Huggable He’s Not

NEW YORK —  About a year ago, Andre Braugher, who plays Det. Frank Pembleton on NBC’s “Homicide: Life on the Street,” went to Tom Fontana, the show’s executive producer, to express his dissatisfaction with the role. After three seasons on the critically acclaimed police series, which had inched its way to ratings success, the Chicago-born actor had had it with the mercurial and prickly Pembleton.

“Tom, something has got to be done,” the intense 33-year-old performer says he told the producer, his brooding, handsome face etched with frustration. “I’m no longer satisfied or challenged with where my character is going. Pembleton has grown more righteous, more brilliant, more insistent. I walk into the box and all barriers yield to Frank. I need a change.”

Fontana, recalling the episode, says that shortly after the confrontation, he came up with what he thought was a workable solution. He called the actor and said, “Andre, I want to give your character a stroke, simply so you can recover from it.” There was silence on the other end of the line. Then the actor responded, “This is a fabulous thing, Tom. It really hits me where I live.”

Indeed, there’s nothing more challenging one could present to the penetratingly intelligent, Jesuitical Francis Xavier Pembleton--or the cerebral actor who plays him--than to shatter his mental capacities with a massive stroke. After all, the detective brandishes his steel-trap mind, rather than his magnum, to corner his quarry in the interrogation room--”the box” as it is referred to in the series. That’s exactly what Pembleton was in the act of doing to a suspect in a double murder case when he flew into paroxysms in the season’s stunning finale. When the show returns this fall, the detective’s most formidable weapon will have been drastically reconfigured--and Braugher couldn’t be happier.

“Now I have the challenge of creating a fascinating character born from the ashes of Frank Pembleton but who is going to be different from him,” the actor says with relish. “We won’t be showing the physical recovery--the lifting leg weights, attempts to brush his teeth--but we’re bringing him back to where he has to struggle with the diminishment of his mental abilities. I can no longer depend on my memory for investigation, yet I have to show that I am competent in court. My recovery is going to change my character forever. It’s not something an actor typically does.”

But then, Braugher is no ordinary actor, as anyone who has worked with him will eagerly volunteer. Richard Belzer, who co-stars with him in “Homicide,” has called him “one of the most intelligent actors I’ve ever worked with.” By all reports, he is also one of the most underrated. If he is not nominated, yet again, for an Emmy when the nominations are announced Thursday, there will be a lot of head-scratching.

“It’s fairly shocking, appalling really, that he hasn’t been recognized,” says Barry Levinson, the Oscar-winning director (“Rain Man”) who co-produces the series about a Baltimore detective unit with Fontana. “As brilliant as he is, I think Andre remains unknown for two reasons: One, he’s not the definitive leading man, which is always hard for any actor, but more so for an African American. And two, he plays a middle-class African American with an edge about him--some might see it as an arrogance. It’s a complex, volatile character. It’s not flashy, and flashy is what everyone responds to most quickly.”

Says Fontana: “My secret hope is that Andre gets nominated for both ‘Homicide’ and ‘Law & Order’ [a dual episode crossing the two shows was a joint project last season] and wins both. But the Emmy traditionally has gone to actors who are flawed or ultimately huggable, and Frank Pembleton is, if anything, not huggable.”

“I’m not interested in playing characters who are worried about being liked,” says the actor who plays him. “We don’t go through life being liked. . . . Frank has more important things on his mind than winning popularity contests.”

So too, apparently, does Braugher. Like Pembleton, the actor is neither flashy nor huggable in person. He is as basic and crisp as the white shirt and black pants he wears as he sits for an interview in an NBC conference room 12 stories above Manhattan. With athletic grace, he swings his lithe frame into a chair after pouring himself a cup of herbal tea and swooping down on a towering platter of bagels.

“I don’t drink coffee and I don’t smoke anymore, I’m the purest man I know,” he says with the deep laugh that once led a critic to describe him as being from “that James Earl Jones school of acting.”

The actor is straightforward, in the course of an interview exuding some of the shy seriousness that first brought him acclaim as the free black Bostonian in the film “Glory” and the passion he displayed in the television movies “The Court-Martial of Jackie Robinson” and “The Tuskegee Airmen.” He may in fact be one of the least ingratiating actors on the scene today, relying on his body of work to sell himself rather than the easy charm so many actors conjure up in similar situations.

An important part of his resume, perhaps even more so than the film and television credits, tells the story of his emergence as one of the most promising Shakespearean actors of his generation. A 1986 Juilliard graduate, the classically trained actor regularly eschews vacations in favor of returning to the works of the Bard. He has played Iago in a Folger Shakespeare Festival production of “Othello” and is currently playing “Henry V” (today is the last performance) in the Public Theatre’s annual summer festival of Shakespeare in Central Park.

It is the sixth time Braugher has appeared in the Public’s Shakespeare marathon, having won praise as Angelo in “Measure for Measure” and Bolingbroke in “The Tragedy of Richard II.” But this is the first time he is playing a lead, and it is as the king whom Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh have brought to a wider audience through their films. Critics praised Braugher’s Henry for his thunderous voice and commanding presence, but the show received mixed notices. Nonetheless, Braugher says that he welcomed the challenge to create a character who evolves painfully from the irresolute and wild Prince of Wales, Hal, to the imposing King who rallies his troops bloodily against the French.

“I’ve always been attracted to ambivalence,” says Braugher, “because the challenge is to go through the ambivalence in an active rather than a static way. The great thing about Shakespeare is that he gives you the language and the complexity of character to explore and discover just how to do that. He allows you to be inside the world--wooing a princess, charging onto a battlefield, tormented with guilt and ambition--which is where I want to be.”

Braugher says that he’s so intensely focused on the role that he sometimes scares people as he walks down the streets of Manhattan muttering lines to himself and praying for “a muse of fire” to help do justice to them. “I’m sure they thought I was crazy,” he says with a laugh. “But I was just practicing my craft, which is why I come back to the stage. It makes me feel like a bigger and better actor playing ‘Henry V’ in the park. Whether it’s a failure or success in terms of critical acclaim or audience draw, it’s served its purpose for me, which is to teach me how to act.”

The Public’s colorblind casting has been the slipknot that has allowed Braugher to escape the pigeonholing that is the bane of many African American actors. In the past couple of decades, theater has made some progress in offering African American actors the opportunity to interpret a wider variety of roles that are not race-specific, but it is still all too rare in television and film.

“My goal is to broaden and deepen the range of African American characters on television,” says Braugher, who adds that he was attracted to playing Pembleton in part because the character was not clearly identified by race in the early scripts. His performance and the high quality of the writing have resulted in a compelling portrait of a moody, hardheaded iconoclast with a rigid and exacting moral code. The creators give Braugher a lot of the credit for the complexity of the character that’s evolved over the years.

“His personal sense of dignity and morality have kept us from going over the line,” Fontana says. “He’s not interested in going around with a gun chasing murderers. If I write, ‘Pembleton runs from the car,’ I can pretty much be sure I’m going to get a call from Andre: ‘Tom, I’m running? Why am I running?’ ”

That sense was forged early in Braugher’s life. He remembers as a child watching black actors largely being relegated to the roles of pimps, drug dealers and minstrelly sidekicks in film and television. Later, when he finally decided to become an actor, he vowed that he would never collude in what he calls “the ugliest, most disgusting form of propaganda.”

Braugher grew up the youngest and most protected of four children of a Chicago heavy-equipment operator, Floyd Braugher, and his wife, Sally, a mail carrier. Originally from rural Mississippi, the senior Braughers instilled in their children a strong work ethic and the ambition to move ahead through education. When their youngest son came home from school to complain he wasn’t being called upon to read because he was so far ahead in his third-grade class, they immediately enrolled him in a private Catholic school, although the Braughers were Baptists. “I never even went back to collect my pencil box,” he recalls. “My parents were very decisive about what they wanted for us.”

What Floyd Braugher most wanted was for his son to be a doctor and, for a time, he got his wish. Andre studied premed and haunted the library at Stanford University until one day a friend suggested that he audition for the role of Claudius in a student production of “Hamlet.” “Suddenly, I discovered the greatest show on Earth--people and emotions and a camaraderie that I had never experienced before,” Braugher says. “I was hooked.”

Much to his parents’ chagrin, their “scholar baby” enrolled at Juilliard Acting School, where he graduated with a master’s degree. Director John Stix, who was then a first-year acting teacher, recalled Braugher as someone who “had a grasp of the world and a maturity” that went far beyond any cultural boundaries. “There was a lot of stuff he wanted to get out,” he has said, “especially a lot of anger.”

When Braugher is asked for the particular source of that rage, he says, “I’m black in America. On a daily basis, I’m reminded that I’m unwanted. It’s just a fact of life. I was born without civil rights and I grew up angry. I’m not protected by my family or wealth or intelligence from the daily assaults that are inflicted on the dignity of black Americans everywhere in this country. It’s impossible to make it over to this interview without being reminded of this rejection.”

In fact, Braugher says, an NBC security guard hassled him as he was attempting to come upstairs to the conference room, certain that he should be sent around to the messenger center. “He’d prefer me not to be in the building, period,” he said. “I could see it in his attitude, in his tone, in his demeanor. That’s just the way it is. But the most painful thing is this: He was an African American too. We were turned against each other a long time ago.”

Observing that “angry men die early,” Braugher says he learned to productively channel the frustration and rage into acting. After “Glory,” he received a number of assurances from people in the business that the critical acclaim and attention from the film would surely cause his career to skyrocket. The keenly ambitious actor moved to Hollywood to be where the action was. The phone didn’t ring.

“I’d go into the kitchen, fix myself something to eat, go to a movie and call my machine six times,” he recalls. “After two weeks of this, I finally realized I was going down a road that wasn’t about to yield any personal satisfaction--at least the business doesn’t. I told myself, ‘I have to build a life for Andre, the man, not the actor.’ And the minute I didn’t make acting a priority, the best things have come into my life.”

Braugher counts among those blessings his wife, actress Ami Brabson, who plays his spouse in “Homicide,” and their 4-year-old son, Michael. “We’ve been trying to have another child,” he says, “but I think the time has come to adopt one, probably one who is closer to Michael in age. Infants are wonderful, but there are kids who aren’t cute anymore, who need some love.”

As for his career, Braugher says that he intends to keep faith with a vow he made that he would be a better actor when his contract with “Homicide” came to an end in 1998 than when he began in 1992. For that reason, he’s intent on sharpening his acting tools regularly with Shakespearean plays, which he plans to continue to do until he shuffles off the mortal coil himself. “I figure I have 30 more years of Shakespeare in me,” he says with a laugh, adding, “I’d love to do a comedy. If I don’t grow as an actor, I’m afraid I’ll end up a caricature of myself.”

While both Fontana and Levinson describe his potential as unlimited and his career as headed for greatness, Braugher treats such heady talk with philosophical coolness. He is excited about Spike Lee’s film “On the Bus,” in which he has a featured role, and is slated for a part in Levinson’s new film “Sphere,” but he’s been burned too often in the past with sanguine predictions about his talent winning out.

“I used to believe in the hype; I used to be extremely ambitious,” he says, a rare smile crossing his lips. “I realize that I may never win an Emmy or a Tony or an Oscar. And that’s OK. A hunk of metal has never kept anyone warm. My agents want me to have a blockbuster, Tom Cruise-like career, but that’s more interesting to them than it is to me. I just like going to work. I just like helping to tell the story.”