TSS Presents Smoking Sessions With Andre Royo

"Smoking Sessions With..."    By TSSCrew on October 29, 2008 at 1:38 pm

The Wire has rapidly become my cultural litmus test for people I meet.

If you’re into it, I’m with you. If you’re not, I’ll convert you. And if, heaven forbid, you’ve seen it and you’re not into it, you’re my sworn enemy. Sworn enemy. Forever, forever ever, forever ever © Andre Benjamin.

So when I learned that I would be able to interview Andre Royo, I was ecstatic. Royo’s portrayal of a drug addict named Bubbles was one of the most unidealized and haunting in any medium. To get the chance to pick his brain was a special privilege. We spoke about everything, ranging from The Wire to rap, race to poverty and politics to Omar Little.

Be warned; there are plenty spoilers below for those who haven’t watched all five seasons. Enjoy.

Words by Matthew Mundy

TSS: So what’s new, what are you working on these days?

Andre: You know, in L.A., running around. When The Wire ended, that was a lot of black people out of work, you know.

TSS: (Laughs)

Andre: …I’m in L.A. and just trying to get the hustle going. It was a great show, got a lot of great feedback and everything. Things that make it a little difficult with all of the strikes going on and the economy being jacked up, I mean you’ve got many excuses. But you know, no Emmy Awards. As actors we’re doing it though, know what I mean, I got Heroes coming out, Criminal Minds coming, me and Ed Burns, one of the creators of the show, we’re working on things. So, the grind just never stops. It just gets a little easier, coming off The WireThe Wire, I don’t feel comfortable like I used to doing some regular show. If it ain’t gonna be hopefully up to par with what I’ve been doing with The Wire.

TSS: Yeah.

Andre: Just like David Simon; he doesn’t want to dumb down either. I never got into acting for the money. It was about the quality of work. That’s the fantasy (Laughs). The reality is, it is about the money and I’m hoping before my money run out, I can get on something I can be as proud of as The Wire.

TSS: For sure. Were you surprised about The Wire? You guys were just completely ignored by The Emmys, year after year. Were you surprised even in the final year that you were ignored again?

Andre: Yeah, yeah. It gets to the point… I’m not saying I feel bad, but let’s be clear. The Emmy’s aren’t alone. Golden Globes, SAG awards, all of them ignored us. It wasn’t just The Emmys. We never got nominated for a Golden Globe, never got nominated for a SAG award. The SAG awards are our peers, so all of the awards ignored us. The first two or three years you figure ‘Alright, it’s too black,’ ‘it’s too slow,’ because the qualifications for these award shows is you mail the judges one or two episodes and they look at it and decide. One or two episodes of The Wire, you’re not gonna get – if you get one or two episodes out of context, you’ll look at it and be like ‘There’s a whole lot of talking going on. And I can’t understand half of what these motherfuckers are saying.”

TSS: (Laughs)

Andre: Know what I’m saying? In the final season, a season where there was the writer’s strike and a lot of stuff wasn’t on TV, it almost felt like it would have been insulting to nominate us and say, ‘Oh yeah, you’re the best show on TV now because there’s nothing else on.’ So we took it as you know what, if we’re gonna start off strong and get a lot of street love, a lot of writers love us. It’s always great when people in the street, and journalists, you read the paper and they’re saying we got one of the best shows in American history. You feel great. You would hope, a little part of you, that would have loved to have gone to any one of those award shows, just to get the goddamn flag back.

TSS: Exactly. It does seem really absurd, because most people – well, a lot of critics – recognize it as one of the best TV shows ever. I certainly feel that way, and I know a lot of people who do feel that way. It just seems completely ridiculous that it never received the props from that on an industry level.

Andre: Yeah. Then again, it all comes down to whose running the industry. I go on sets and I do guest stars here and there. And writers, they’re the ones who were on strike this year as well, and writers love our show. They’ll sit and talk to us and be like, ‘We should be doing this, I’ll be writing this for you,’ and you kind of figure out how much power they don’t have. You feel bad, because they’re the ones who put the words on the page, and they’ll sit and talk to you for hours about how much they love the show. But they don’t have that kind of power to be like, ‘They should be nominated, or this should be out there.’ That entire cast [of The Wire] should be working right now. I don’t know who are the powers that be that really make those types of decisions, but you don’t get that show. And I’m not sure if there’s no money to be made off that type of show. You can’t call it.

Most of the actors on the show, it has been a lifelong dream to 1) Become a working actor, 2) to be on a show that is successful, and 3) for people to respect what we do. And to be on a show like this… Again, the scariest part now, is will we ever be on something that good again? Have we hit our high end, our peak right now, now that this show’s gone? Because we’ll do other shows, and we’ll bump into each other and be like, ‘Yo, did you do that movie?’ and be like, ‘Yeah, wasn’t that wack?’ or ‘That was real one dimensional.’

TSS: (Laughs)

Andre: Everything was so lined up in a perfect line as far as the number of people of color on the show, the storyline, the characters being four or five dimensions and just being on a show that not only educated but enlightened and entertained all at the same time. It’s amazing.

TSS: 100% agreed. It was just an amazing, really unflinching look at race, and poverty, the inner city and the war on drugs. I can imagine it would be a tough show to follow up as an actor.

Andre: Yeah, exactly. Again, with that though, hopefully there were so many writers that liked the show and with the accolades that it got, hopefully more people will write about it. The scary part is a lot of people won’t write about it because it didn’t get the awards. And people will be like, ‘I loved that show, that’s a great show…but I wouldn’t do it, because it just goes unnoticed.’

TSS: Yeah…

Andre: Like Jay-Z won’t go back to Reasonable Doubt, because he knows the other shit makes more money (Laughs).

TSS: (Laughs) So what was it like for you personally, playing Bubbles? It was such a harrowing and truthful portrait a drug addict. And you became one of the most redeeming characters on the show as well. What was that like?

Andre: It was a real spread of emotions, because as I got the call and they said, ‘They want you to audition for a show called The Wire, playing a junkie named Bubbles.’ I remember being really, really upset.

TSS: (Laughs) That’s understandable.

Andre: I was like, ‘Yo, really? Are we still doing junkies and Bubbles? I’m not messing with it man.’ And then to feel myself to go from that to go to Baltimore and talk with David Simon and all that. To see that these guys are serious and also feel that I needed a job anyway, and I better make sense of what this job has to offer. The blessing that these cats did not want to make caricatures; they wanted to make characters. To being in Baltimore, doing research and hanging out with the certain people I had to hang out with, it became my rite of passage to do a good job. To represent a lot of who we as society forget about or ignore or walk past, and if I had an opportunity to say, ‘Yo, look at me, I’m no different than you, I’m human, I have certain problems, we all have addictions, but don’t make the mistake of looking at me as inhuman. I’m a human being that is trying.’ I think what David Simon and Ed Burns were doing with this show was that at the end of the day it was just a non-judgmental look at people in different ways just trying to make their life better.

There was no concept of good or bad. It was just like, ‘Yo, this is what I gotta do, to make my life better.’ From the cops, who really need to catch somebody and to serve justice, to the drug dealers who need to make money, everybody was just trying to make their life better. And doing Bubbles, it made me really understand that even I, the actor - as I run around looking around for work and hustling, and trying to support my family - I gotta fall back and be a human being and recognize, not be so close minded and having tunnel vision.

Me playing Bubbles changed my life. It made me understand about addiction and poverty. Since Bubbles was a real character – he was a real life informant for Ed Burns – it became, out of respect, that I’m gonna do good by this guy. And the real Bubbles passed away. So I always was looking for that script and that time when I passed away. And David said, ‘I don’t know how many episodes we’re going to do with Bubbles. We’re going to change the story line every year. We don’t know where Bubbles is going to be.’ From that, to being on the show all the way to the end, I just thank the audience, who really followed me and fell in love with what I was doing with the character, Ed Burns and David Simon, for saying, ‘We know what happened with the real Bubbles. But for this Bubbles, for this person, we just see a different arc. And we have to, at the end of the day, that yeah, within all of this ‘crime continues, shit doesn’t really get better,’ there needs to be one person, or one thing, that gets better. There has to be some sense of hope, or everyone will just start fucking killing themselves or doing whatever.’

TSS: (Laughs) True indeed & it’s admirable that they chose that direction with the character.

Andre: It was an amazing feeling. I never realized how much people really resented the woman who played my sister. I thought the situation was cool and I was looking at it from the real character point of view. I know Bubbles really shitted on his sister, stole from her, and they never showed that. She gave me a place to stay. The only time I really felt like, ‘Whoa, she got me really locked down,’ was when I watched an episode, and I saw the back of the door. When I watched that episode and she put the wood plank down, that’s when I was like, ‘Oh, shit, she got me locked in here like an animal.’ That’s when I realized why people were so happy when I came up the stairs. And I realized that it was a big, big thing, and I almost missed it because that whole fifth season was the hardest season for me to shoot, because it was the first time I really played Bubbles clean.

At that time, after four years, I forgot myself. I was always looking on the floor, looking for needles, looking for some way to get high…

TSS: (Laughs)

Andre: And I’m reading the script like, ‘No, he’s not. He’s really clean dawg?” And I’m like, ‘I don’t know how to act that. I don’t know how to act clean.’ (Laughs) It was a crazy journey man.

TSS: Yeah, I definitely know what you’re saying about when you walked up the stairs. Because I watched fifth season when it was on, and then my wife got me the DVDs. She hadn’t seen fifth season yet, so we watched it together. And I remember throughout the fifth season, horrible shit is happening to everybody - I mean Dukie, Michael. It’s really heart-wrenching shit, and I remember my wife she was just like, ‘I pray to God Bubbles gets to go up the stairs for at least just one dinner.’

Andre: (Laughs) Exactly, exactly.

TSS:: Obviously it must have been tough for you guys finishing up the show. You must have all been really close, and five seasons is a long ass time as well, you know?

Andre: It’s like college man. We’re all college grads now, and in our hearts we all say, ‘Yo this will last forever, we’ll see each other everyday, we’ll talk to each other next week,’ and your heart says that. But in your mind, you know motherfuckers are gone, man. You know a lot of cats you might see once in a while. You might drop an email here and there. But you know, with this memory and this connection we will all stay very close. But as the fifth season with every script and every episode we shot, it got heavier and sadder. Everybody was cool and everybody was tough and wanted to show nothing was happening.

But when we shot that final scene and we were all there with bottles of champagne like it’s over, you know, emotions started flowing. It was for us, for Baltimore city embracing us, and just in general people really felt what we were doing, and that made us feel what were doing even more. And when they said ‘Cut, it’s a wrap,’ you can’t really… I can only explain it by saying it was like leaving your neighborhood, leaving your crew, leaving your peoples, and it was very emotional.

TSS: So where are you originally from?

Andre: From the Bronx.

TSS: From the Bronx, okay, alright. So a lot of this, especially in terms of drug addiction, do you have any experience with that - like family members or anything or people close to you?

Andre: Ummm, we’ve all had experiences with addictions, and that’s what made it kind of easier to play. I’ve never had anybody I know of personally that was addicted to heroin. But when I see my family in the middle of winter going outside to smoke a cigarette, that’s crazy. It’s like, ‘Yo, it’s freezing,’ and they like, ‘I gotta have a smoke.’ That type of addiction, that type of feeling, it was easier for me to cling onto, because I think we all have it.

For my research, I took six months and I just stopped doing all the things I like to do. The first thing I had to do was to really understand that need. You know, I watch TV every day. I started cutting out all the things I like to do. I made a list of all the stuff I do everyday and I stopped doing it. And after a while I was fiending. I was fiending for that TV to be on. I would stare at it and had to stop myself from being like, ‘Fuck it, you can watch a little TV. Fuck it, come on. You can watch a little. Ain’t no harm in that.’ No, no. Cigarettes, cocaine, alcohol, we’ve all seen that, we’ve all seen someone in our family who has those types of addictions. But until I got to Baltimore and looked at it for research, I had never been around and watch people shoot up and hung out in rehab with people.

TSS: Yeah. Why do you think The Wire struck so many chords with people? It’s fan base is just incredibly rabid.

Andre: Because, I think as we grow up, you know, there’s a lot of things that we know are wrong with how we are living out here. We know for a fact that the machine has been built fucked up. But we find different ways to ignore the problems and just get it done. That’s our motto, like we know this is bad, we know that there is no real difference between Democrats and Republicans, really. At the end of the day it’s about the money, it’s about the dollars and it’s about the cents. We know really that there’s no middle class; it’s just the rich and poor. Everything else is being erased. And we know certain things.

But you get delusional or you get protective and you put blinders on. And all of a sudden when you go home and normally turn on the TV to escape, and just laugh at some silly stuff, you watch this show, which shows you everything you know is going on, but in a removed setting. I think people were just happy and also relieved that somebody was putting it out there for the world to see. Somebody was reminding them, ‘Look, you’re not alone in thinking that,’ and showing that this is wrong. How we raise our children and the environment that surrounds our children is wrong. And this is why kids grow up thinking the way they do is because they are seeing these things, and I think it was just like The Matrix, ‘Red or blue pill?’ And The Wire was the red pill. The Wire was a reality check up, dawg, don’t kid yourself. The system’s fucked up. And when that happens, people gravitate to it like, ‘Yo, that’s the truth being spoken.’ And you always gravitate to the truth.

TSS: And do you think it also had to do with, as you said before, how there were a lot of black characters on it, and most TV doesn’t reflect a lot of places in America. And I think for a lot of people it probably reflected their neighborhoods more than any TV show has or currently does.

Andre: Yeah, we don’t get the opportunity, rarely, to turn on the TV and feel that we are being spoken to. And we are being addressed. Like, ‘Yes, we’re talking to you right now, and we understand what you’re going through.’ We rarely get that. When we do get it, it’s more of a diluted, ‘Hey, why are you complaining? Being poor is okay, as long as you got love! As long as you got love! So what you working in a junkyard. So what, you can’t afford a job, you got each other! Hug it out, hug it out!’

TSS: (Laughs)

Andre:: And all the time it was like no, being poor is not fun at all. There’s nothing cute, there’s nothing fancy about it. And when the kids came on the fourth season, you know, I remember the actors meeting the kids at like a picnic thing and they were excited to be on the show and we were nervous like, ‘Wow, we going with the kid storyline? It’s going to be ‘Once Upon A Time In America’, or it’s going to be ‘Fat Albert’. We don’t want ‘Fat Albert’.

TSS: (Laughs)

Andre: And the kids bought it. That was my favorite season. And the kids really made the show, and the one thing for the show that David Simon couldn’t do, as much as he talked about it, as much as he invested in the second season, what he couldn’t do, was to get people to not focus on, ‘It’s a black show.’ When the dock came on, then it was a socioeconomic show, and it was like there’s rich and there’s poor. And these kids are fucking poor. It was about that they had no other choices. And I think that was amazing.

TSS: Yeah, and that’s the other question I had. For you, what were your favorite seasons? Mine was fourth as well, that season just fucking killed me, you know.

Andre: In every season, I’ve had a great moment or great episodes. But the fourth season it was just everything just lined up, everything was powerful and the flow of the whole show, it never dropped. And I remember for the first season it was about the cops. It was supposed to be about the cops, but it was the first time we introduced drug dealers where they weren’t like, ‘Yo, I just want to have a doobie and smoke my weed,’ you know? We were talking businessmen, who could run a Fortune 500 company, putting together what they know for the streets.

We also got introduced to cats like Omar, who you never saw on TV. You never saw. I don’t know if they ever will, because as far as when I grew up, the gay character was the fucking joke and not the wise-ass dude, like, ‘I’ll fight you or fuck you, what do you want?’ You never saw that on TV. You never saw a character like Stringer Bell before. There were certain moments in every season. But the fourth season, just the cops running around with their hands tied, not really able to do anything, and showing that frustration. The political with Carcetti running for mayor. Everything just had this feeling of urgency, education, and just empathy like, ‘Wow, it’s really not just one thing you can blame.’

When I was growing up, my parents and everybody was having these parties. And it would be like a round table, and they would say, ‘It’s the school system,’ or they would say, ‘It’s the government,’ or they would say, ‘It’s the family,’ and they would argue all night, but in reality they were all right. Everything matters. You can’t just fix one thing and leave everything else fucked up. It won’t work. You gotta fix it all, know what I’m saying? And the fourth season just made that really, really clear. Everything is connected and everything has an effect on the other. And that was my favorite season.

TSS: Exactly.

Andre: But I didn’t like getting beat up every fucking episode!

TSS: (Laughs) Yeah man, that was heartbreaking. You had a tough fourth season, eh? With Sherrod…

Andre: Yeah, it was a mess. And I remember David Simon was such a funny dude, because when Stringer Bell was killed in the third season, I was like, ‘Yo, y’all gotta make Bubbles the new sex symbol.’

TSS: (Laughs)

Andre: ‘ If you clean me up over the fourth season, I can be the next Stringer Bell. We’ll be motherfucking superstars.’ And David was just like, ‘Yeah, aight Dre, you just wait until fourth season, we got something for you.’ And all of a sudden I was getting beaten up every single episode, like, ‘Ahh, you fuckers.’ It was a rough season, it took me a long time after we wrapped that season to really fall back and get that energy off me. Just the death, any death of a young kid.

And it was a double-edged sword not only as a character was I going through feeling bad. But as an actor, you’re talking about a young actor who was like, ‘I can’t wait ‘til fifth season, I’m going to be doing this, this and this,’ and I’m like, ‘Nah man, you dying dawg. You’re not coming back.’ And you know that was a sad day. Because you only know five or six episodes ahead, so he was like, ‘I’m gonna do this and I’m gonna do this!’, and you never know. Unfortunately we don’t know until we get the script. To see his face as he’s reading, it was heartbreaking. It was like, ‘Damn’. It was a crazy, crazy season.

TSS: What’s it like for you to get recognized? Do you get recognized by Wire fans often?

Andre: Yeah, the great thing about it is that I remember after the first season… At least it’s gotten a little more…I don’t want to use “respectable”… The first season it was just the local BET watchers and young cats. They’d be like, ‘Yo crackhead! You my man crackhead!’ And I’d be with my daughter, and they’d be like, ‘Yo it’s that crackhead! What up crackhead?’

TSS: (Laughs)

Andre: It went from there to by the time the fourth season had ended I was happy that it was a little broader audience, where it was like, ‘Mr. Royo, your character as Bubbles…’ And it was much better than being yelled ‘crackhead’ at from across the street.

TSS: (Laughs) Yeah.

Andre: Again, it’s so funny, people will come up and you never know how you’re received, and you never want to stroke your own ego, and you’re always waiting for someone to come up and be like, ‘That shit was wack.’ You know, ‘I didn’t like that stupid show.’ And so you’re always wondering when someone’s coming over, you see that little thing that you know they recognize you, and you don’t know what’s going to come out of their mouth, but it has never happened.

These people never say like, ‘Hey man, your show was okay. It was pretty good.’ These people want to sit and really talk about it. They want to be like, ‘Yo, I am one of your greatest fans.’ And they really want to sit there and feel like they are proud. Not only are they proud that they’ve seen me do it, but they’re proud that they’ve sat and watched it all. It’s a real sense of, ‘I sat there and watched it all, and I felt it.’ It’s amazing, it’s great.

TSS: For sure. I think Wire fans - from people that I know of who are into the show - there are no casual fans of The Wire. It’s either head-over-heels obsessed with the show or they’re just not into it for whatever reason.

Andre: Yeah or they haven’t watched it. People either say, ‘I’m in love with the show,’ or, ‘I only saw a couple episodes, my friends keep on saying I should watch it all.’ And I’ll see those same cats like four or six months later, and they’ll be like, ‘I just watched five in a row. I love that show.’ Either you didn’t watch it or you loved it. But what was great about it is that you had to watch the whole thing.

And that’s one of the best things about the fourth season as well. That was the first time that David Simon and Ed Burns…you know the first three seasons, again, every time we were about to come out, the rule was you mail out two or three discs and you all write something on the show. The fourth season David Simon was like, ‘Fuck this, I’m not just sending out two or three, I like books. That’s like ripping out chapters, chapters one and chapter seven, and sending it out. You’re not gonna get it. I’m sending out all thirteen episodes.’

When that went out, a month or so before it was about to air, he sent out all thirteen episodes to reporters. And we were like, ‘Yo, you know when we send them all out, they’re gonna get bootlegged.’ And two, I remember the ex-president of HBO had just finished saying that, ‘We don’t know if we’re going to pick up The Wire, we don’t know. David Simon has already proven that crime doesn’t end and we’ve seen it, we’re not network, so we don’t have to follow a certain standard, I’m gonna let y’all decide if we’re gonna pick up The Wire or not.’ When those reviews came out, he was just like, ‘I was only playing, we love The Wire. We’ll definitely have a fifth season. What’s wrong with y’all? I was only kidding.’

TSS: (Laughs)

Andre: Because the reviews after that fourth season, it almost became daunting, because it was like, they wasn’t saying, ‘This is a great show, this year was very very good. This year they came back stronger, better than the rest.’ They were saying, ‘This show is the best show in American history.’ We was like, ‘Goddamn. This is fucked up. This is sick!’

TSS: Was that the moment for you guys? I mean I’m sure before you know were involved in something special. But when did you start realizing how great of a show it was, how important of a show?

Andre: It’s hard for me to really say, because it’s so hard. While we were filming we were just paying attention and trying to get the job done. And then every year HBO was like, ‘We don’t know if you’ll get picked up.’ And it made us feel like, ‘I dunno, are we not good?’ And again, no nominations on any award shows, were like, ‘Damn man, maybe we’re not as good.’ Like Kanye said, ‘Are these niggaz really better than us?’ ‘Is Boston Legal really a better show? Maybe it is, I don’t know?’ But there lots of times when we would be like, ‘Fuck that, we know we got the hot joint.’

And I think with every actor it was different, but for me the first time I ever knew that we had something that was totally different would have to be when they introduced Omar’s character. When they introduced Omar’s character, and he was robbing everybody, and he had the swagger, the trenchcoat, and the shotgun, I remember walking around in my ‘hood and cats being like, ‘I’m like Omar. Omar’s a real dawg. That’s my man. Me and Omar could hang out. That’s how I get down.’ And then in like the fifth or sixth episode, everybody dropped and I would walk around and the same cats would be like, ‘I dunno man, I dunno. Omar, that’s some funny shit, I dunno.’ But they couldn’t take away the respect they had for him.

And in our culture, that homosexual stuff never flew. As far as I know, it’s the most homophobic culture in the world, like you can’t escape. Like if they think you’re gay, you’d have to move damn near. But all of a sudden with Omar, it was like, ‘I don’t care if he’s gay, he’s still my man. He’s still fly. I’d still hang out with him.’ And for me, I had that experience only a couple of times, seeing how something could change somebody’s thought process.

The first time I wanted to be an actor was when I saw Rocky. Rocky was the first movie that I saw that showed me the power of motion pictures because Apollo Creed, as far as we know, wasn’t a bad dude. He wasn’t evil, he was just like Ali, a badass dude, nice with his hands, but for some reason, in the middle of the movie, in a theater in the Bronx, all the black dudes were rooting for Rocky. And I was like, ‘Wow, they really want the white dude to win. That’s incredible!’

TSS: (Laughs)

Andre: So when I saw people’s minds change with the Omar character, I said, ‘You know what, I don’t know if this is gonna last, but we definitely raised some eyebrows. We got something here that you definitely can’t say you’ve seen before.’

TSS: For sure, Omar is definitely one of the most interesting characters in TV history.

Andre: I mean for me, like I said, Omar was crazy. Stringer Bell, when I saw people react when they saw him in school taking classes, that was crazy. People were like, ‘Wow, this is a different type of gangster.’ And the Bubbles character, people come up and are like, ‘Yo, I can’t look at a homeless person the same way dawg, I can’t. I know I can’t help everybody, but for some reason now, I see the human in them rather than see a derelict.’ And that just brings tears to your eyes, and makes you emotional. The Snoop character, I mean that nail gun scene that opens the fourth season had everyone bugged out!

The actors were really blessed to be surrounded by the creativity of David Simon and Ed Burns, who really set up a place where we all felt safe, we all wanted to bring everything to the table. And Baltimore itself was one of those cities where The Wire can be done – just like every ghetto, every ‘hood, it’s not saying that this is just happening in Baltimore. But the mindset of what people thought about Baltimore… The only thing I knew about Baltimore was it was between New York and DC. That’s it. But you get there and you see a city that looks like it’s given up, the same as Detroit. It looks like, ‘This is it, we don’t care, what you see is what you get.’ But every year to go back to do another city and see peoples’ faces light up and they would have a little more pride living in Baltimore, because that’s the place that The Wire’s from, it was amazing.

TSS: And you mentioned before that you were working with Ed Burns on something?

Andre: Yeah, me and Ed Burns are working. We got real close and I like his writing. He really broke down a lot of the characters and he likes how I get down, what I talk about, how I present myself. So we’re trying to get together, to get some things off the ground. And I think a lot of the actors from The Wire because it’s such a character-driven story, plotline-based show, that we find it hard-pressed to find that feeling again, so I think a lot of people are going to go behind the camera and to try and get more of that out there.

TSS: For sure. Which actors did you become particularly close with?

Andre: The three people I’m really close to are Sonja – me and Sonja are both from New York, and we did some movies together, it just felt weird like, ‘Yo , every movie you in I’m in.’ So we got real close, that’s my sister. Me and Michael K. Williams got really, really close, because we both had that kind of character that was kind of wasn’t a cop, and wasn’t a robber. ‘You two guys, we don’t know what we’re gonna do with you two guys, you might be, you might not be,’ and we were both in it until the end. We had an affinity for each other. And me and Dom West, he had just had his daughter, I had my daughter, we got really close.

I liked them all. Wendell Pierce is a God, you know. He’s the mayor, he’s the one who’s been through it all and seen it all. He’s been in a billion movies, and he still comes everyday ready to rock. Everybody was just so, so good. It’d be unfair for me to say… I want like five Wire movies, I want to work with these guys all the time. It’s just a family, you know, and I got my favorite cousins here and there. But if I say it, the other cousins are going to be coming after me (Laughs).

TSS: Yeah, and there’s no chance of a movie or anything else, right?

Andre: You know, I don’t think so. I’d highly, highly say no, because seeing David Simon, he doesn’t come from that kind of cloth. He didn’t get into this to get popular with the TV, he writes books, he writes stories. For him, it took him five years and I don’t know how many episodes to get this story told, and so for him to say I’m going to do it in two or three hours, no. And he won’t put it out there just because it might make some money.

TSS: Yeah, exactly. And being a fan of the show it was obviously devastating to see it finish. But it finished in such a perfect way that it would be a shame to revisit it.

Andre: Yeah, especially in a shortcut way, a two hour way. It would be very, very tough to go into a Wire movie, and sit for two hours, and feel like your expectations are all going to be met. I think he’s going to leave it at that. If there were to be another Wire thing, he would make it a 300-page book, and make motherfuckers read it. ‘I don’t dumb it down, and I’m not gonna dumb it down to make a movie. So here, motherfuckers, if you really love me, and you really feel what I did, go get my 300-page book and read that.’

TSS: Do you hope to work with David Simon in the future at some point as well?

Andre: Yeah, oh, of course. I think he’s one of the best out there as far as character and storyline, so yeah. Also, he’s honest, he’s one of those dudes, if he has something and he thinks he can do it [he’ll work with you]… If not, and even though he got love for you, he got a lot of people he wants to put down. So you can’t get mad at that, because he put me on. So, you come off The Wire, you come off meeting somebody like that, as much as I hope to work for him, I hope a lot of people get to work for him. I hope a lot of people get to experience that, so when I meet somebody we can sit down all day and have a broad conversation about what sort of things you did with David, instead of you being the only one.

I think there is some blessing to him [working with the same people] – like Spike Lee would always do it, and I thought that was great. At a time when Blacks weren’t working, he would keep the same crew that he had working, to show that we got love and can do the same thing that white people do, we can look out for our peoples, you know? And also for the fact that when the time came, he did make people stars – he grabbed Wesley Snipes, he grabbed Sam Jackson, like ‘I want everybody to get a chance.’

TSS: I heard you talk about rap before. You’re obviously a rap fan?

Andre: Yeah, yeah.

TSS: Alright, well who’s your favorite… We’re a Hip-Hop website, so I figured I’d ask one or two Hip-Hop questions…

Andre: I gotta say that I wasn’t a fan of Kanye, at first. I felt that Timbaland, Dre, great producer, but there’s no reason to open your mouth.

TSS: (Laughs)

Andre: But the great thing about Kanye is that dealing with the problems and stuff he went through, the great thing is that I’m watching him become better. He’s not just staying in one lane. You feel that he’s growing as an artist, and that’s always a beautiful thing to watch. I think that Kanye has really stepped it all up and I’m a fan of his.

Jay-Z, you gotta love him because he made it very clear, it ain’t like he got dumb, or he smoked out. He’s like, ‘No, this is rap, and it’s a business. If you’re not doing it, and making money…’ He said this is my lane, this is my story. Love him.

I love Nas. Nas to me was a happy medium. I wasn’t really into dead prez, I wasn’t really into most of the backpack crew, I wasn’t a fan of Common. Nas is my Common and Dead Prez rolled in one. I thought he was someone I could relate to, because he didn’t just preach about being one way. He preached about it, he tried it, fucked up, and was like, ‘Know what? I tried that line, I fucked up, my bad. I thought it would be me, but it wasn’t me.’ And he’s honest. He would admit to a mistake.

TSS: Yeah, I know what you’re saying. He seems a lot more multidimensional than a lot of the backpackers, you know?

Andre: Yeah, those are my top three. Every quarter has a head and tails. With those three, if I got those three, and I can listen to them, I don’t mind sitting on the tail side and listening to fucking Lil’ Wayne. No mind. Because now I got a choice. But if it was just Lil’ Wayne types out there, I’d probably be like, ‘Rap is fucking wack.’ But listening to Nas, and listening to Jay, you don’t mind that other shit, like, ‘Yeah, I know I’m not them, but I’m hot right now, so kiss my ass and suck my dick,’ you know? You gotta love it, you gotta love it.

TSS: (Laughs)

Andre: And that’s what made DMX hot, and that’s what made 50 hot. It wasn’t their rapping skills. It was their hungry, young, ‘I don’t care if I’m not as nice as those guys, I’ll still bust their ass with energy.’

TSS: That swagger, exactly.

Andre: Yeah and I wouldn’t be a true Hip-Hop fan, and it may not sound good, and it may get a backlash, but I miss Eminem. I miss him. He was nice. I miss him, because for me, you never thought – to me he was like Rocky, where you didn’t mind him winning. You didn’t mind him winning, even though you thought he didn’t belong there because that’s the way you were raised, but I was like, ‘I can’t front, that motherfucker is nice.’

TSS: Oh for sure, like on the Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem Show, he was a beast. I don’t know what happened.

Andre: Yeah, so I miss him, those are my top. Everybody else, I just feel like it’s not that I don’t like them - like T.I., Rick Ross - nut I just feel like you’re getting thrown into that list, that type of discussion, too early. For those guys you gotta have at least three or four albums before I even talk about you, before I even have your name in my mouth. You can’t have a hit single and be like, ‘He’s just as good as so-and-so.’ I can’t do that.

TSS: Alright, well I don’t even know if this question is possible to answer, but if you could name one MC who you would think is The Wire of MCs, who would it be?

Andre: The Wire of MCs? If I had to go with The Wire MC… Hmmmm. That is a tough one. I know at one point they wanted Nas, they wanted Nas to do a theme song. I don’t know what happened, but Nas was their first choice. I don’t know if the money wasn’t right, or I think HBO’s swagger was too big at the time. They were like, ‘We HBO. You should be doing it because we’re HBO.’ And Nas was just like, ‘I’m Nas, though.’ I think Nas was their first choice. I think if it’s really The Wire and embodying what The Wire was about, I would have to say Biggie. I would have to say Biggie was – unfortunately not from Baltimore. But Biggie was a great storyteller, grimy, business, swagger, I think he embodied them all in one thing.

TSS: And wasn’t around for long enough as well… (Laughs)

Andre: (Laughs) Yeah, and wasn’t around long enough, and I think Biggie would have given them a hard battle. One of those cats that would have given Eminem a little like, ‘No white boy, no. I’m just like you. I’m fat, black and nasty as ever. Now what are you gonna say? I put all of my negative shit out there, so what are you gonna say?’ (Laughs)

TSS: (Laughs) I’ll let you go in a second, but you touched on it briefly before, how do you feel about the election right now?

Andre: That’s a touchy subject right now, and in general, I don’t want to come across like I’m this political dude. I’m learning with my kid how to be political. I didn’t vote a lot; I just started voting in the last few elections or so. And I was very happy and the first time I voted I had a tear in my eye, because I had slept a long time on how this feels to try and have an impact on what’s going on with the world.

Because I grew up in the Bronx, and it was like, ‘I don’t give a fuck who is president, it ain’t really affecting me on this level.’ And now that I’m paying more attention and trying to be there, trying to be a better image for my daughter… I sit there and my daughter be watching TV and she’s seeing Hillary talk and Obama talk, and she’s just like, ‘What’s the big deal?’ (Laughs) And I’m like, ‘You don’t know, but Blacks and a woman, I could never have envisioned this happening in my lifetime.’ And she’s just like, ‘Yeah, whatever. Can we turn on Nickelodeon?’

TSS: (Laughs)

Andre: And I’m like man, I got a lot of work to do. A lot of work to do. But as I listen to these people speak, I’d rather have Obama than McCain. But what scares me is that even if McCain is talking real talk, he’s not going to be in office that long. I feel like if I want a full change, and jump in the fire and really start something new, we gotta go with Obama. And the only thing is that once you go with Obama, will he be given the opportunity to really make change, or is he just going to be change by being a black face in office? And that’s the thing. He definitely will change the energy and evolution of how America is looked at again. Forever ever. For a long, long time.

But will he be making decisions? After he makes a speech and goes into the White House, will the door be locked and they’ll be like, ‘Look, we’re making the decisions, go out there and make another speech. Do what you’re supposed to do, but really, really don’t get it twisted. You’re not making decisions.’ I really, really can’t help but think of Kennedy, and go, ‘That was one of their own that was trying to make a change, and they busted him in the head. That was one of their own, and they were like, ‘You’re trying too much, you’re fucking with too much money, you gotta go.’ And so if they could do that to one of their own… They’re not going to get rid of Obama, and they’re not going to assassinate Obama, because that will make him a martyr, and that will make him even bigger and put a real exclamation point on, ‘We knew that this would happen.’ But will they make him a real president? I don’t know. Like will they really have him making decisions? I don’t know.

TSS: Yeah. And how dope was it for you when Obama said The Wire was his favorite show?

Andre: Crazy dope! Crazy dope. It was like, ‘Now it’s official. Now we’re official.’ It was like, ‘One, we just got bigged up by the presidential nominee. And two, if he’s watching TV, at least he’s watching real TV.’ Know what I mean?

TSS: Yeah. Because that was during the primaries, and I already wanted Obama to win. But when I heard that Hillary said Desperate Housewives I was like, ‘Whatever,’ but when Obama said The Wire? I knew that he was the man.

Andre: Exactly! He’s a smart dude.

Posted in "Smoking Sessions With...", ARTIST INTERVIEWS, GENERAL, SMOKE BREAK, TV/Movies, VIDEO — Tags: "FIFTEEN MINUTES WITH...", Andre Royo, Bubbles, David Simon, Ed Burns, HBO, Heroes, The Wire, TV