ndre Braugher had to figure out a way to believe in the unbelievable when he took on the role of teacher Matt Burke in TNT's original miniseries Salem's Lot. The actor, who began his film career in the Oscar-winning film Glory and went on to portray one of the most complex characters ever created for television in his Emmy-winning turn as Detective Frank Pembleton in Homicide: Life on the Street, ultimately discovered the horror genre gave him material he could sink his teeth into.
Salem's Lot is the second miniseries to be based on the Stephen King classic, the first airing in 1979. TNT's mini updates the tale and stars Braugher, Rob Lowe, Donald Sutherland, Rutger Hauer, Samantha Mathis and James Cromwell. The story takes place in Jerusalem's Lot, a secretive little town that finds itself dealing with evil forces. Salem's Lot premieres
on Sunday, June 20, and concludes Monday, June 21.
Braugher is an award-winning star of stage, film and television and has starred in the films Primal Fear, City of Angels and Frequency. He earned an Emmy nomination for his role in Gideon's Crossing and won an Obie Award for his title role on stage as Henry
V.
Andred Braugher chatted with Science Fiction Weekly about acting, separating his home life from work, and his willingness to believe in the impossible.
What was it about the material in Salem's Lot that appealed to you?
Braugher: Well, I read the novel 20 years ago, I think back in college. Peter Filardi wrote a great script, which I think really captures the essence of the small-town horror that Stephen King is trying to create. I really understand and believe in these people. Mark Wolper is an excellent producer. I worked for him for the first time back in the beginning of my career, back in '88 or '89. Mikael Salomon is quite a fine director. Rob Lowe, who I've admired for many years, especially on the television show The West Wing, was playing the lead. So there seemed to be all the elements to make the project attractive to me. And all the things I imagined to be true in the very beginning are still absolutely true, and part of that is the accomplishment of the people involved.
Tell me about your character, Matt Burke.
Braugher: Stephen King novels typically have an ancient philosopher buried somewhere inside of them. That's true in The Stand and various other of his novels. It's that person who's able to take the imaginative leap to something that no one else has ever conceived of, be it possession by the devil or the possibility that vampires are alive and on the move in rural Maine. Matt Burke is Ben Mears' high-school teacher from many years ago. Ben is on a quest to write a story somehow about modern-day horror, or the town, or to find redemption of some kind. And the cynic in Matt Burke is aware that people are still out to prove themselves, that they've never strayed from their true nature.
My character can tell, from many years of association a long time ago with Ben Mears, that he's both a journalist who is routinely used to betraying his subjects as well as a man who's desperately searching for the kind of communion that comes with genuine love and genuine affection. Those two sides are at war with each other. I can also look and say, "You know, it's possible that Ben Mears, in the midst of the vampirism outbreak, will be one of the first people to run. But if he doesn't run, he's going to stick it through to the end." So an unlikely band of vampire hunters we have.
And your character turns to Ben first, before everybody else.
Braugher: I feel as though I have to because he's an outsider. I mean, you're taking 20 years to become an insider of a small town like that. Also he's a respected writer, but he has a critical mind. You tell a cop and they suspect murder. You know what I'm saying? You tell a writer and you back it up with real, sharp detail, and you might get somebody to believe in vampirism. So I turn to him not because he seems to be the most likely ally, but he might be the only person who will believe me.
Your chemistry with Rob Lowe in this miniseries is terrific.
Braugher: I enjoyed every second of doing it. I was a long way from home in Australia, but it turned out to be a really good project. I have to say I'm very pleased that it's precisely what I'd hoped for.
What was your biggest challenge with this production?
Braugher: Horror. I mean, it's a vampire tale. I need to believe myself. Do I believe what I think I believe? And so it becomes tricky in that way.
So it's grasping the material is a real live possibility?
Braugher: Yes, as a real live possibility. I mean, I can't say to you I think there're vampires living in L.A.
Not the kind with real fangs, or at least not the kind with fangs you can see.
Braugher: Right, you're talking about metaphorical vampires. You just can't talk about literal vampires without people thinking you're out of your mind. That you're either goofing on them or that you're really, genuinely insane. Because the vampires and the devil, and all of that stuff, belongs to an ancient, superstitious era, as far as we're concerned. Which is what makes the film most credible, because no one ... even the believers can't believe. It's impossible to believe in vampires. That's what makes this vampire tale work. Nobody believes.
And the smart person in the story is the authority figure who heads out of state to save his own skin.
Braugher: He's thinking, "I'm gonna play a little golf in Florida. There's nothing I can actually do about this. I'm not a vampire killer, you know. I'm not a hunter."
Salem's Lot is filled with lots of scary stuff, lots of tension. Lots of very suspenseful moments. What scares you?
Braugher: I was afraid you were going to ask that.
Well, I've got to ask that question!
Braugher: I don't have a better answer today than the many times I've been asked that question. I'm scared of the same things. I'm scared of the boogeyman. That's my only credible answer.
You've had an amazing career so far.
Braugher: Oh, I've been very fortunate.
You started with the civil war epic Glory. Am I right?
Braugher: In terms of film and television.
What a way to start your career!
Braugher: I know. I don't take it for granted. Believe me, I feel very, very fortunate to be associated with this material and these people in the course of my career.
What has surprised you most about your journey so far?
Braugher: What can I say? I've been surprised by the fact that I love great material, and when I see great material I'm willing to travel to the ends of the Earth to be involved with it. So Homicide came along, and I was willing to go wherever they wanted to. Baltimore? Yeah, if you're going to do it down there, great. Gideon's Crossing came along. You're going to do it in L.A.? I'm willing to go and do it.
Those were great characters.
Braugher: Incredible characters! But they're not common. I can't believe that characters like these are going to be right around the next corner. So when they arrive, I have to cling to them and invest myself in going where it's necessary to play these roles.
Do you see Matt Burke as one of those great characters?
Braugher: From the moment I closed the cover on the script, I knew I was going to be involved with it. That if he didn't make me an offer, I was going to make them an offer! I just wanted to be involved with it.
Throughout my career I've seen great material. Sometimes I've been available for it, and sometimes I haven't. But when I'm available for it, I leap on great material, because it's not common.
It appears you've been able to find it. You've made a career of playing these intense, wonderful characters. I've seen that pattern in your work. What draws you to that intensity? It can't be easy to get into the depths of these roles and then go home and be a dad.
Braugher: Well, I do. I have to say, I always leave my acting at work. Now, it's odd. Most people won't agree with this, or won't even believe it, but I don't do any work off the set. A lot of people say, "So when do you study your lines?" I say, I study my lines on the way to the set, I study my lines at the set, or whatever. But at work, I'm totally devoted to work, and at home I really drop it.
On hiatus, of course, when scripts come in, I'm reading scripts, and I'm talking to people, and doing business as usual. But when I did Hack, for example, I did entire scenes in two seasons of Hack, and I literally never opened a script anywhere else but on the set. There's downtime enough on a television show to get everything done that you actually need to get done. And for many years on Homicide, because I lived in Baltimore, I went home to play with my boys and eat dinner after the show, after we finished for the day. I never, never did work away from the set.
What it does for me is compartmentalize my artistic life away from my home life, my family life. It allows me to pick it up with gusto, and to drop it. Because I can only say to myself, if my call is 6 a.m. and we're off at, oh, I don't know, 8, 8:30, that's 14 hours. In that 14 hours, I'm going to get done everything that needs to be done in terms of working on my character, doing the job, reading the next script, making suggestions about this or that. Or having conversations with the director or the producers or the designers or the craftsmen on the show.
There's a lot of actors in Hollywood who can't make that distinction and may end up with more trouble in their personal life because of that.
Braugher: My wife's an actress, so we wind up talking about work, but I've never, or at least very rarely, said to my children, "Oh, Daddy can't do this, I'm reading a script." It doesn't happen. For example, my second son went off to school today at 9 a.m., and he's going to be back at 3:15, so basically everything that happens in my workday happens between 8:45, when I
drop him off, and 3:15, when he shows up. In those six and a half hours, I can accomplish basically everything that needs to be done.
And in that way, when he gets home he's looking for April Fool's jokes, or we're designing Halloween costumes, or all these other different things. Because the boys don't care. They don't care that Daddy's playing a serial killer this week. You know, don't bring it home. It's time to play Xbox or something. It's time to do this, or work on my homework, or whatever. My version of living simply is that I simply work at work and I simply am a father and a husband at home.
What is your process of getting into a character? Getting into a character's mind, and getting ready to play that character?
Braugher: I hold the mirror up to life. I start asking myself, basically, how are these things accomplished and what feelings and emotions are generated at each point during the course of the script, or during the course of the character's journey? I build it up, point by point. It's hard to talk about a process, because so much of it is intuitive now. What I try to do is put together for myself the most credible understanding of how a person could do and say these words during the course of an episode or a film. I look for what it is that makes this true and credible. Sometimes the search takes a long time to find something that's credible and interesting. I keep working at it.
What's been the hardest character for you to get into?
Braugher: Well, this Hack character has been difficult only because it's a similar formula from week to week. You know, kidnapped girl in basement, we have to find her. That sort of thing. But what happens typically is that act of thinking through how to come to a realization in the formula for Hack, the Olshansky character is typically right and the Washington character is typically wrong. So I find myself wrong on such a regular basis that I begin to ask myself, "How can I be a credible, brilliant detective when every week I'm wrong?" Do you understand what I'm saying? So I have to sometimes twist myself into a pretzel in order to get to the point where I'm still a very good detective, yet I could have come to this conclusion. I'm
trying to do this in a credible way, not just "Olshansky's partner is a doofus." How do we get to this point? But what I always have to realize is that on a show like Hack, which is not similar to Homicide, in which all the storylines continued and developed from week to week. Hack is basically a new episode every week. There are new characters. There are Adams
and Eves every week. None of these things have happened before. So it's a different feel in terms of an episode. On Homicide, in those six years, you saw six years pass.
I think your character on Homicide, Frank Pembleton, is one of the greatest characters ever portrayed on television.
Braugher: He is. He's a dynamite character. So aren't I fortunate? I could have been playing third psychic from left on some of these shows, and I get Frank Pembleton. You know what I mean?
When you were a child growing up, did you ever imagine that your life would turn out the way it has?
Braugher: No. The future is impossible to imagine. When I was a kid growing up in Chicago, there were no role models for black male actors. There was Sidney Poitier. There was Yaphet Kotto every once in a while. Bill Duke every once in a while. Harry Belafonte every once in a while. Cicely Tyson every, every once in a while. So when I told my father I wanted to become an actor he was not thrilled with this decision, because engineering and medicine would have proven to be lucrative. He was disappointed in that way, but he asked me a question that I had no answer to. He said, "Who can you point to as a role model for what it is that you're doing? Show me somebody who is successful in what it is that you're talking about doing." 'Cause he was serious. He's saying, "You're going to be an actor. What are you doing? Are you going to go around the country juggling? What do actors do?"
And those were probably good questions at the time.
Braugher: They were very good questions. My father is quite intuitive. He's like, "How are you going to earn a living at this? And are you actually suggesting that you're going to take a Stanford University education and squander it on this insane clown show that you've suggesting?" And I said, in essence, "Yes, because it's what makes me feel most alive." So he asked a question I didn't have any answer to. There was no Denzel Washington or Howard Rollins. There was nobody on the horizon other than Sidney Poitier and people who worked basically every third year. I was taking a tremendous chance, but I felt as though quite often you have to take chances, otherwise you don't enjoy the spoils. So that's what I did. I took a chance on a question that couldn't
be answered.
And surprised everybody.
Braugher: Including myself.
What if your children came up to you and said, "I want to be an actor"?
Braugher: I think it's great. You can go ahead and do it. What they're going to learn very quickly is that it's not a business for the thin-skinned. This is a business that you will receive overt real-time rejection on a regular basis. [When you write an article,] you've got an editor that comes in and says, "It's too long, and this is flabby and let me change this and
rewrite this." And the editor is the big villain. But on a regular basis an actor might have, let's say, two auditions in a week. You're going to go down there and you're going to receive real-time rejection. People take it personally. Of course, it's not personal.
That must be hard if you're being told your hair's the wrong color, you're too short, too fat, too thin, too whatever.
Braugher: It would be a blessing to receive that kind of feedback, but the real feedback is "Next!" You don't actually know what it is that's separating you from the winners and the losers. That's why this is such a mystifying business. Everyone's looking for "it." What is "it"? Everyone's trying to read the minds of the producers and the casting directors. Nobody knows. I don't know, and they don't know. Everybody's looking for something that's impossible to describe. And so I've made it my business to go in there and show them what I'm going to do with the role in real time, so that you're never in doubt. This is what Andre Braugher plans on doing with the role. Not "Andre Braugher's experimenting with the script and feeling it out." This is what I plan on doing with the role, and if you like this then you hire me, and if you don't like this then, "Next." So if my boys can take real-time rejection on a regular basis, then they are suited for this business.
And when they don't say "Next," what makes you want to take a role?
Braugher: Everything's on the script. That's what's so hard, is that when you deliver a script I'm going to yea or nay it from my perspective, based upon what you have down on the page. If you had the greatest people assembled, yet the script sucked, what decision can I possibly make except I don't want to be involved? Because we're doing this script. We're not doing our associations or our reputations or our heat or the A-list of stars that are involved. It's really, do we want to tell this story? And so we're always looking for our Chekhov and our Shakespeare, and we're looking for our brilliant playwrights for the stage or the film. We follow the playwrights. I do. And you can't go wrong following the playwrights.
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Also in this issue:
Richard K. Morgan
and
The cast and crew of The Chronicles of Riddick
