Wendell Pierce on Politics, New Orleans and Playing Clarence Thomas

Wendell Pierce calls himself a "journeyman actor," so he was both bemused and amused by the massive media circuit surrounding HBO's Confirmation.

"I'm really seeing the machine," he said amid an endless series of interviews in the network's executive dining room, where he was enjoying free croissants and Diet Cokes and looking forward to a special, albeit rushed, lunch. "I never had this for The Wire or Treme."

In Confirmation, Pierce plays Clarence Thomas opposite Kerry Washington's Anita Hill during the infamous 1991 Senate hearings on Thomas's Supreme Court appointment, when Hill accused him of sexual harassment.

For Pierce, this is just one stop in his journey. He remains relentlessly busy, acting and producing for television, film and theater; writing a book (The Wind in the Reeds: A Storm, a Play and the City That Would Not Be Broken); and committing time, energy and money to social justice causes in his hometown of New Orleans, in Baltimore and beyond.

What has no one asked you in all these interviews?
Do you want to meet the justice? I'll be the first to say there were preconceived notions I had about him, and it's an open secret that we differ in our political views. But yeah, I really do.

What do you remember from 1991?
I was glued to the hearings. I remember how he asked for redress on the issues of racism, as he so famously brought up in his rebuttal, saying, "This is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks," and the hypocrisy of that, since he would not allow any plaintiff in any affirmative action case to say they needed to redress the issues of discrimination.

Your best-known characters are plenty flawed but always likable and charming, like Bunk Moreland on The Wire and Antoine Batiste on Treme. What drew you to this role?
People who know my political views say, "Why are you doing this?" But my thought was not "Oh, should I do it?" but "How fast can I say yes?" I want to challenge myself continually and this was a great challenge because I had those prejudices about Thomas myself. It strengthens the acting muscles to tap into other parts of yourself. When you can accomplish something that's unexpected, for you as well as the audience, that's really important. It's also very important if you want people considering you for other projects to broaden their view of you.

What did you learn about Thomas?
We actually have more in common than not. That's the epiphany I had doing research. We both had five generations of family in the South; we are black and Catholic. What amazes me is we had such similar backgrounds, so I wonder what sent him down one road and me down another. All he wants to do is be in a law firm in the South, but when he is turned away he says it was because they viewed his Yale degree as diminished by affirmative action. I see it as it's an old white guy network that would have never hired him because he was a young black lawyer—it was institutionalized racism.

How much do his political views shape your portrayal?
The enigma is the private man. For me, this is less about the political journey or whether he did what Anita Hill said. The journey I'm on is about a man at the height of his career who is about to lose it all because of the events of his past. He really had a long relationship with Anita Hill, and he had to wonder, Why would she make those allegations? He must have felt a sense of betrayal.

He gave me a window into how he felt when he denied the allegations but said, "If there was anything I said or did that offended Anita Hill or any other woman, I am sorry for it." That meant he was reflecting on it. I've come to believe, being a student of human behavior, he was unaware of how his actions were landing on someone else. But still, legally, what's interesting is that ignorance of the law does not absolve you of the law.

What research did you do?
I really studied the testimony as if it were an orchestral score. He had a way of saying "in any way," of sitting like this with his hands crossed, almost like a pressure cooker. He had the pursing of the lips, the shifting of the eyes.

I literally tried to score it, sometimes to the detriment, I think, of the drama. But in that replication, being exact did open the door to his inner life. I saw that he almost didn't say the most iconic line about the "high-tech lynching." You see he finishes and then sits back and only then he comes back to the mic, in a moment of revelation, and he goes into it. For me it was a real moment of him throwing caution to the wind, saying what he's feeling, thinking, It doesn't matter now if I'm confirmed or not. I said to director Rick Famuyiwa about the way I sit back and then come back to the mic, "Don't cut that out."

Does the current Supreme Court confirmation battle give extra resonance to this movie?
We would never wish for the death of a Supreme Court justice, but there is this unfortunate kismet now. Raising people's civic awareness is a healthy thing—the death of Antonin Scalia heightens the message that we are trying to get out, that you shouldn't forget how important this is, that the president and the Senate have a constitutional duty to do their job, that the confirmation of someone to a lifetime tenure on the bench has a generational impact. You also have to remember there's a whole generation of people 30 and under who don't remember this or haven't heard of the Thomas hearings.

You've been all over the country on other projects lately. I just saw you in a play about police profiling, Twelve Angry Men, at the Billie Holiday Theatre in Brooklyn. You are on two series, Suits and The Odd Couple. Anything else coming up?
I'm going to do a play called Cost of Living at Williamstown, a four-hander about two relationships—mine is with a disabled woman. It's a very different role for me. And I'm shooting a film in Atlanta called One Last Thing where my character finds his long-lost daughter, played by Jurnee Smollett-Bell.

I'm producing Billy, a movie based on Albert French's novel. We're in preproduction. In the 1950s in Mississippi, a 10-year-old black boy is being humiliated and bullied by this white teenage girl, so he sticks her with his pen knife and she bleeds out and dies. He faces the death penalty. The movie is about how we do or don't value life—do we as a society put this 10-year-old boy to death for what he has done?

And, of course, that's just your day job.
On the civics side, I'm investing in the $20 million construction project for apartment buildings in Baltimore. We are putting together a job-training program to train those who are disenfranchised to be a part of the labor force that builds the apartments. This is my response to the Baltimore uprising. The social justice movement of the 21st- century is economic development. Putting people to work is the answer. We all know where violence comes from in the community: It's a residual effect of an underground economy. The Baltimore plan creates a new economic engine.

Things have gotten more complicated at home in New Orleans, right?
We have built 40 homes in my old neighborhood of Pontchartrain Park, and half are filled. They are affordable—at $160,000 for a 1,500-square-foot house—but the government handcuffed us by making it so that only people with below 80 percent of the average median income can get the houses. We had to turn so many people away, just because they have a job. We are trying to lift that restriction.

You've worked to combat "food deserts," where there are no supermarkets selling fresh produce in inner cities, but your grocery stores in New Orleans didn't work out. Was that political or business?
Some of those difficulties were just business. The learning curve is painful and difficult. I still believe in the concept—we look at India and China as emerging markets, and we should look at underserved communities right in our own cities as emerging markets.

But politics is an issue. My business partner ran for mayor, so [New Orleans Mayor] Mitch Landrieu doesn't like me and killed a deal for a grocery store in the Lower 9th Ward because my partner might think of running against him again....

I'm a pariah in the mayor's eyes. There were community development grants that Mitch wanted to use to fix the streets and the lights, but then the money goes out and you never get it again. But the city can actually use that money and act as a bank, giving low-interest mortgages. At a public meeting, I said, "Why not use the grant money to give first responders a 1 percent mortgage?" You could recruit policemen and tie it to blighted properties, and those responders are giving their money back to Treasury with a little bit of a bump. Mitch says, "Do you want me to play bank or fix your streets and lights?"

I say, "You can do—" but they cut off my mic before I could say both.

So politics gets in the way. But I always tell my community you have to keep on bringing the solutions and putting them on the table.