All the Pieces Matter

by Jonathan Abrams

  STEVE SHILL (DIRECTOR): It was shot in a real courtroom that was actually active at the time. Normally, you would shoot overnight, but for some reason we couldn’t. It was an active courthouse in Baltimore. The video village was around the back, and around the back was the corridor where defendants were being led back and forth from the cell holds to their respective courtroom. I’m sitting at video village with people being led past us in chains for real. It was frankly awful. It’s one of the most awful things that I’d ever been involved in. I would say that this is a quintessential David Simon moment. He brought us there because this is one of the places where he had sat as a reporter for twenty years reporting on this stuff, and this is what he knew. He brought us to the real place, and by accident we ended up shooting there during working hours.

  I can’t tell you how guilty I felt for sitting there as some jerk-off television director making money fictionalizing what’s happening to these people for real. David Simon’s thrust was to expose the injustice. Even talking about it right now, I still feel bad about it. I had to move my director’s chair out of their way so they could shuffle past in shackles. I feel like a piece of shit because of it.

  Lawrence Gilliard Jr. passionately, yet unsuccessfully, argued with David Simon against D’Angelo’s sudden and emotional demise. Many regarded D’Angelo, Avon’s conflicted nephew, as the show’s Season 1 conscience. Gilliard’s fellow cast members described D’Angelo’s death as even more shocking and devastating than Michael B. Jordan’s Wallace’s killing in the first season.

  FRANKIE FAISON (ACTING COMMR. ERVIN H. BURRELL): Whenever anyone would die or get killed, that was always tough. It was tough to lose these characters, but you have to be true to the writing. People die or disappear. Those were always emotional scenes and emotional times, when someone would read the script and know that their number had been called.

  STEVE EARLE (WAYLON): Yeah, D’Angelo. He argued with David about [getting killed off]. When he got the script, he fucking argued with him about it. He thought he could change David’s mind.

  LAWRENCE GILLIARD JR. (D’ANGELO BARKSDALE): The way I found out was we were in the second season, I think we were on like Episode Four or something. I was coming out of my trailer. I saw David, Nina, and Ed Burns; they were walking across this lot. Ed and Nina peeled off. David just kept coming straight for me, and he goes, “Hey, what’s up?” I’m like, “Hey.” “So, I’ve got some good news and some bad news. What do you want first?” I’m like, “Well, give me the bad news first.” He goes, “You’re not going to have to read beyond Episode Six.” I’m like, “What?”

  It was shocking. I was shocked and I was upset. I was disappointed. I said, “Well, what’s the good news?” He said, “I wrote an amazing death scene for you.” I’m like, “That doesn’t quite trump the bad news.” I’ve been around the game for a long time. I’m a professional, so I just thought, I’ll just move on beyond this. Once I read the scene and I found out how it was going to happen, I just wanted it to be a good death scene. I wanted it to be memorable. I wanted to do a good job. That person exists in the world. I always want to be truthful to my characters.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): Nothing was funnier in its own dark way. I didn’t laugh. He said, “My character is only—he’s only twenty-six years old. He’s got his whole life ahead of him.” “Yeah.” “There’s so much more I could have done with his life.” And therein lies the tragedy. It was really like he was pleading from real life, like any sane, life-loving human would. To hear it happen, that’s exactly why it’s such a tragedy.

  WOOD HARRIS (AVON BARKSDALE): I thought this kid was going to be with us this whole ride. He got killed. It had unpredictability, and it added that element to the work that we were doing. It was just very unpredictable on The Wire. It felt almost like a horror movie. It’s scary around the corner. It added a reality to it as the actors because we could not be presumptuous to think that we would be here the next week even.

  LAWRENCE GILLIARD JR. (D’ANGELO BARKSDALE): You don’t develop characters and have your fan base, your audience, fall in love with a character, and then kill them off. It’s just not done, you know? It was shocking to me. It actually affected me more than I thought it would, because before The Wire, I was already working steadily in the business. When I found out about it, I was like, “All right. This is different. It was not expected, but I’ll be working. I’ll just keep doing my thing.” I didn’t realize how much it would affect me, because I really loved that character. Not only how much I loved the character, but also the writing was so good, you become spoiled. It had never happened to me before, because I was used to reading the regular Hollywood formula stuff. You know what to expect.

  When you do a show like this, you’re ready for good-quality writing and you’re performing on such a level, with everyone who’s at the top of their game. When you’re done with something like that and you move back into that Hollywood system, everything you read is crap. It took me a long time. I passed on a whole lot of stuff. It took me a long time to realize, Wait a minute. This crap is the norm. That’s what I’m going to get. I have to find my way back to this.

  JAMES “P.J.” RANSONE (CHESTER “ZIGGY” SOBOTKA): I shot that show when I was so young. That was my first big TV gig. It kind of fucked me up because I sort of expected that everything else would sort of be that way. Nobody cared when we were shooting it, so they weren’t like, “You’re shooting The Wire.” You know what I mean? I didn’t have anybody older than me being like, “You’re doing this amazing, prestigious thing.” It was like, “Oh, just go ahead and shoot this show that nobody cares about.” I didn’t realize that the bar had been accidentally set so high in terms of writing or storytelling.

  ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): I love Season Two, but I know when Season Two aired, we got a lot of slack because people were like, “What happened to my story? What happened to our show?” People were like, “I had to sit through eight, nine, ten episodes of the slowest fucking show that I fell in love with. I fell in love with these characters, and they were all gone in Season Two. What the fuck is that about?” You had to sit in the bar and tell people, “It is what it is.” They would get it. They would agree with it, but they were mad. They were mad. It also, to be honest, it brought in our audience a little bit. It brought the conversation to a bigger perspective because, let’s be clear, white people were not watching this show the first season. Not the masses. I’m sure there were some, but when you see more than four black people on-screen, they’re like, “That’s not my story. That doesn’t have nothing to do with me, so I’m going to change the channel.” All of a sudden, in Season Two, white people are watching it and going, “This is dope. Who’s that guy? Who’s this Omar guy?” They start asking questions, and the black people go, “You don’t know who they are? Let me tell you who they are.”

  You had these conversations, and that’s what made Season Three big. You had two audiences who came together and started talking about this show and going, “This show is amazing. This show is not following TV standards. They can just go from any angle.” It’s all the same narrative. It’s about the community. I don’t think any other show at that time was doing it like that, just changing it all up. Because Season One or Season Two, there were no nominations. If you get a nomination or even if you win, it’s harder to change up. If it’s working for you, HBO might be like, “Don’t change nothing. Leave it like that and keep doing it.” [But] because we were still going under the radar, HBO was like, “Try and do something new. Try and figure it out. See if you can get nominated. If it ain’t bad, then do that.” It was David Simon’s and Ed Burns’s plan, but they didn’t get that much resisting in the changing.

  JAMES “P.J.” RANSONE (CHESTER “ZIGGY” SOBOTKA): The first season, you follow these black drug dealers around the streets of Baltimore and you go, “Oh my God, they’re trying to function as a business. Their capitalism is
the same way everything else is.” Then you shift focus to the white working class, right? What you really take away from that is those people are just as trapped in the machine of capitalism as the drug dealers are.

  People go like, “The White Season.” It’s always weird to me because it’s like, no. They’re just like, incrementally a little bit more financially well off than the drug dealers. So, to me, the takeaway from that is people go, “Season Two is always the worst.” The reason why I think people think that is because it’s too much to reconcile the fact of whites in the same terms of social mobility as a poor black person. They hate to admit it to themselves. It’s too much to reconcile the fact that white people are enslaved to their own social class as much as poor black people. They would have to give up the delusion that they can be wealthy one day, working honestly within the contexts of the system.

  Think about where we are as a country today. People make these great hyperbolic comparisons to [Donald] Trump and Adolf Hitler, and it’s really wrong. Trump has benefited completely from a system of debt, right? Borrowing against your perceived value. What he’s really tapping into is exactly what I’m talking about: is the delusion that you think because you are a certain sort of skin color that you are afforded more social mobility than other races or cultures. And that’s just simply not true. A politician will use that in terms of going, “See, the problem isn’t me. It’s these other people working right next to me.” But if they were to compare their pay stubs, they’d see that they had more in common with that person than they would hope for.

  AMY RYAN (OFF. BEATRICE “BEADIE” RUSSELL): At the end of the first year, because I had signed a contract for the duration of the whole series, David said to me, “You know, this isn’t like network TV, where I can write an episode and some other character can say, ‘Hey, congratulations, Beadie. You became a detective. You took the test.’ In reality, that would be five years that you’d have to go from port police or something like that.” He said, “I’m not going to do that. I have plans for you. Don’t worry, but you’re not going to be one of the detectives next year.”

  I was crushed, because I love the show. Wendell Pierce said to me, “You got to fight for your job.” I was like, “Well, what am I supposed to do? I can’t become detective overnight.” I don’t think it was every script, but David would put a few random scripts with a famous line from a movie, and just for fun, you’d see if people would figure it out, and Wendell had figured one out and he gave me the answer. He said, “Go tell David you know what the line is.” I was really nervous, and I go up to David and I say, “David, there’s a line in one of the scripts that says, ‘Let’s go.’ And the other guy says, ‘Why not?’ Is that line from The Wild Bunch?” David does this double take, and he looked me up and down, he’s like, “Ha, well, how did you know that?” I was like, “Oh, I was just guessing. Am I right?” For a second I was like, Oh, my God. Okay, I’m going to make detective. He’s going to change the roles. He was so impressed. He said, “Somebody told you.” I was like, “No, no. I’m right. Oh my God. I’m right.” I never told him that story, that Wendell told me the answer. Maybe he’ll find out from this.

  Anyway, it didn’t work, and I was finished on Season Two, but as you know, I came back and was peppered in through the years.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): In Season Two, the writers had a contest to see how many lines from The Wild Bunch we could get into the show. “Let’s go” is one of the most famous lines in the film. We were deep in the season, and I think we got like ten, fifteen lines in. Some of the actors got wind that we were doing it. They recognized some of the lines. More lines like “Let’s go.” There were lines that really sort of stick out. She said, “I think I’ve got one of the Wild Bunch lines in the script.” It was said to Nicky Sobotka by his uncle. I remember looking at her, going, “Are you a [Sam] Peckinpah fan?” And she went, “Oh, yeah.” I said, “Really?” There was a little part of me that went, “Somebody give you that?” “No, no, no.” “Very cool, Amy.”

  The large size of the ensemble cast made it impossible for the actors to know every single cast member intimately. Al Brown recalled sitting at a table with Dominic West between takes in the final season. West finished telling a story and departed. Brown turned to the person sitting next to him and asked, “What the fuck was Dominic trying to talk like some Englishman for? Is he auditioning for Shakespeare?” Brown had not realized West was British, even though the pair had been with the show since its beginning. But the deaths of major characters served as bonding sessions, with Sonja Sohn routinely gathering the cast and crew in mourning. The closeness of the actors largely broke into whom they portrayed on screen. Cops commiserated with cops. Crooks hung out with crooks. The cast would describe itself unilaterally as a family, but as with any family, occasional bickering occurred.

  AMY RYAN (OFF. BEATRICE “BEADIE” RUSSELL): There was a real camaraderie with the whole group. A lot of laughs. I felt very close to Dominic in that way as well. It becomes almost sibling-like, and when our characters became romantic, it’s kind of goofy, four o’clock in the morning, you’re in bed together, and you just want to be home in your own pajamas. Like in bed with your own brother or something, not that I know what that’s like.

  LANCE REDDICK (LT. CEDRIC DANIELS): I definitely got annoyed with Dominic. I think it was really our personalities. I think it’s ironic, but I don’t think it’s because of the nature of the roles we were playing. I’m an introvert, and Dominic’s an extreme extrovert. He’s the guy that’s got to be the center of attention all the time, in my opinion, as talented as he is. I kind of just want to do my work and hang out. I just feel like there were times where Dominic got bored. It’s funny, because this didn’t happen when we were in a scene just the two of us. It only happened when we were in group scenes, where he was class clown. That just bugged the shit out of me. For me, everything matters.

  DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): We had a lot of fun. It was long days in the hot sun, and we had to do something. I can’t remember what I got Lance for. He was pretty serious. Lance, he’s a very serious actor. He’s a real professional and takes it seriously, so it was quite easy to get him.

  LANCE REDDICK (LT. CEDRIC DANIELS): He’s a great actor, but as personalities, we’re oil and water.

  DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): [Wendell and I] bonded pretty quickly. He took me around New Orleans a few times, and it was interesting. The difference between us and the nationality difference, I suppose, was what sort of drew us together in a way or what made it such an easy relationship.

  RICK OTTO (OFF. KENNETH DOZERMAN): I don’t think anybody plays drunk better than Dom West and Wendell Pierce.

  DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): We were drunk. Well, we got a lot of practice in.

  WENDELL PIERCE (DET. WILLIAM “BUNK” MORELAND): He’s that sort of person that makes you feel like when he’s dealing with you, that moment is the most important in the world at that time. That’s what I really appreciated about Dominic. You can take him anywhere in the world. I took him to New Orleans for Mardi Gras once, and—Clarke Peters was the same way. The places that I took them was just like, “God, if the production company ever found out, they’d be like, ‘Wendell, that was dangerous.’ ” We were in the back alleys and the little barrooms in New Orleans, just having a great time. I wanted to show them a different side of New Orleans, not something that was touristy. We had a ball of a time because Dominic is open to that sort of thing.

  DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): This guy stopped me and Wendell in the street, going, “Hey, you’re in The Wire, that’s Wendell,” and Wendell goes, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” and he said, “Look, man, my friend here. He plays McNulty,” and the guy looked at me and went, “Oh, yeah man, you’re the bitch ass. You’re the crybaby. That’s right, you’re the crybaby.”

  WENDELL PIERCE (DET. WILLIAM “BUNK” MORELAND): The guy knew me, and I said, “Wait, meet
my partner on the show. You remember him?” He kind of thought he remembered him, but he felt as though, “Well, you’re actors, so you must have had an emotional scene.” He’s like, “Yeah, you were crying and everything. Yeah, I know him now.” He just assumed that he had this big dramatic scene that he started crying. The guy was funny. Then, what Dominic didn’t say was that I had him over on Orleans Avenue looking at [the] Zulu [parade during Mardi Gras] and a guy said, “Hey, Wendell. Wendell Pierce.” I said, “Hey, listen, don’t look at me. He’s on the show, too.” Dominic loved the fact that he’d be able to go somewhere, they’ll jump on me and crowd around me and not recognize him. I said, “But, no, this is McNulty.” This one guy said, “Oh yeah, the white boy.” I had him over in the Lafitte housing projects, and everybody says, “Yeah, that’s the white boy. The white boy from The Wire.” For that block, for half an hour, he was, “Hey, baby, come over here. It’s the white boy from The Wire.”

  AMY RYAN (OFF. BEATRICE “BEADIE” RUSSELL): One time, we went to New Orleans for publicity. The Essence Music Festival. I’m probably the only white person in New Orleans as well, and we were all at this club dancing, and Seth [Gilliam] said to me, “Can I ask you something?” “Yeah.” “How do you feel right now?” “First time in my life I feel exotic. This is awesome.” You know, I didn’t feel shut out by the guys, and certainly if talk off set turned to a different topic that I wouldn’t feel comfortable with, I would just walk away. There are lots of other women around on set working in the crew, our DP, Uta, she was at the helm the first two seasons, and Nina, there was a female force on that show even though it wasn’t represented in large numbers on-screen, but the women who were there were strong and full of love and humor, and it was a nice group.