All the Pieces Matter

by Jonathan Abrams

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): We had a script coordinator change. The old script coordinator was used to Felicia making her own lines up and doing her own thing. This one was a little bit more like, “No, you can’t do that.” They became the closest of friends, but it was like, the script coordinator would come in: “What do you do with this person?” Felicia would come to me, “She’s driving me fucking crazy.”

  CLAIRE COWPERTHWAITE (SCRIPT SUPERVISOR): My first day on set was the same day as Snoop’s, Felicia. My whole impression was she was an actress. On the very first day, she says her dialogue, and soon they’re like, “Holy shit.” I don’t understand a word this person’s saying. First of all, I thought she was a guy. That was the other thing, too. She dressed that way. I turned to them, I said, “So, yeah, is this show subtitled, because I have no idea what she’s saying?” I then go up to Snoop. I said, “Hey, how are you? My name is Claire. I’m Script.” She gave me this look, this once-over. And then with the deadpan eyes, not saying a word, as if I had just been somewhat dismissed, she didn’t say anything.

  I said to her, “You know, you should say this.” She looked at that, looked at me, and I’m like, “Okay.” I walk away. I then sit back on the chair, and she gets the gist, but doesn’t say it, and I’m like, “Okay.” That’s my job, it’s to make sure the actors stay on script. I say, “So, you have got the gist, but the line is actually…” “Dang, girl. I got to say this word for word?” I think she’s an actress, and I’m like, “Well, normally writers like it when you say their words, but you know what? This shot could be different.” I go up to David and Ed, because some shows let you play a little bit with the words. “On this show, you’re cool with them getting the gist of it?” “No, no, no. It’s word for word.” I said, “Uh-huh. So, Snoop?” “Oh yeah, we forgot to tell you, she’s real.” I’m like, “Real? What the hell does that mean? Real?” And they’re like, “Yeah, real.”

  I looked around where we’re shooting, which was the first scene with her, where she finds a power-actuated nail gun. She starts to board up the abandoneds. I’m thinking, Hmm. How real? They said, “Oh, yeah. She just got released from prison.” And I said, “Ahh.” Remember, I’m this middle-class white woman. I’m like, “Did she do something really bad?” And they’re like, “Yeah, she killed someone when she was sixteen.” I’m like, “Oh my God.” I’m like, “Okay, alrighty. Well, okay. I’ll be back.” The next scene that we had right after that, she was in a car and she was mic’d, and I had headsets on, and she didn’t quite grasp the whole headset-mic thing, where if you’re speaking in a car or somewhere private and the microphone is on, the people that are wearing headsets can hear you. She has to say her line again. I’m like, “Oh God. I have to go and tell her she’s not doing this right.” I’m walking up toward the car, and I hear her on my headset, “Dang, here that girl come again, man. She frustrate me.” I’m like, “Oh my God.” I knock on the window. I’m like, “Hey, not to frustrate you, but it’s really good if you could say this one line.” By now, she knows how to say it. The next scene was the next episode. She’s supposed to kill somebody. Let me tell you, there wasn’t anybody better than she was. She was awesome. I mean awesome. I was complimenting her. I’m like, “You really know how to do this. God, you’re amazing.” Then it clicked for us. We became extremely good friends during the shoot. She had the most amazing look of hers. She had this angelic face, but with these eyes that had seen too much in her lifetime. It was this overall kind of sadness on one side, but hope on the other.

  FELICIA “SNOOP” PEARSON: They just wrote me in. I was like, “Wow.” I give my hats off to Nina, Ed Burns, most definitely. David Simon, all three of them. Everybody. Everybody. That changed my life. That moment that I met them, it changed my life forever, and I thank them for giving me the opportunity. They seen something in me, and I didn’t even see it in myself.

  MICHAEL K. WILLIAMS (OMAR LITTLE): My most proudest moment of having anything to do with The Wire is knowing that I met her five days out of prison for fucking manslaughter, for murder, and was able to have something to do with changing the trajectory of her life. She could have made some other decisions coming out of prison, you know what I mean? I had something to do with her not doing the same thing that got her in the first place. That will be the greatest reward I will ever have from The Wire.

  JAMIE HECTOR (MARLO STANFIELD): She had the whole entire set in stitches, and she was in her hometown and it’s like the microphone is on. Once she got comfortable, shooting with her was just fun.

  METHOD MAN (CALVIN “CHEESE” WAGSTAFF): When I met Snoop, Snoop wasn’t even working that day. I hear a knock on my trailer and shit. I open the door, and Snoop: “Sup, Meth? What’s good?” I think she had some weed or some shit like that. But we were just kicking it, you know what I mean? She was basically like telling me how she got the job and all that shit. It was just like speaking to one of my nephews. No lie. And she harder than some of these niggas on these streets. I’m telling you, boy.

  GBENGA AKINNAGBE (CHRIS PARTLOW): It was our chemistry off-screen. Now that I think about it, she and I would play. We’d play all the time. She’d say some wild things to me, and I’d say some wild things to her, and she’d say some wild things, and my mouth would be open, like, “What?” We would just play. I remember she took me to a strip club in Baltimore once, sat me down at the stage, gave me a stack of ones, and was just like, “Have fun,” and left. It was wild.

  You spend a lot of time with somebody, you learn about them. One thing I learned about her is she is a survivor. She’s hard to kill. It’s hard to kill her spirit. This one time, we were slap-boxing, because that’s what she and I do. We play in between takes. It’s like, “All right, cool. We’re gonna slap-box.” She’s smaller than I am. I was a Division I wrestler, but she’s tough. Don’t street-fight her. We were about to start going, and she was like, “All right, cool.” First thing she does when we start slap-boxing, she stepped on my foot, stomped on it to hold it there, hit me like three times within two seconds, and then went running. I was like, “Oh okay. That’s how you survive. I can’t trust you. That’s what it is. You don’t play by the rules.” She’s no joke. I couldn’t move anywhere, because she had stomped on my foot. I was like trying to move my foot. Meanwhile, she’s bopping me in the face like one, two, three. Then she runs off.

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): Gbenga turned down a role [to play Slim Charles] because he was taking a test. Shit, man, we got to find something for this kid to do. That’s when we created Chris Partlow.

  GBENGA AKINNAGBE (CHRIS PARTLOW): I didn’t realize they didn’t do it that much. I was very honored to be on that show, even before I found out that they went out of the way to make sure I was on the show. Then, in retrospect, having been an extra, I was really ignorant at the time. I didn’t know that that kind of trajectory didn’t happen very often.

  It’s funny because people talk to me and they meet me and they think I grew up going to a private school in New Jersey, an only child or something like that, but it’s the opposite. I grew up in Maryland, in and out of institutions and schools. I was in a large family that never had enough. A lot of what you saw in the show, I had lived. It was like reliving it, but as a completely different person now. I was fortunate enough to get a wrestling scholarship, which took me to college and helped change my life. Now I’m looking back at my childhood through this TV show in Maryland. It was very strange and, in many ways, jarring for me. Then, also, because I’m different now, people are treating me different, treating me better than they would treat me if they thought this is where I came from. It was disturbing. I was fortunate. No one in my family that I know of was addicted to drugs or [impacted by] gun violence, but we lived in that poverty and saw those things all around us. The story told, in many ways, elements of my childhood, but going back and experiencing it as a different person now, it was jarring. It was strange.

  ED BURNS (C
O-CREATOR): It was Gbenga and Jamie Hector. I mean, I used to watch their faces to try to get the nuances that made these—I’m talking about sweet, do-anything-for-you people into, holy shit, and I could never figure out how it just happened, but it would.

  JAMIE HECTOR (MARLO STANFIELD): Getting to know [who Marlo] was and getting to know the way he thinks and gets to operate was fun. When I would walk outside the house where I lived at in Baltimore, when I would step outside of there, then I would approach people like that. They didn’t know me. The show wasn’t on yet. They didn’t know of the show. People weren’t seeing Marlo Stanfield yet. It’s a young lady walking down the street, and I wanted to go approach her just to see how she’d respond, or I wanted to go and buy something in the Gallery, I would approach them the way he would.

  That was fun. Going into the Gallery, if I wanted to purchase something or buy something in the mall, it was just basically, being that he was so economic and being that he wastes nothing, everybody would respond accordingly, right away with respect. Walking in a store, knowing exactly what you want, knowing exactly what you’re going to get. “No, I don’t got time for small talk.” Just get this, get this. “Thank you. I’m out. Bye.” That right there would be also appreciated. It’d be like, “He’s an a-hole,” but of course behind his back. Just exercising all of that was just fun.

  GBENGA AKINNAGBE (CHRIS PARTLOW): Chris, in his mind, it was just business, but he’s obviously a sociopath. The way I described it, it was like Snoop was a psychopath. Snoop, the character, got a thrill from the hunt, from the kill, and so on. That’s what drove her. Chris, he didn’t care. He could have sat down and had dinner with your whole family or killed your whole family, and it would have affected him the same way, which is disturbing, very disturbing. Psychopaths are easier to track, because if there’s something that they like to do, there’s usually a ritual behind it, and you can track the ritual. A sociopath may never kill. They blend in to society. They learn to fake emotions.

  That’s, to me, a disturbing phenomenon. I’m not saying I’m a sociopath, but I wouldn’t tell you if I was. These are all elements that go into making these characters, and so, that being said, Chris, it’s not like he was like, “Oh, I’m just going to go out and be a badass drug dealer” or whatever. To him, it was just like an everyday thing. Business, eat some food, talk to Marlo or whatever—it’s just an everyday thing, and his business happens to be this dark, dark world.

  Blink, and you would have missed it. In Season 3’s tenth episode, “Reformation,” Brother Mouzone dispatches his associate Lamar to various gay bars as unwilling bait to catch Omar. Omar is nowhere to be found, but the camera pans to find Dep. Commr. for Operations William Rawls in the background at one of the bars. In most cop shows, the homosexuality of a deputy commissioner would have been a dominant storyline. The Wire, of course, was not most shows. It left the strand dangling. The audience barely had time to recognize what it had seen before the show quickly shuffled along, never mentioning it again, beyond Sgt. Jay Landsman laughing after reading RAWLS SUCKS COCK graffitied in the bathroom the following season.

  With such a deep ensemble cast, many characters were left without an overt backstory. This allowed the actors to ponder their origin stories themselves. Director Ernest Dickerson once asked Michael Potts (Brother Mouzone) how the disappointing Lamar came to be associated with Mouzone. “It became clear that he wasn’t the brightest bulb,” Potts said. “Why would I have him as my second? That’s what I came up with: Clearly, he’s family. He’s a nephew. He has to be family, because he gets the wrong magazine every time.” As Frankie Faison (Acting Commr. Ervin H. Burrell) said, “They touched upon that with Rawls and other minor things, but then it’s just dropped, so you didn’t know what to think. You just don’t have time to delve into the most intricate aspects of everyone’s personal life. You would have five or ten more seasons of The Wire.”

  JOHN DOMAN (DEP. COMMR. FOR OPERATIONS WILLIAM A. RAWLS): I was surprised when he showed up in the gay bar. That surprised me. That came out of left field. I hadn’t seen the script, and I showed up on the set, and the AD [Assistant Director] came running over with this big, shit-eating grin on his face and said, “Have you seen the new script?” I said, “No,” and Ed Burns was sitting there, and all of a sudden, I saw his head pop up and he looked at me and came rushing over and said, “John, we have to talk.” He took me into a little room on the side, there on the set, and told me what they were planning to do. He said, “How do you feel about this? We’re not really sure we’re going to do it. We’re going to shoot it, but we may not use it.”

  I thought to myself, It’s not going to make a damned bit of difference what I say here. If they want to use it, they’re going to use it. So, I said, “Oh, I love it! Let’s do it. Why not?” Then, after we did it, I was thinking, Boy, this could go in some very strange directions. What am I going to be required to do with this? Then, the next script came, and there was nothing. And the next script came, and there was nothing. Finally, a third script came, and there was nothing. But I had to go through in my mind all of the possible scenarios. Now, it was like, “Well, why aren’t we doing something with this?” I went to David and I said, “David, you know, this whole gay thing…I’m up for anything, whatever you want to do.” He just kind of looked at me, with this faraway look, and walked away. Of course, in his brilliance, he never touched it again. It was perfect, what he did, he just dropped that little seed in there and never touched it again, but it planted the seed in the audience’s minds.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): We discussed it. First of all, we said, “Okay, we’re going into this gay bar. Who should be in there? Who would be possible?” So, we actually had the discussion. We went through the entire cast. When we thought Rawls, we said, “Man, that’s perfect.” We went back through all those moments with all of his sexual metaphors of him berating guys, and we would read them with this new sense, and the more we got into it, the more we were like, “That’s it. That’s the opportunity.” Then we had a second discussion about should we use it.

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): I just liked the idea of you just panning that camera across that barroom scene and just catching him like that and keep right on going. Hit Rewind. And if we were given more seasons, it’s something that you could work with. Daniels would find out about it; he could use it. I mean, you plant little things that way, so that the characters have someplace to go that you can use.

  JOHN DOMAN (DEP. COMMR. FOR OPERATIONS WILLIAM A. RAWLS): I don’t know what his reasoning was, but it showed another whole dimension to the Rawls character. Maybe it explained a lot about why he was like he was.

  Seasonally, The Wire proved unabashed about offing characters who carried major story threads, as with the deaths of Wallace, D’Angelo Barksdale, and Frank Sobotka. The death of Stringer Bell in Season 3’s penultimate episode proved that no one was safe. Long before the soaring popularity of Idris Elba, David Simon had decided that all attempts at reform in Season 3 would die, from Hamsterdam to Elba’s Bell. He meets his death in the end-to-end magnificent “Middle Ground,” an episode that earned Simon and George Pelecanos an Emmy nomination. The cold open features a Western-like protracted standoff between Omar (Michael K. Williams) and Brother Mouzone (Michael Potts) that is beautifully framed by director Joe Chappelle. Stringer, fumbling in his attempts to leave drugs behind for legitimate business, calculates that Avon Barksdale’s escalating beef with Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector) threatens his operations and he offers Avon to Maj. Bunny Colvin (Robert Wisdom). Meanwhile, Brother Mouzone forces Avon to serve Stringer to him in order to protect his drug connection to New York. The two betray each other, yet they convene for one last conversation, during which they reminisce on a balcony about their youth as Baltimore’s lights dance and flicker in the background.

  Bell’s end comes once Omar and Brother Mouzone corner him at an appointment. The character’s death received what amounted to an obitua
ry in The New York Times, long before newspapers routinely reviewed episodic television. Charley Scalies, who played Season 2’s Horseface, recalled walking into a deli shortly after Stringer’s death aired on television. A woman rushed him, jabbing a finger in his face, and demanded to know why Bell had been killed. “It scared the shit out of me,” Scalies said. “She looked at me as I was The Wire, and she was going to tell somebody from The Wire that she didn’t like it. She just charged after me. Turned out to be a lovely lady, but she got excited.” The death came as a surprise to Elba, too, as did the original way that writers planned for Omar to commemorate the victory.

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): When Idris and Wood, when those two were fighting in that room, they thought that the furniture was break-apart furniture, because they smashed into the table and just shattered it.

  They thought it could just be put back together. That’s how good, how intense they were in this particular scene. They were like, “No, that was actually a table.”

  WOOD HARRIS (AVON BARKSDALE): We might have broke some furniture, but we weren’t going at it for real. I will say about the chemistry that me and Idris have, is that you won’t see that again unless you see us again. It’d almost be like Robert Redford and Paul Newman in a sense, where they did a lot of movies together and you just don’t see that energy from any one of those actors apart necessarily. When we had that fight that he’s talking about, I don’t recall it being anything but good acting. We were just acting. I don’t recall even breaking something. That’s what I mean by being in the moment. We were in the moment. A lot of TV shows are behind a clock, and they rush through. Nothing really felt rushed on The Wire. It felt like you were making a movie every week.