MICHAEL B. JORDAN (WALLACE): Once my character started taking drugs a little bit and started sniffing coke, I kind of knew there was a slow decline.
DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): I said it to Michael, “People are going to remember Wallace. Wallace is going to bother them for a long time after the whole show is forgotten. You’re going to work. You’re going to have a career. You did great with this.” They all look at you like, This is the last job I’ll ever get. You can never convince them enough.
MICHAEL B. JORDAN (WALLACE): I kind of knew it was coming. Especially when you get that knock on your trailer door from David Simon. I’ll never forget it. He said, “I love you. The audience loves you. We’ve got to kill you. We’ve got to kill you off.” I remember telling my mom not to show up on set that day. My mom gets extremely emotional, and this was kind of too much. I didn’t want her to see it. It was a long time to shoot that shot. We definitely overshot that for sure. I remember them having to duct-tape the windows, so the light wouldn’t go through, because we were going so late into the night, to the morning. But it was really quiet. The crew knew.
Everybody showed up. Even if they weren’t working, they kind of showed up on set. I know Andre Royo did, for sure. He was definitely a mentor of mine on that show. He showed up to help me get into the mind-set and really talk me through it. I remember getting the squib under my shirt. They had a tube running down my leg with warm water for when he peed himself, when he got scared and shit. Me and J. D. Williams, who played Bodie, we’re both from Newark, New Jersey, and we both spent a lot of time on that show together, and I learned a lot from him over that show. We was just talking to each other, and then [when we started shooting the scene] it was like I didn’t even know him.
GEORGE PELECANOS (WRITER/PRODUCER): That was shot as I wrote it. I was very fortunate, because I had these extraordinary actors doing the scene. I heard that it was a very emotional day on set, because everybody loved Michael B. Jordan.
DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): I gave him the Wallace scene because, at that point, I had read three or four of his novels, and his violence was never gratuitous. It was always on a human scale, and it had a narrative tension that was that of a novel. So, I always knew that those things would always have heart. And I thought he was the best person to chase that stuff. That was “use what you have.” To have a novelist’s sense of tension when it comes to violence is really picture perfect.
ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): It was Pelecanos who wrote that murder scene, and I didn’t like it. We made Bodie a psychopath, and psychopaths don’t hesitate. It was great for the character growing. I won’t deny that. It was great for the actor—really gave him a stretch. He turned out to be a great actor, but to me, it didn’t follow the logic of who the kid was. You create a psychopath, there’s no moral sense of having him not pull the trigger.
DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): I was listening to Ed. But I’m also listening to George, and one of them had a better argument. Once you read George’s scenes, there was something surprising. Bodie seemed to be heading for this moment the whole time. If somebody goes exactly where they say they’re gonna go always, human beings aren’t like that. The Chekhovian model of character is people don’t say exactly what they mean. They say what they think other people want to hear or what they want to hear themselves. They don’t say exactly what they’re thinking. They’re not blunt. They have a roundabout way of avoiding certain truths. Then they find themselves as contents under pressure. And then there are different outcomes. Sometimes that makes for the best moments in drama and also the most interesting moments in real life. People are contradictory. I felt like I was watching Bodie becoming a much more interesting character. You can see the dividends that got paid on it in Season Four. It’s a self-reflection on his life. You couldn’t have him just blot-out lawless. I couldn’t do anything ever with him ever again. It would’ve stunted him. That would’ve been it. There’s nowhere to go with that character at that point, other than have him perform various acts and be serviceable to the plot.
J. D. WILLIAMS (PRESTON “BODIE” BROADUS): It wasn’t an emotional thing for my character. Bodie, he tries not to step over the line, but once he’s over the line, he’s committed. That’s where he was going with it. Throughout the day, you might have been seeing Bodie’s apprehension or him thinking about what he has to do. Then, there is that flash in the room where he’s like, he should’ve stayed away, but at the time, I was feeling it should’ve been just more resolute. The way I had been playing the character all that season, he was pretty committed to certain things he was doing, whether it’s walking out of the juvenile hall or punching out an old man cop. I felt like once he made a decision, he pretty much stuck with it. It worked.
I don’t think either one of us is wrong, because the audience loved the fact that Bodie did feel. They could tell that he felt compassion, which I think they would’ve been able to tell anyway. The audience loved that fact, and the point still got across that Wallace’s death was tragic.
TRAY CHANEY (MALIK “POOT” CARR): I had just experienced a loss, a death in my family. This guy that was like a brother to me was abducted and killed, and he was like my best friend. As you could see, the way the scene was set up, it was set up for whatever it was, but I think the emotion for me came from my reality.
MICHAEL B. JORDAN (WALLACE): I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house. I think everybody was kind of affected by that one, man. Everybody was fucked up.
LAWRENCE GILLIARD JR. (D’ANGELO BARKSDALE): I think it was his mom, came to me like, “Can you talk to him?” I’m like, “Bro, you’re talented. You’re young. Don’t stress it. It’s just a job. You’ll move on. You’ll move on from this, and you’ll get on something else that’s great. Just keep doing your thing.” That’s all we can do as actors. It’s hard when you’re doing it, but you gotta remember that it is just a job.
J. D. WILLIAMS (PRESTON “BODIE” BROADUS): He was going through it. I had to pull him to the side. I explained to him, I said, “First off, a death scene, this is where that theater training comes in, because that’s the main thing you want to do on the stage, is die. You can’t do any more acting than that.” I tried to explain to him that a death scene is an honor, and it’s very important because, once you die, the people are going to start looking for you. They’re going to say, “Well, he was great. I loved that character. Who was that guy?” Because you did your job. Now you’re going to be embedded in people’s emotions, and they’re going to be looking for you, and they’re going to root for you because of the sympathy. This is going to be good for you. He calmed down some. He got his self together. He shot the scene, and as soon as the director yelled, “Cut,” as soon as he hit the floor, he sat up and he started crying.
MICHAEL B. JORDAN (WALLACE): You just get into it and then you just go from there. Yeah, man. Went through it, got shot. Then I remember we did it a couple times. I want to say we did like two takes, three takes. And then I took a break or something and I went out. I just remember my mom bawling, hearing her sob. I remember hearing her crying, and I’m like, “Oh God.” The whole emotional thing. That was cool. That was an intense night.
CLARKE PETERS (DET. LESTER FREAMON): I’ve put it to my agent, “Don’t give me jobs where I’m getting killed off all the time. Please don’t.” It sends the wrong messages to people. There are actors who really like to and will die really good, give real good death scenes. Give the job to that cat. I want to live to play another day.
GEORGE PELECANOS (WRITER/PRODUCER): The tragedy was that [Wallace] couldn’t leave. He couldn’t leave his environment, and he kept coming back. I think that’s what I wrote in that episode: “This is me, yo. Right here.” Like, “I’m Baltimore. I’m not going anywhere.” He even goes out to the country for a while, and he can’t stand it. And he keeps going back.
MICHAEL B. JORDAN (WALLACE): Wallace was the heart of the show. David wanted to rip that he
art out and really use Wallace as a harsh example of sometimes being the victim of your circumstances. Good kid, good heart, he had good intentions, and you could see with that environment what those types of circumstances can do to a kid like that. All these guys may be looked at a certain type of way. All aren’t what they maybe seem to be. I love that symbolism and what that stood for. And to see that end so viciously with his two boys, his two best friends…That death scene is something people always come up to me and talk about and say how they were crying and how much it affected them. Years later. It’s just a testament to the writing and that crazy performance. It was awesome.
That’s when I fell in love with acting. I fell in love with acting right around the time where Wallace started sniffing coke. That was the first moment when I ever lost myself in a character, where I didn’t feel like myself, where I was totally zoned in, and Andre Royo really helped me with that. I really fell in love with acting at that moment. Up until that point, it was a lot of imitating or trying to be in the moment. My mind state was, Play it, make it as real as possible, and just try to go through it. At that age, my mind isn’t as developed as now. My strategy, my process, wasn’t as developed. It was really raw. That was me as raw as you was going to get.
GEORGE PELECANOS (WRITER/PRODUCER): After that, unofficially—we never shook on it or anything like that—David always gave me the penultimate episode of the season. That happened to be the episode where people got killed. By the end of the run, people were wearing tee shirts on set. I don’t even know who made them. It said my name, Pelecanos, and it had a pen with blood dripping on it. Even the actors got to the point where they sort of dreaded the script coming out that I was going to write because, by policy, we would never tell the actor that he or she was going to get killed. We didn’t want the performances to get telegraphed. If they knew in the beginning of the season that they were going to get killed in a certain episode, we felt like they might telegraph it. Think about it. When your character is killed in a TV show, it’s like somebody handing you a pink slip. You’re fired. It’s not a pleasant thing. But I always got that penultimate episode, and it’s because of the Wallace scene in Season One.
LAWRENCE GILLIARD JR. (D’ANGELO BARKSDALE): I’m maybe eighty percent prepared when I get to set, because I like to leave a little room for whatever the director’s ideas are, whatever the other actors in the room, whatever their ideas are. It’s all about collaborating. I didn’t prepare. I wasn’t at home in the mirror repeating, “Where’s Wallace?” and “I’m gonna look like this. I’m gonna do that.”
I remember Clement [Virgo] coming out at one point. There are certain moments when you’re working when the director can just give you a certain look. It’s really just a look. They don’t have to say anything. He came out and he just gave me this look. I guess I took it up another notch after that. It changed something in my performance. Obviously with that scene, it took something up a notch, and that was when it really started cooking, after that. It was a very emotional scene, and I was just in that moment. You could feel it. I remember. Everybody in the room and around me could feel that it was really happening. That’s the magic of it all. That’s what you’re always striving for when you’re acting, when you’re on set, when you’re in front of that camera. You always want that magical moment where it’s really happening, until they say, “Cut.”
DELANEY WILLIAMS (SGT. JAY LANDSMAN): When Kima gets shot, that first season, we had a scene where we’re doing the search in the train yard for the shooters. This was a big helicopter, nighttime scene, closed down all the streets, and then we spent a lot of time in the train yard looking for evidence, where the perpetrators had gone through and got to their getaway car. It was a long, long night, much longer than it should’ve been, because it was in a train yard and we shot out the scene, and then a train pulls in and stops. And when the train pulls in and stops in a scene that you’ve already shot, you have a new train, and you can’t cut between shots. So, they had to get the train to move, but to get a train to move out of a train yard is quite an operation. At least an hour and a half to get the right people on the phone to get the train to move out of the train yard, so we could finish shooting.
BRIAN ANTHONY WILSON (DET. VERNON HOLLEY): We were shooting a very tense scene where we were in the hospital, and Frankie Faison was cracking jokes, and I had to gain my composure and stop smiling. He’s a really funny guy, and he’s a very great actor, too, but he keeps it light on the set. There was a lot of tension, because it was a somber thing. We’re waiting to see if she survives, when a cop gets shot.
DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): I was sort of rather hung up about crying, because I thought it was a sign of great acting. It wasn’t something I could do very easily. I think a lot of actors, and certainly male actors, are hung up about crying on-screen. But for some reason, I thought it was appropriate that I should cry on-screen at this point. I had to spend the whole day before in a sort of miserable gloom and thinking about dead babies and trying to get myself into the space.
I was hanging around Frankie [Faison]. Fantastic guy and really funny, but I was trying to be deadly serious in between takes, to keep in the zone and try and keep the tears coming, which is impossible to do and a pointless exercise anyway. Frankie kept cracking jokes. I’d made the set really gloomy, and no one felt they could speak. It was tense on set because I was acting so hard. It was some sort of music on some radio, a sort of low rap beat coming out of a speaker somewhere, and Frankie started moving to the beat and going, “Would it be inappropriate if Kima was dying and then we all just started dancing?” It was so funny that I couldn’t stop laughing, and I thought, Fuck, Frankie really fucked me up. I’ve lost it, you know. I’ve come out of the zone. In fact, I think he was trying to lighten things up anyway, because that’s the only way you can act it. Then I did the scene, and I tried to cry as much as I could.
STEVE SHILL (DIRECTOR): I was completely taken aback by John Doman [addressing McNulty in that scene]. It’s one of the great pleasures of being a director: you can just sit down. I was just watching TV. I didn’t need to direct him in that scene. I just sat there, and I was like, Oh my God, these guys are making me look so good. I was absolutely completely taken aback by John Doman’s power. He later told me he was a captain in the Marine Corps in a previous life and he also worked in advertising on Madison Avenue. He was an alpha type in the real world. He didn’t come to acting until he was in his forties. That’s where that power comes from. It comes from real-life experience.
JOHN DOMAN (DEP. COMMR. FOR OPERATIONS WILLIAM A. RAWLS): For me, that was probably the best scene that I had. As an actor, you don’t want to have a one-dimensional character, and things like that really make it worth doing. When you can show another side of the character, it makes it so much more interesting.
ANTHONY HEMINGWAY (DIRECTOR): There was also a synergy within our production due to the familial nature we like to foster. We love a lot. We laugh a lot. It’s the only way to get through the challenging schedules and demands of the job. The first season on most shows are always hard, as you’re establishing so many different elements, and The Wire was somehow harder than most because of the complexities of the show: so many actors, shooting all on location in the real elements, etcetera. Toward the end of the season, the show started airing while we were still shooting, and it immediately became a hit in Baltimore. We were shooting around the low-rises set when a school bus passed by and all the kids yelled out the window, “Omar, we love you.” That was a satisfying moment, knowing that all the blood, sweat, and tears from all was being appreciated.
DONA ADRIAN GIBSON (COSTUME SUPERVISOR): We really became a family, and I think that what helped to develop that was the first Fourth of July. Anthony Hemingway and I had a cookout at my house for the people who weren’t going to leave to go home. It was really well attended. I’ll say maybe fifty people came. We had a really good time. It was not a big
deal. We threw some burgers on the grill. Well, the next year, we decided we would do it again and it just only grew. By the time we were done, it was like three hundred people were coming.
DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): It was like the middle of America was hollowed out. The people who were watching the show were either in West Baltimore or North Philadelphia. They were in the places that the show was about, because they couldn’t believe there was a drama about their neighborhood. Or it was people who were like book people or whatever who had found it in a weird way, and that’s how it felt after two or three seasons. But, man, it took forever.
Baltimore and The Wire would become eternally linked in an increasingly layered relationship. The show nearly always filmed on location and established more of a documentary template than that of a traditional television show. Critics argued that The Wire exposed only a negative fragment of Charm City, while hurting potential tourism. One city council member proposed a resolution to contradict the bleak image with an upbeat ad campaign. The efforts fell through, but David Simon once wrote in Baltimore magazine that the city’s then mayor, Martin O’Malley, threatened to pull permits to shoot for the show’s second season. “We want to be out of The Wire business,” O’Malley said, according to Simon. And that conversation arrived before the start of a story thread featuring an ambitious white mayor inspired, in part, by O’Malley’s political rise. Even responses to the show from inside the city’s police department varied sizably throughout the years. The department opened its doors to Simon and often hosted actors and writers for ride-alongs. Ed Norris, the police commissioner handpicked by O’Malley, occasionally played a detective by the same name on The Wire. “Show me the son of a bitch who can fix this department,” he once demanded on the show—he might as well have delivered a wink to the camera along with the line—“and I’ll give back half my overtime.” At an Amplify Baltimore event, Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III, who arrived five years after Norris, derided The Wire as a “smear on this city that will take decades to overcome.” Bealefeld complained that crime shows in other cities showcased models, tough cops, and competent prosecutors. “What Baltimore gets is this reinforced notion that it’s a city full of hopelessness, despair, and dysfunction,” he said.
All the Pieces Matter Page 9