For me, following in the tracks of those four kids and starting out as friends and then bifurcating their journeys was very interesting to me—how, like, for instance, Michael became sort of the next Marlo or Omar, the next guy that’s going to run a crew and all that stuff. And seeing someone like Randy Wagstaff end up in social services, and Dukie unable to escape his situation at home, and then Namond, how his father was in prison and his mother, her version of love was getting him a pair of Nikes. It just offered all these various windows into these kids’ lives. Kids that experience or grew up in that part of town or any urban area will be able to identify with those characters, whether they themselves have become those characters or if they knew someone. It just made them human. Despite the things that you were witnessing, let’s say Michael with Snoop and Chris Partlow, being recruited by them for Marlo, how can you resist it if you’re a kid growing up in that neighborhood and you have these larger-than-life figures paying attention to you when nobody else is?
SEITH MANN (DIRECTOR): When we were shooting the episode, there were parts that we had [where] kids come in and audition in the casting office. Then there were some of the smaller parts, just one line or two here or there. We were having a bunch of kids show up, so we figured, We’ll cast it in a day. Before we shoot, we’ll have some of the kids come read and we’ll pick the best ones. There’s going to be two hundred, three hundred kids there. Some of the kids would come in to read the sides, and some of the kids couldn’t read the sides.
They’re all seventh, eighth, ninth grade. They’re students, but some of them didn’t have basic reading fundamentals. It was so heartbreaking. I don’t think I’m completely naïve about the world and how fucked up it is in the inner city. At the same time, I was being confronted with kids that are thirteen, fourteen years old who couldn’t read language that was written basically like how they talked. It wasn’t big words. It was like, “Pass me this,” or something. I don’t remember the dialogue, but it was sad. It was like, “Okay, I got to cast the kid that can read the lines.” For me, it just really cemented how important it was for David and everybody to be telling this story.
Against betting odds, The Wire had returned for a fourth season, but it would mark its reappearance largely without Dominic West, considered as much a star as any among the ensemble cast. West, who had a young daughter in England, was homesick and expressing increasing frustration at playing a character he felt he had taken to his full depths. He yearned to be a movie star, and his name had been thrown in as a possibility to be cast as the next James Bond. West’s fellow cast members staged what amounted to an intervention. They pleaded that they needed West, needed McNulty, to finish a story that they had all striven and sacrificed for since the beginning. To placate West, Simon and Noble agreed that his role could be greatly diminished in Season 4—McNulty was reduced to a domesticated beat cop—but they needed him back and fully engaged for Season 5. West agreed, and signed a contract that included a stipulation that he could direct a Season 5 episode.
DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): [Dominic West] had a life back home. He was having a kid. He was in exile in Baltimore. We had to make accommodations in Season Four to travel him and shoot him out a couple episodes at a time. The other people who were sort of disciplining of him, Andre and Sonja and Seth, are the people who’d be like, “Okay, Mr. Lead Actor Guy. You’ll get work, but we’re doing work here that matters to us. Strap on a helmet. Get on the team.” They actually had a couple of moments of taking him out drinking, taking him by the shoulders and shaking him, which was actually great for morale, because he responded to that. When you’re in the middle of doing something that long—it’s five years—it’s easy to think, I’m not seeing it. It’s hard for anybody to see it, when you’re getting one script at a time. He was being asked to go on faith. He doesn’t know how it’s going to end, whether or not we have a clue or a plan. We had to talk him back into the boat a couple years. I told him we had to finish the story, and he did. As we got toward the end, by the time he saw Season Four on the air, that came to an end. But at the end of three seasons, he just wanted to go home.
DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): I asked, stupidly—because I think it’s the best season—but I did ask him in Three, I said, “You’ve got to give me a bit of a break,” and he said, “Okay, we’ll shoot you out in three weeks.” I think I did it in three weeks. He said, “We’ll do all your stuff in three weeks, and you can take a break as long as you come back for Season Five.” Yes, I agreed to that—and managed to talk my way out of the best season of all, I think, like an idiot.
CLARKE PETERS (DET. LESTER FREAMON): Playing the same character for seven years of your life can take its toll, man. You’re a family man. You’re trying to get your life together. You’ve got to spend a lot of time away from your family. He had a young daughter who he loves. I do remember having one talk with him, basically that “this is our gig. This is what we signed up for. Let’s get through it, and then it’ll be all right on the other side of it. Sometimes it’s the piece that makes you that also breaks you. You may not want to be McNulty. I may not want to be Lester, or it might get boring or tiring to answer the same questions and all of that, but you know what? If it wasn’t for these characters, we wouldn’t be where we are in our careers today. You at least give respect to that. At the beginning of this journey, you were very enthusiastic about it, so remember the days of thy youth. Just hold on to that.”
I may have had a talk with most of the company. I seem to be the person everyone wants to talk their problems out with. Somewhere along the line, I think Clarke and Lester got mixed up.
ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): You just get burned out. You’re just like, “I can’t. I don’t know what else to do. I can’t do it anymore.” He felt like he wanted to do movies. He was tired of being away. He’s far away from London, from his family, being in Baltimore. We love Baltimore now, but sometimes you just want to go home. You want to work and, after work, go home, be a family. He was burned out. He was done. He had some movies that were coming out. I think it was Mona Lisa Smile or The Forgotten or some shit. He’s like, “I’d rather do that world.” He didn’t want to come back. Again, we got canceled. HBO said the show was over. We’re not like a network. We don’t get to come back. Three years is a good run. It’s a good run for the show. It did its course. HBO was like, “How are you going to tell a story without Stringer Bell?” David Simon was like, “If that’s how you feel, listen, release everybody’s contract. Let me send you a couple of scripts and see how you feel.”
We all got released. I came out here in LA and I was like, “Hey wifey, let’s go to LA. Let’s figure it out.” She was having it because I can always come back and do Law & Order. I moved to LA. I was testing for My Name Is Earl. I might have been Crabman. I got a call from David, like, “Yo, I sent them a couple of scripts. They want us back.” I was like, “Oh, shit. Really?” I was about to test for this network show. David was like, “Listen, you’re not under contract. If you don’t want to come back, I understand. I get it. We had a good run, but our story’s not over.” I was like, “Shit.” I didn’t get the part for Crabman, because it might have been a harder decision. You’re talking network for a different type of money, but it’s also a pilot. Then I just got hit with a flashback at that point. We had lost Bob Colesberry. We had lost a great editor in Geraldine Peroni. She passed away. We had it mapped out for five seasons. We wanted to tell our story. We had to finish it. I went back. I know Dom didn’t want to come back. Again, we felt like it was an obligation to the storytelling, to Baltimore, to the people that we played, and to ourselves to finish this journey for all the people, all [the] behind-the-scenes actors who gave us their time, that worked on it. It’d been selfish for us to not finish the story.
Each season of The Wire carries a theme, and each season starts with a metaphor. Season 4’s cold open highlights Felicia “Snoop” Pearson, who popped up intermit
tently the previous season. The show’s creators urged Pearson to become serious with regard to acting. The open would test her dedication. It features the androgynous Pearson purchasing a nail gun that the fictional Snoop and Chris Partlow will use to lock up the vacant buildings where they detachedly stored dead bodies. She listens intently during the hardware store employee’s detailed pitch in describing the power and recoil abilities of various nail guns—the moral being that one can be educated if the curriculum actually applies to his or her life. The employee describes a .27 caliber charge as “not large ballistically, but for driving nails, it’s enough.” His gleeful expression slowly transforms at Snoop’s response: “Man, shit. I seen a tiny-ass .22 round-nose drop a nigga plenty of days, man. Motherfuckers get up in you like a pinball, rip your ass up. Big joints, though…Big joints, man, just break your bones, you say, ‘Fuck it.’ I’m gonna go with this right here, man. How much do I owe you?” In an Entertainment Weekly column, Stephen King crowned Snoop “perhaps the most terrifying female villain to ever appear in a television series. When you think of Chris and Snoop, think of John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, only smart. And with a nail gun.”
DENNIS LEHANE (WRITER): The episode where Snoop shops for a cordless screwdriver at Home Depot. That made everyone’s jaw drop.
DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): We’d let her be off book. We let her sort of get her own words. But that was a very specific metaphor about education. I wanted her to say the words of it. I remember going to her and saying, “Look. You’re an incredible presence, and we hired you because you’re an incredible presence and you’re very real, but the question for you now is: Do you want to be a professional actor? Because this is the transition, because I have no doubt that you can be yourself in front of the camera. You’ve been doing it now for three or four episodes. You did well last year, but here’s a moment where if I’m going to rely on you to carry a bigger burden on the story, then I need to know that when I send pages, the pages will prevail and that you’ll find a way to say what’s on the page and make it your own and make it real. That is acting. It’s going to require work and it’s going to require struggle. It’s not going to come naturally. Nothing comes naturally that’s this complicated. It doesn’t mean you don’t have talent. It means this is going to require work.”
She looked at those three pages and she was like, “Damn. I got to know all this word by word?” I was like, “Look. Good news, it’s not a stage play. We can get it in pieces, but we’re going to get it.” We had to run up. The first few takes were a struggle, but by the end, we had all of it. I was so proud of her. I was so proud of her. Little did I know she was getting glossies made and she was finding an agent and she was like, “What do I have to do to be professional?” She did not take that opportunity and piss it away. She really committed to it. That was her true test as an actor. Everything up to then was just her being herself on camera. That was her reading scenes and conveying somebody else’s idea fully. I was nervous about it. Nina [Noble] was like, “We’re going to be there all day.” But we weren’t. It took a little bit of time, but we were not there all day. She got it.
FELICIA “SNOOP” PEARSON: At first, I didn’t get it, because that was my second season or whatever. But the writers and the producers was like, “Man, you the first face everybody gonna see. This a real big deal.” So, I was like, “Word?” Then everybody was like, “Yeah, Snoop. It’s a big deal.” I still was humble, but I was excited. That scene right there, I think that only took us like two hours, and that’s with them setting everything up, every angle or whatever. Took like, let’s say three hours. It was a very fun scene.
JOE CHAPPELLE (DIRECTOR/CO-EXECUTIVE PRODUCER): We shot it, and the guy she played off against, the salesman, was really good, too. But she was so nervous that first day. She just kept rushing through her lines. You could tell she was very, very nervous. So, we did the scene, and then we looked at it and we decided to bring her back, and we reshot her coverage. The first pass at it didn’t work. It was one of those rare times in television when you do get to go back, because it was the season premiere. Let’s make it work. We believe in her. We think she can do it. Let’s get her to take another whack at it.
We went back and we replicated the whole hardware store, and she nailed it because she was that much more comfortable with it. She was so nervous, which you just wouldn’t expect from her. Her whole persona is very laid-back and very sort of in control. But then she got nervous and got a little flustered.
METHOD MAN (CALVIN “CHEESE” WAGSTAFF): That’s what I want. I want a scene where it stands out like that where it’s just a scene where people always talk about that shit. That was her meat and potatoes right there. That’s what showed everybody, yeah, she’s got some presence. Even before that, but that was like, “Here, this is for you. You’re opening the show. This is like the cold open and it’s all about you: one, two, three, go.” And she nailed that shit.
TRAY CHANEY (MALIK “POOT” CARR): Snoop is still that reflection and that example. That’s the real Baltimore when you think about Baltimore. Some of that stuff, Snoop wasn’t faking. That was real. That was real life.
KWAME PATTERSON (“MONK” METCALF): Everything you see pretty much on The Wire is pretty much how I was on the streets. The same way. I was a different person then—not during The Wire, but when I was younger. Now, I laugh and I joke around a lot. I play around, where, back then, I was real serious. I was mean. I was always paranoid, always keeping my head on a swivel type of thing. So, literally, I just brought all that to the character of Monk.
ANWAN GLOVER (SLIM CHARLES): Getting up every day with my older brother, he was in it, in the street life. In my neighborhood, getting up as a little kid, one day, going to school, saw a dead body by the trash can, get out of school and the dead body’s still right there, with the yellow tape. I know how to adapt to those different situations, and then on The Wire, the last episodes, my little brother was murdered. And I had to shoot those scenes with me coping with my mom pulling her hair out, and producers and the writers are like, “Anwan, do you want to sit back for a minute?” I said, “Na, I’ve gotta keep pushing. I can’t take no time back.” Because I probably would have went crazy. But they were always in my corner with everything.
JULITO MCCULLUM (NAMOND BRICE): We were very intimidated by the adults and the returning cast. We were extremely intimidated. When I saw Chad [Coleman], I was like, “Oh, wow.” I hadn’t watched up until we started shooting. It was funny, after we did Hack, I would see Chad. We lived in the same neighborhood as well, so I would see Chad riding his bike sometimes, and we’d always stop and talk because he was like my first scene partner ever. Hack was one of my first jobs. When I saw him in The Wire, I was like, “Wow. This is home.”
TRISTAN MACK WILDS (MICHAEL LEE): Chad, in one of my Off-Broadway plays, played my dad. So, there was already a dynamic there that we had. When I finally came around and we did The Wire, we kind of just kept it going. But it was crazy to play. This is two characters that are very reserved, very to themselves. They handle their own business. They go about their own way. But it was one of those things where I think you saw Chad’s character trying to be more than that through Michael. He saw himself in Michael, the good and the bad. He wanted to do what he could to try to keep him from the bad. But there are some things that are inevitable.
MICHAEL KOSTROFF (MAURICE “MAURY” LEVY): I once told Chad that he was playing this man of very few words, who kept everything inside, but it felt like there was an opera going on inside of his head. He said, “Oh yeah. There’s a lot going on in there.”
CHAD L. COLEMAN (DENNIS “CUTTY” WISE): I didn’t have a choice. David wasn’t writing monologues for me. Of course, that is the nature of the man, and that’s partly what makes him incredibly compelling, is that he is not a master of language, but he has a lot going on inside. That was what Cutty was about: uplifting and not destroying. I think more than
anything—we didn’t explore it—but I think he had a prison experience that was what we would wish for anybody. Somewhere in there, he began to hear something different. That’s not to jump to say he’s Malcolm X. It’s to say, in a very real way, that’s one of the things that allows a person to change.
I think he met some knowledge and enlightenment that helped him really make a seismic change, and I think that’s something we all can be proud of, and I know for a fact that the majority of the guys in our community come from his ilk as opposed to just rampantly saying, “I’m the gangbanger. Whoo-hoo, here we go.” I was proud to take that on because so many people just have a difficult time seeing that these guys want to change. Some people don’t, but many of them do. These guys who would normally be men of few words and who posture a lot, come out and be vulnerable and just want to come out and give you a pound and a hug and pound their chest and say, “Man, thank you. Thank you for representing me.” That’s a major experience for me.
JONNIE BROWN (OFF. EDDIE WALKER): Walker [a crooked African-American police officer who terrorizes black kids in the show], that was one of the hardest roles that I ever did, ever had. It’s actually one of my most notorious roles on film and television. A lot of people remember me from that, but I gotta tell you, it started to get to me, around the third or fourth episode. I started to go to the writers. And I went to David and I just said, “Guys, what I’m doing in this character is completely outrageous. You got me in this completely dark Twilight Zone. Is there any redemption?” Because, from one episode to the other, they don’t tell you what’s going to happen. They themselves don’t really know. They have an idea, but they change it at the last minute. It just started to mentally affect me. It really did. It was such a dark force, this character. And I went to them twice. I went to them twice, like, “Look guys. I mean, what is this guy doing? He’s like the Terminator.”
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