Ya' Cousin Cleon
OG COUCH CORNER HUSTLA
Pierce is best known as Bunk Moreland from the HBO series The Wire — a weary, womanising detective whose mouth could emit cigar smoke and blunt bonhomie simultaneously. “The Bunk is strictly a shirt-and-tie motherf**ker,” ran one of his memorable lines. Pierce is also a shirt-and-tie aficionado; when we meet, he has a spare tie in his pocket for good measure. But if the role of Bunk has defined his career, it is far from the limit of his ambitions.
This month he returns to the London stage as Willy Loman, the lead in Arthur Miller’s classic Death of a Salesman. The production, which premiered at the Young Vic in the summer, is his first UK role — and the first time that London has had a black Loman. Its initial run received a host of five-star reviews, including from the Financial Times.
Seventy years after the play first appeared, Death of a Salesman remains a crushing critique of American capitalism. But with a black anti-hero, it also becomes a tale of racism — and “how destructive that is to the spirit of the individual”, says Pierce.
So it makes the play even more depressing, I suggest. He laughs. “It can be. [But] entertainment is a by-product of art. It’s not the purpose of art. We’ve come to a place where it’s an expectation, ‘I want to be entertained by a piece of art, instead of challenged.’”
This is the second thing you realise about Wendell Pierce. He is not just charm and delivery and smart dressing; he is truly serious. In Pierce’s vision, art “changes people’s humanity, it changes the air in the room, it changes everything. People always ask me, ‘Well, give me an example of that.’”
Then, sat in an armchair, with a coffee in one hand, Pierce embarks on the story of Charles L Black, a white lawyer from Texas, who saw Louis Armstrong play jazz in 1931, and two decades later joined the legal team that would help tear down racial segregation.
“He always talked about how he had never seen genius in a black man before. I like to think that moment of art was the thing that changed his humanity — that it was not just an intellectual decision.”
For Pierce, as for many African-Americans, the American ideal has remained a promise, rather than a reality. The daily encounters with prejudice. Donald Trump. The neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. “You raise the veil and you see that the barbarians were always at the gate,” he says.
Wendell Pierce was born in New Orleans in December 1963. His mother was a schoolteacher; his father, now aged 94, is an army veteran, who kept his own talent as a photographer under wraps and warned his son against becoming an actor. Pierce attributes his career path to the Free Southern Theater, a travelling group of black actors linked to the civil rights movement. “[My parents] would come back and tell me the stories. And I revered them. They made me want to be an actor.” His seriousness — his belief that actors “should always be kinda activists” — reflects that tradition. “In that sense, I am New Orleans and New Orleans is me,” he says. Pierce attended the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, where there was relentless peer pressure to study.
Subscribe to read | Financial Times
Whole article , worth checking out.
We asked, ‘Henry, are you shedding?’ Meaning, ‘Are you practising?’” he recalls. He started accumulating screen credits from the mid-1980s, but felt like an impostor. There was a long slog until David Simon’s The Wire aired in 2002.
Pierce and many of the cast thought the show — with its fog of slang and characters — was destined to fail. In fact, along with The Sopranos and Mad Men, it kickstarted the golden age of television.
His own role pushed him, an African-American who had experienced police discrimination, into a more ambiguous relationship with law enforcement.
How much does Pierce have in common with Bunk Moreland? “Bunk wouldn’t be going to museums and hearing music and all that stuff. Just a good drink and a cigar. What we share is he’s a student of police work, he’s a criminologist. The drive of, like, I may be a f**k-up, but I know I’m good at this one thing.”
Pierce, too, felt good at one thing — acting. But, in 2005, midway through The Wire, Hurricane Katrina hit, and the poorly kept levees unleashed an almost biblical flood on his home city. Thus began a new phase in his life, laced with attempts to guide the city’s rebirth.
He starred as a womanising trombonist in Treme, another David Simon creation for HBO. It’s a beautiful portrait of a city, although it lacked The Wire’s sensational brutality and therefore its impact.
For Pierce, it achieved what he wanted: “It has become a cultural document.” (Pierce’s love of jazz is no act. “Ronnie Scott’s is my hang here in London.”)
Meanwhile, Pierce entered into a mix of business and philanthropic projects with a childhood friend called Troy Henry — building houses in his family’s neighbourhood, opening grocery stores in areas without access to fresh vegetables, even chairing Henry’s mayoral campaigns. The property projects have suffered lawsuits, the mayoral campaigns failed and the grocery stores closed. A tough business, I suggest of the latter. “The toughest of business!” But Pierce is undeterred, and with Henry, recently bought a local African-American talk-radio station. In 2016, one of Pierce’s homes, in Baton Rouge, was ruined by flooding.
Climate change and rising seas bode ill for the region. Does Pierce ever imagine that his hometown may be unliveable? “It’s the greatest port in the States. New Orleans is always going to be there. Because if it wasn’t for New Orleans, the United States literally would have never grown.” Pierce is unmarried, has no children and in the past has spoken about how his work has disrupted his private life.
What sacrifices has he made? “The older I get, I realise that I use that as an excuse,” he replies, with disarming frankness. “You don’t have to choose between your personal life and career. I have to look at my — my dysfunction when it comes to my personal life . . . ” He says that a richer personal life would help his acting. “If you really look at going to another level of the human experience, you have to explore those relationships.”
Then he diverts again on to his favoured theme, how African-Americans shaped the US. “I can literally, when you come to New Orleans, Henry, take you and we can stand as we’re sitting here now, on the birthplace of jazz: Congo Square, where captured Africans found their freedom, culturally, before they found their physical freedom . . . Henry, play a solo, be free, be an individual within the constraints of the song.”
This month he returns to the London stage as Willy Loman, the lead in Arthur Miller’s classic Death of a Salesman. The production, which premiered at the Young Vic in the summer, is his first UK role — and the first time that London has had a black Loman. Its initial run received a host of five-star reviews, including from the Financial Times.
Seventy years after the play first appeared, Death of a Salesman remains a crushing critique of American capitalism. But with a black anti-hero, it also becomes a tale of racism — and “how destructive that is to the spirit of the individual”, says Pierce.
So it makes the play even more depressing, I suggest. He laughs. “It can be. [But] entertainment is a by-product of art. It’s not the purpose of art. We’ve come to a place where it’s an expectation, ‘I want to be entertained by a piece of art, instead of challenged.’”
This is the second thing you realise about Wendell Pierce. He is not just charm and delivery and smart dressing; he is truly serious. In Pierce’s vision, art “changes people’s humanity, it changes the air in the room, it changes everything. People always ask me, ‘Well, give me an example of that.’”
Then, sat in an armchair, with a coffee in one hand, Pierce embarks on the story of Charles L Black, a white lawyer from Texas, who saw Louis Armstrong play jazz in 1931, and two decades later joined the legal team that would help tear down racial segregation.
“He always talked about how he had never seen genius in a black man before. I like to think that moment of art was the thing that changed his humanity — that it was not just an intellectual decision.”
For Pierce, as for many African-Americans, the American ideal has remained a promise, rather than a reality. The daily encounters with prejudice. Donald Trump. The neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. “You raise the veil and you see that the barbarians were always at the gate,” he says.
Wendell Pierce was born in New Orleans in December 1963. His mother was a schoolteacher; his father, now aged 94, is an army veteran, who kept his own talent as a photographer under wraps and warned his son against becoming an actor. Pierce attributes his career path to the Free Southern Theater, a travelling group of black actors linked to the civil rights movement. “[My parents] would come back and tell me the stories. And I revered them. They made me want to be an actor.” His seriousness — his belief that actors “should always be kinda activists” — reflects that tradition. “In that sense, I am New Orleans and New Orleans is me,” he says. Pierce attended the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, where there was relentless peer pressure to study.
Subscribe to read | Financial Times
Whole article , worth checking out.
We asked, ‘Henry, are you shedding?’ Meaning, ‘Are you practising?’” he recalls. He started accumulating screen credits from the mid-1980s, but felt like an impostor. There was a long slog until David Simon’s The Wire aired in 2002.
Pierce and many of the cast thought the show — with its fog of slang and characters — was destined to fail. In fact, along with The Sopranos and Mad Men, it kickstarted the golden age of television.
His own role pushed him, an African-American who had experienced police discrimination, into a more ambiguous relationship with law enforcement.
How much does Pierce have in common with Bunk Moreland? “Bunk wouldn’t be going to museums and hearing music and all that stuff. Just a good drink and a cigar. What we share is he’s a student of police work, he’s a criminologist. The drive of, like, I may be a f**k-up, but I know I’m good at this one thing.”
Pierce, too, felt good at one thing — acting. But, in 2005, midway through The Wire, Hurricane Katrina hit, and the poorly kept levees unleashed an almost biblical flood on his home city. Thus began a new phase in his life, laced with attempts to guide the city’s rebirth.
He starred as a womanising trombonist in Treme, another David Simon creation for HBO. It’s a beautiful portrait of a city, although it lacked The Wire’s sensational brutality and therefore its impact.
For Pierce, it achieved what he wanted: “It has become a cultural document.” (Pierce’s love of jazz is no act. “Ronnie Scott’s is my hang here in London.”)
Meanwhile, Pierce entered into a mix of business and philanthropic projects with a childhood friend called Troy Henry — building houses in his family’s neighbourhood, opening grocery stores in areas without access to fresh vegetables, even chairing Henry’s mayoral campaigns. The property projects have suffered lawsuits, the mayoral campaigns failed and the grocery stores closed. A tough business, I suggest of the latter. “The toughest of business!” But Pierce is undeterred, and with Henry, recently bought a local African-American talk-radio station. In 2016, one of Pierce’s homes, in Baton Rouge, was ruined by flooding.
Climate change and rising seas bode ill for the region. Does Pierce ever imagine that his hometown may be unliveable? “It’s the greatest port in the States. New Orleans is always going to be there. Because if it wasn’t for New Orleans, the United States literally would have never grown.” Pierce is unmarried, has no children and in the past has spoken about how his work has disrupted his private life.
What sacrifices has he made? “The older I get, I realise that I use that as an excuse,” he replies, with disarming frankness. “You don’t have to choose between your personal life and career. I have to look at my — my dysfunction when it comes to my personal life . . . ” He says that a richer personal life would help his acting. “If you really look at going to another level of the human experience, you have to explore those relationships.”
Then he diverts again on to his favoured theme, how African-Americans shaped the US. “I can literally, when you come to New Orleans, Henry, take you and we can stand as we’re sitting here now, on the birthplace of jazz: Congo Square, where captured Africans found their freedom, culturally, before they found their physical freedom . . . Henry, play a solo, be free, be an individual within the constraints of the song.”