Cut! Calling the shots
With the final season of the hard-hitting drama The Shield about to start on Five, Sony Magazine catches up with CCH Pounder, who plays Captain Claudette Wyms, and series creator Shawn Ryan
The Rampart scandal of the late 1990s revealed widespread corruption in the LAPD’s anti-gang unit, known as Crash (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums), which was part of the Rampart division. Loosely based on the Crash team,
The Shield centres on a group of renegade LAPD cops known as the Strike Team. Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) and his squad deal drugs, kill rival dealers, indulge in armed robbery and kidnapping, and put a lot of very bad guys behind bars, leaving the viewer enthralled, appalled, and morally disorientated.
Vic’s nemesis is Claudette Wyms. Middle aged, lonely and single-minded, Claudette, played by CCH Pounder, is a strange mixture of idealism and ruthless pragmatism. At times, she encourages the worst of Vic’s excesses if she believes his methods will hasten an arrest. Mostly though, she plots to bring the Strike Team down.
What drew you to the part of Claudette? My attraction was the director, Clark Johnson. I had done a film with him called Boycott and I was amazed by all the unexpected things he would have us do. I begged him, ‘Please, let me work with you again!’ The next thing he did involved seven guys and a blonde! Later my agent said, ‘Why have you turned it down?’ I said, ‘It’s seven guys and a blonde.’ She replied, ‘So why can’t you be one of the guys?’ Directors get stuck with what you look like and not who you could play. Oh she’s African-American, she’s over 30, she can play only these parts. So I went for the part of a male detective.
You auditioned for a male part? Yes, I did a half-butch, half-female audition. But I used the original words. I said, imagine a woman working in an all-male environment who has to be one of them.
The Shield was so different, so brutal, that no one believed it would go beyond a single season. So they were like, ‘What the heck, let’s give it a go.’ But by season two, Claudette had changed so many dynamics within the show, even without changing the words. Things that Vic would have done to a man he couldn’t do to Claudette.
The Shield has been described as the ultimate post 9/11 show. Do you agree?Well, it does reflect something of that feeling of horror George Bush and Dick Cheney left some Americans with. Vic certainly has this ‘ends justifies the means’ thing. And the times we are living in have bred this super-breed of ‘I’m doing it my way’ individualists. Just look at Jack Bauer, or Jason Bourne, or even the new James Bond. At least with Vic,
The Shield is continuously questioning that.
Despite the strong female roles, lots of women regard The Shield as a man’s show. How do you feel about that? I have sympathy with that point of view. I only fell in love with
The Shield maybe a year-and-a-half later. Although some of it is tough to deal with, the writing is incredibly compelling.
Does Claudette’s opinion of Vic harden? Harden? If anything, she becomes more tolerant because the world around her has hardened horribly. I guess if you were to pin her down she would say that in an ideal world we would not need Vic Mackeys, but then in a truly ideal world there would be no crime.
Were you aware of the Rampart connection? Of course.
The Shield was originally called Rampart but they weren’t allowed to use the name. Vic is the embodiment of Rampart. Here is a person who is part of a profession that protects and serves and is therefore afforded extraordinary privileges. And he abuses them in the most terrible ways. Yet people turn a blind eye because of the amazing work that he has done and the connections that he’s made. But, and you get to see this in the final season, when things start to unravel, it is remarkable how quickly they do. And that is what happened to the cops in Rampart.
Story by Ben Marshall The final season of The Shield,
from Sony Pictures Television International, airs on Five from February. The Shield Season 6
is available now as a three-disc DVD boxset
This is an edited version of the interview with CCH Pounder. To read the full story, subscribe to Sony Magazine
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