The might of right

By GREG DIXON

It was, she confesses, a most unusual audition. When actress C. C. H. Pounder went to read for a role in the cool, violent, anti-cop show The Shield, she did something few actresses can claim to have done. She auditioned for a bloke's part.

This is rather hard to imagine, given the pivotal place Pounder's Detective Claudette Wyms has in the show's netherworld of bad cops and worse criminals. But it is, she swears, the truth.

"It was a really strange way to get a role. But I'd worked with Clark Johnson, who directed the pilot, on an HBO television film called Boycott and he was just a wonderful director. I said to him, 'I don't care what you're doing next, I want to work with you.' He called and said in the next thing there's only one girl, a blonde, and eight or nine guys.

"My agent said you can be one of those guys, get on in there. The guy was an old man and I went and read it. They were looking for a particular kind of guy heading towards retirement and for some reason they hadn't seen him. So when I came in, it just completely changed their minds. So in fact I got the role of the guy, I just had to make it my own."

No argument Pounder has done that. In a show where the male lead — Michael Chiklis' Detective Vic Mackey — is a repellent-yet-mesmerising study in duplicity, corruption and moral bankruptcy, Pounder's Wyms is equally absorbing as the show's tough moral centre. Though morality, she agrees, is a relative commodity in The Shield's world of greys.

So the uncompromising Wyms was literally an afterthought for the show's writers and producers. A male character grown, in some weird organic process, into a woman but with dialogue and an attitude that remains, in many senses, male.

"She was one of those sneaky women who you don't realise she's going to get a hold of you. I said to writers that I'd like them to keep the writing the way it was. That gives the opportunity to establish pretty fast that Claudette has been there, she's a veteran, she's one of the guys, don't mess with her. I wanted that feeling that she'd already gone through the fire."

Pounder is herself a veteran. The stage-trained actress has a career that now stretches 27 years across the stage and the small and silver screens, including numerous guest appearances on quality shows like LA Law and The West Wing, four seasons as ER's Dr Angela Hicks and a memorable movie performance in the 80s art house hit, Bagdad Cafe. She also has an Emmy-nomination to her name for a short-term role on The X-Files.

Curiously, however, this respected, and very American, character actor has strange English inflections dotting her warm, melodious speech. They are, it turns out, the remains of schooling in England. The Guyana-born 50-year-old — whose C. C. H. appellation contracts Carol Christine Hilaria into something more memorable — went to England first before moving to the US as a teenager in 1970s, where she enrolled in upstate New York's Ithaca College to study theatre.

And it is theatre that is still her preference. She calls it her revenge and reward.

"It's thrilling because you get the immediate reaction. But film and television are both the same in that you do your best and in no parts of it are you in control of it because somebody else snips and splices it. So you're never quite sure what you're going to get: it's sheer fate. But you have it. I could be 110 and it will still be there. So it has a history to it. I like the classics and I hope that I've made a couple of classics."

In the often below-par province of American TV writing and performance, Wyms is already that. But Pounder reveals a modest streak in dishing out credit for this.

"She's truly written. It's not like the actor has to go what am I going to do with this? It's there on the page. That's a compliment to [writer and executive producer] Shawn Ryan for doing that."

Ryan deserves her applause and ours. In a sense he has created a show that is something altogether different from traditional American TV drama. Whereas so many Yank shows about cops, docs and lawyers paint their worlds in monochromatic shades, with good and evil clearly defined, The Shield's scary realm has the ambiguity of the real world.

"Even the good people are not good every single day of their lives. I don't mean that in the sense that now and again they go and shoot someone. They bend the rules. The bad people, who are really horrendous, have moments of such humanity and tenderness that you can't understand how it can be the same guy.

"Our show reminds me of those newspaper articles where someone has murdered like 25 people, sliced them up, put them in the fridge and all their neighbours say he was such a lovely, quiet man, I'm shocked.

"This is so much more of the America that we don't talk about, that we don't wish to deal with."

Quite how that plays in George W. Bush's for-us-or-against-us America, in a country that now has a law called the Patriots Act, is hard to gauge at this distance. Certainly the show, which is into its third season there, is a hit. Pounder believes that The Shield's wilfully confused moral-ethical stew is timely.

"I think the audience is tired of being pandered and catered to in the sense of lowest common denominator and let's-make-everything-happy-by-the-end-of-the-hour. It hasn't been happening in our real life society for years. "I'm really shocked that so many people come up to me in the streets and say why don't you just leave [Mackey] alone, he's a good man," she says laughing.

"I'm kind of like, you've got to be kidding. Then there's a whole other group asking when are you going to get him?"

Personally Pounder loves Mackey, the violent rogue cop who's also the caring family man.

"The shortcuts that he takes are immoral shortcuts. But people say it's a means to an end. I think that people like to think that's possible.

"He's incredibly complicated. It's fascinating to watch a character like Mackey.

"I always say he was a man who wasn't given a lot of tools to work with but the tools he's got he's putting them to the best use he knows how. In other words, he tends not to think before he acts. He's an irrational and emotional man."


She gives full credit to Chiklis for creating such a memorable monster — "he doesn't judge the character" — but ask her what it's like acting around a performance as dominating as Chiklis' Emmy-award-winning turn and she becomes ever so slightly defensive.

"It's a dominating performance but it's not necessarily the strongest. It's very hard for other people to see that. I know it's not the strongest.

"I believe that Claudette is the strongest, the most powerful character there in the sense of being on the side of right. And I have to believe that to play her. Mackey's a character who is weak and flamboyant. I believe he is the flashiest — and all bad guys have always been far more interesting."