans, and we have a laissez-faire sort of approach to everything. It’s a cultural thing in New Orleans. Dominic is very much that. We had so much fun. It started from the beginning. I remember reading with him, and I was like, Oh my God, this guy is prepared, and I don’t have this shit memorized. He was on point and prepared, and he maybe dropped one line and went on and was like, “You were so prepared and I was awful.” I was like, “Wow, I was thinking the opposite, man. You were prepared and I was awful.” Our chemistry—it’s been a great friendship from the bat. He has a great curiosity about things. He’s very well read, loves to go out and have a good time. I think we share that approach to life.
ALEXA L. FOGEL (CASTING DIRECTOR): I did have to sell the head of HBO at the time, Chris Albrecht. I flew out with Dom, and then he and I worked at it at the hotel, and then we all went into HBO and he and I read together for a couple of the executives. I stepped in because I felt like we needed to explain to Chris what it was about, this guy who looked so different than what was written about this character, that he had this kind of darkness and [this] lost quality and a sense of cynicism about everything about him that he really managed to embody.
At the end of my little monologue, Chris turned to me and he pointed and said, “You better be right.” For three weeks, I would wake up every three hours and all I could see was the end of that finger pointing at me, saying, “You better be right.”
CHRIS ALBRECHT (CHAIRMAN AND CEO, HBO): Dominic is British. That was before people were casting a lot of Brits as American.
DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): Ed [Burns] always thought that he was, and rightfully so, the smartest guy in the room. Not on The Wire, but when he was a cop. To a lot of the frustration with the bosses, a lot of the sort of maverick disobedience and thinking everyone else is an idiot, and he’s the only one that knows how to solve the case, a lot of that in McNulty was from Ed.
I think that’s what struck a chord most with the cops that used to watch the show. They’d go, “This is exactly what cops think about all the time.” It’s, I suppose, what everyone thinks about all the time—is what an asshole their bosses are and how they could do the job so much better if only they didn’t have to answer to these idiots who are their superiors. I think Ed brought that very much, the sort of experience of being a cop, to the show, which is what made it so different and so real. A lot of McNulty was based on Ed, particularly the intelligence and the intellectual arrogance, I think.
ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): That’s what I did. I went to my captain first and said, “This doesn’t work against gangs. It just doesn’t work.” Of course, in Baltimore, we pretended we didn’t have gangs. That was something. It took many, many years to acknowledge the fact that we had gangs, but that was just the brass being stupid. Then I went up to the State’s Attorney’s Office and got Howard Gersh, and he basically put pressure on the police commissioner. I got sprung loose from the Homicide office, much to the chagrin of the major, and was able to go after all the gangs, which got me away from Homicide and also got me away from the Narcotics Unit, sort of carved my own little niche. I did that almost up until the day I retired.
But McNulty is more of an expression of David, with the divorce and that kind of stuff. What McNulty did, as far as pressuring the police department to establish a unit to go after gangsters, was what I did. His personal life and stuff like that—that wasn’t my personal life. I’m sort of a homebody.
ALEXA L. FOGEL (CASTING DIRECTOR): Idris [Elba] was up for a Fox movie that I was casting right before I did The Wire. He didn’t get it, which was really frustrating for me. I thought he had tremendous presence. His American accent was perfect. But he was an unknown face, and for a studio, that was tricky. He was very much on the forefront of my mind when I started on The Wire. Because of the experience that I had with the feature, I told him to just use an American accent. I’ve never done that before, and I’ve never done it since. But I was sort of coming off of this frustrating experience where he didn’t get a role and I was trying to kind of create an environment in which everything was going his way.
IDRIS ELBA (STRINGER BELL): I couldn’t afford to stay anymore. This was literally the last audition that I was up for that could change my life. It was in December when I was auditioning. In January, my lease was up, my daughter was about to be born. It was a really troubling time. It was like, Get this job and you stay. Don’t get this job and you won’t be able to afford to stay and you’ll go back [to England]. Also, my visa was running out next year as well, so it was really the last hurrah for me, to be honest. Then eventually, the day my daughter was born was the day I got the job.
WOOD HARRIS (AVON BARKSDALE): Me and Idris were two of the first people cast. Alexa was talking to me at the time about how she loved us working out. She said, “Oh my God, you two are going to work really well together.”
MICHAEL B. JORDAN (WALLACE): I remember feeling so bummed the first time I went in there and I didn’t get the job. I originally went in there for Bodie, and I was too young for it and I didn’t get it, and I was just super sad, and I remember [pilot director] Clark [Johnson] and Alexa calling me back in. They brought me back in for Wallace, and I ended up getting that character. That was cool. That was the silver lining.
ALEXA L. FOGEL (CASTING DIRECTOR): We had to do all these extra things, because [Michael B. Jordan] couldn’t go to Baltimore by himself. He had to have a guardian because he was underage. Every time we did the deal, it was sort of for two people.
ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): I had just finished do
ing a play and got mad love from all these actors that I looked up to. I was on cloud nine. My manager called me and was like, “HBO has a new show.” At that point, because of Oz and Six Feet Under and all that stuff, it still was the biggest. That’s what every actor wanted. You had Law & Order and you had HBO. That’s what every actor in New York wanted to be on.
When she said, “HBO is doing a new show called The Wire and I got you an audition for this junkie character named Bubbles,” I was mad. I was like, “I’m not doing that. I’m not playing a junkie.” I didn’t know anything about the kind of addiction Bubbles was in. I just felt like it was one of those roles we always heard would be either that typecast guy or ridiculed because you never get it right. Only a few. You had Sam[uel L.] Jackson as Gator and you have Chris Rock in New Jack City. I couldn’t see myself doing better than that. If you can’t see yourself doing better with the role, then why take it? I was a little like, “I don’t want to go.” My manager, being the great manager she was at that time, was like, “You’re broke, motherfucker. You ain’t got no money. They didn’t offer you the role. You got to go audition. How about you go there, so people in the television world can see if you can act? If you book it, then you can turn it down, if you want to.”
She made it in a tone where it was a challenge, like, “You ain’t booked it yet.” I was like, “I’ll book it.” I was high on myself at that time. I was like, “All right. Let me go in.” I went in. It’s New York. You see the same black actors in all the auditions. It’s a small circle. I see all my boys, and everybody’s auditioning for this guy. His name is Bubbles. Someone’s chewing bubble gum. I was like, “That’s so fucking juvenile.” I spat my gum out.
LANCE REDDICK (LT. CEDRIC DANIELS): I originally was called in for Bunk. I read for Bunk three times. The last time I went and read for Bunk, it was the only time that David, Ed, and Bob Colesberry were in the room. David asked me to read for Bubbles on the spot. I went outside and looked at the words, came back, and I read for Bubbles. I’m sure that was because he’d just seen me play two drug addicts in a row. I worked with David and Bob on The Corner, where I played a crackhead. Then I was cast in Oz in March of 2000, where I’m an undercover cop who gets addicted to heroin. He saw me play two skinny drug addicts in a row. It’s funny, because I even remember, toward the end of my run on that season of Oz, David was stopping by to say hello to [Oz creator] Tom [Fontana]. I remember him saying to me, “I’m working on a new project. I’ll keep you in mind.” I was grateful for him saying that, but people say that stuff all the time. I didn’t expect it to go anywhere.
ALEXA L. FOGEL (CASTING DIRECTOR): That’s just the way it goes until you get deeper into the process. The beginning of the process is a total crapshoot. You’re just trying everything out, and then it starts to makes sense, because the quality of the actor starts to adhere more closely and strongly to specific qualities in the role. But in the beginning, you just don’t know.
ROBERT WISDOM (HOWARD “BUNNY” COLVIN): Alexa Fogel is one of the great casting directors around. Alexa nailed this one. She’s really an unsung hero of the show. She just had her finger on the pulse of a broader array of talent than our industry is given credit for.
PAT MORAN (CASTING: BALTIMORE): I knew right off the bat that this was not any Cosby kids here. That wasn’t going to fly. In order for that to translate, even though the words were great, you needed to match it up with the eyes. I also feel that there’s a role for everybody. After a period of seeing a lot of people, perhaps they couldn’t carry a show, but there’s a one-liner waiting for them somewhere.
I was always happy to be a part of it. I believed in it. There wasn’t one rotten script that came, and that’s what you really love. The characters were so specific, and you saw what it looked like in your head. Until it looked like that, I wasn’t happy.
JAY LANDSMAN SR. (LT. DENNIS MELLO): I actually read for the part of Landsman, but I’m still working now. I’d have to take off three days of work, whenever they want. I said, “I can’t do that all the time.” All of a sudden, they had Delaney Williams read for it. Delaney Williams wasn’t anything like me. David Simon said, “You did fine on that reading, but you’re just no ‘Jay Landsman.’ ” Asshole. He thought it was the funniest thing in the world when it happened. We met all these people, and he had this big, fat guy. I was one of the thinnest guys there at the time and never ate.
DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): Jay is not heavyset. Jay had, at that time, probably put on more weight than he had normally had. When I was in the Homicide unit, Jay was and still probably is the worst practical joker in the history of the Baltimore Police Department. There were so many practical jokes he played on me. It was so hilariously humiliating when I was the intern there. So, I finally got him back. Delaney is a great actor, and I loved working with him. We didn’t cast him because he was heavyset. We cast him because he was great in the read. Once we did cast him and I’d realized what I’d done, then it was like, “Jay, you’re good, but I got a guy who’s much better at being Jay Landsman than you.”
When he saw Delaney walk on, Jay immediately went on a diet. The real Jay. Jay dropped like thirty pounds. He’d put on some weight. I’m not saying he was heavy. He was heavier than he’d been. He saw Delaney walk on-screen, I think Jay didn’t have a doughnut for the next two to three years. Next I saw, he was thirty pounds lighter. Jay was like, “You motherfucker.”
DELANEY WILLIAMS (SGT. JAY LANDSMAN): I didn’t know I was going to be on a lot, and they didn’t tell me anything about the character. I had no idea there was even a real Landsman until the end of the first season, when I met Jay. That’s how little I was told about what was going on or what it was about. I think they kind of said, “Well, this is the person we need.” As an actor, I chose things to play, and they were happy with it. Then they wrote toward those things. As far as that goes, he was functioning as the guy between the bureaucracy of the city government and a police department. I really wasn’t told anything about it, but it turned out that, looking back on it, it was a comic relief device of sorts.
LAWRENCE GILLIARD JR. (D’ANGELO BARKSDALE): When I booked the role, I was living in New York, and my agent called me and he told me that there was a script, new HBO show, and it was going to be about Baltimore. He knew I grew up in Baltimore. He sent me the script, and I read it. Instantly, I just had a connection with it. I knew the neighborhood. I knew the streets. I’m reading it and I’m just thinking to myself, I know these corners. I know these streets, and I know these characters. I know these people. It was very personal to me, having had the experience living, growing up in Baltimore. I just felt like, I really need to get this part.
Doing the show, playing D’Angelo, I knew cats who were in that situation. I knew cats on the street. I was fortunate. My mother sheltered me from a lot of that stuff. I was lucky that way. I grew up right in West Baltimore. As a matter of fact, I played football for the Lexington Terrace football squad, which is where the high-rises where the Barksdales were operating and all that stuff was going down. That was my hood.
When I was like thirteen, fourteen, I got into high school and I went to a school that pretty much took me away from all that. I knew cats who weren’t taken out of it, were still in it, weren’t as lucky and fortunate as me. When I was playing that part, I was just thinking about some of those cats and thinking to myself, The person that I’m playing is a real person somewhere in the world. I want to do that character justice. And because it was personal to me, I wanted to do the story some justice. I wanted it to be as true as I could and do some justice to the stories for them.
DEIRDRE “DEDE” LOVEJOY (ASST. STATE’S ATTY. RHONDA PEARLMAN): I was shocked when I got cast, because when I got the call, my agent said, “This is an HBO show and there are two female parts in it.” I was like, “Right. I am sure that I am going to be cast as sort of the kind of on-again, off-again interest to the main character.” I was like,
“That’s not me. I am not that girl. I am not.” As a result of that, I just thought there was not a chance in hell that I would ever get cast. I walked in the waiting room and every award-winning actress that you could name was there, and lots of my colleagues were Tony Award winners and much more beautiful than I am. I would consider myself always a character person. I’m a leading lady, but on the theater generally. I was so relaxed. I just visited with all of my friends. I didn’t think twice about the audition, because I knew there wasn’t a chance in hell.
I did my audition, and a couple days later, I got a call that there was interest, and I went for my callback and I still knew that there wasn’t a chance in hell. I did my reading, and David was there and Robert Colesberry, and Clark [Johnson]. I was trying to quit smoking for the ninetieth time back then, but I had my little nicotine patch on my chest. I went to put my microphone on and the nicotine patch was showing. I was like, “Oops. Sorry. That’s my patch. I’m a little spacey today, but it’s because I’ve got my patch on.” I don’t know if that made me more relaxed or whatever, and I booked it and I didn’t have to screen-test.
I can’t remember if I had this conversation with David Simon or if I sort of gleaned it from several conversations with him, but they auditioned a lot of people for that role. They just didn’t quite know what they were looking for. They knew they were looking for something, but they didn’t know what it was. That is why there were really beautiful people and people like me. They said that when I walked in the audition, they were like, “That’s her.” That just happens once every million years, and the stars align for an actor. It wasn’t anything I did better or worse than I usually do in a thousand other auditions, but I am eternally grateful that it happened to align for me to be part of a project that wound up being sort of historically significant.
All the Pieces Matter Page 3
