Words matter. These are the best Wendell Pierce Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
At Julliard we had some voice classes. It was really just so you could carry a tune. It always just helps with your speaking voice also, when you connect your diaphragm and your breath.
Ultimately, I would love to do ‘The Emperor of Ocean Park’ by Stephen Carter.
The key, I always thought, to my career would be diversity – a diversity of not only the type of work that you do but the mediums.
Coming out of school, sometimes people can be theater snobs. I only wanted to do theater, highbrow stuff. But what I learned very quickly is there can be good material in every genre.
I worked at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, lived there for three years, and lived in Baltimore for 12 years.
I would love to see a real story about Fred Hampton.
The world, post-Katrina, was a hard time for my city. The hardest time. For people who didn’t live through it, no words can fully express the pain, the rage, the grief, and the futility we New Orleanians felt. For the people who did, words seemed like a feeble protest against a relentless night without end.
It was really great to also see the response that people were having to ‘Treme’ ’cause you’re in a vacuum when you’re on a TV show. You see the response online, you read about it and all of that, but actually to be live and have that many thousands of fans come out, it’s really wonderful.
I went to Beijing for the Olympics and was literally right across the track from Usain Bolt. And when he gets to full stride, for every two steps the other guy’s taking, he’s just taking one.
My mother was a teacher for 40 years. She was part of the United Teachers of New Orleans.
Gregory Hines was the most talented man I’ve ever met or seen. Gregory Hines is one of those people that whenever he talked to you, you felt like you were the center of the universe.
The NFL is such a large, multibillion dollar enterprise with fan loyalty because they have provided not only entertainment for sports fans, but memories, good memories, family memories to these fans, that can only bring about good will.
I tell people all the time: get some training and become a student of your craft.
Be your true self. Because if you’re not, there are consequences to be paid.
My father was so against me becoming an actor.
Culture is the intersection of people and life itself. It’s how we deal with life, love, death, birth, disappointment… all of that is expressed in culture.
One of the real worries I had before the first season of ‘Treme’ aired was that, man, people in New Orleans really hold movie and television shows up to a high standard in how they depict the city.
The role of culture is that it’s the form through which we as a society reflect on who we are, where we’ve been, where we hope to be.
When a sports team is doing well in a city that’s going through tough times like New Orleans, like Detroit, it bolsters this real sentiment of ‘we can get through this.’ And when you have that sentiment, it becomes more than feelings: It’s transported into action.
I trained at Juilliard so that I could do all kinds of genres, so that’s what I’m trained to do.
We always see abhorrent behavior and say why, but then we get mad when somebody tries to answer.
In our house, my dad had a chair. It was a Barcalounger, big and comfortable. If we missed him or wanted comfort when he wasn’t home, we’d just climb into the chair and let it envelop us.
In 1974, when the city of Boston was desegregating its schools, I watched the news with my dad and saw the police escorts in riot gear, the protesters screaming at the buses, small frightened faces in their windows.
David Simon is a brilliant writer, brilliant at being able to take what is ordinary and make it extraordinary.
Juilliard gave me the ability to go and do classical, contemporary, comedy, drama, everything.
