Andre Royo is a Long Way From Baltimore
One of my favorite pieces of journalism from 2015 was a profile of Andre Royo, who you probably know best “just” as Bubbles from The Wire for Maxim. With his own show, Hand of God, premiering on Amazon Prime, and a recurring role on Fox’s buzzy new Empire, Royo was poised to finally break free from the pedestal-placing, yet limiting role he once occupied. We went shoe shopping, we brunched hard, we spent a lot of time talking about racial politics on television for actors of color. It was excellent.
(A housekeeping note: This ran on Maxim.com on September 4, 2015 here; Maxim updated their CMS and the link is temporarily dead, which is why I’m resharing in full here. You can see Royo’s tweets about the article here and here. If you’re reading this to review my clips and want details, I can direct you to my editors at Maxim.)
“I just think it would be incredibly cool to have a daughter who’s a lesbian, you know?”
Andre Royo pokes through an assortment of Jeremy Scott Adidas at sneakerhead mecca, Drip Hollywood, zeroing in on a gilded pair of sneakers with lightning bolt wings attached to either side. He waves them towards me for approval, then dismisses them before I can even reply.“I’m already wearing these, and mine look better.” His zebra print and color-blocked pastel Adidas Wings did, admittedly, look excellent.
“I’m sorry,” I answer. “You want your daughter to be a lesbian because it would be cool…for you?”
“No, no, no. I don’t want my daughter to be a lesbian because it’s cool, I want her to be a lesbian because if she comes home dating a six-foot jock, there’s not really much I can do about it. I’m not that tall. But a lesbian? She’s not getting pregnant. Her girlfriend won’t fight me.”
He briefly ponders a monstrous sneaker adorned with a plush teddy bear, before turning back to me, deadpan. “And, you know, also because being a lesbian is cool.”
He continues to wind his way through the all-white futuristic display case, as an older Russian woman sifting through a nearby rack of sweatpants exerts exactly the least effort possible to pretend she didn’t hear Royo hypothesizing on the trendiness of his teenage daughter’s sexuality. In a space not much bigger than a shipping container, Royo has already canvassed the room twice, while running through his feelings on homosexuality (for), smartphones (against, he still uses a flip phone), and the love shack he used to run as a teenager (“The best!”). And we’ve only been shopping for three minutes.
His natural presence — equal parts ebullient and equal parts manic — is reminiscent of someone Royo knows all too well: Bubbles, the iconic drug-addicted informant he played for five seasons on HBO’s The Wire. The problem is, that’s the last person Royo wants to be. Seven years after the show wrapped, many stars on the Baltimore drama have found themselves in a pattern of booking roles not at all dissimilar to ones they played on The Wire. Now, Royo is facing a new chapter of his career with Hand of God, which premieres on Amazon on September 4th.
He turns to me, already done looking at shoes. “Do you want to go get a little hair of the dog? Knock back some drinks?”
It’s 11:30 AM on a Wednesday. So we go.
As I learned earlier in the week, tell anyone that Bubbles from The Wire is a sneakerhead and you two are going shopping for kicks, and you’re instantly the coolest girl in school. This was further evidenced when Royo and I grab lunch. As she seats us, our incredibly kind, incredibly hoarse hostess can’t stop gushing to Royo about how much she and her boyfriend love The Wire.
Before Royo can thank her, a manager scurries over and shoos her away, reminding her that she’s not allowed to speak to customers. “Sorry,” he says, turning to us. “She just had vocal cord surgery and could really damage her throat if she speaks, but she’s just such a huge fan.”
That’s the kind of staying power Royo’s pitch-perfect heroin addict/police informant has over fans: they’d sacrifice vocal cords to speak to him. While the visibility has always been positive, that kind of unyielding fan attachment to one character can quickly feel suffocating, especially when you’re a black actor who’s been forced into a niche of playing incarcerated felons or drug addicts (and sometimes both).
“I’ve always had to prove to people that I can be more than a junkie,” said Royo about his role as Mayor Robert ‘Bobo’ Boston in Hand of God, alongside Sons of Anarchy’s Ron Perlman and Body of Proof’s Dana Delany. The show follows a judge (Perlman) who has a mental breakdown and believes God is commandeering him to dole out vigilante justice.
“At first, they didn’t even want to see me. They didn’t think I could play a mayor. I did my thing, I did my little hustle, and I found [Hand of God creator] Ben Watkin’s cell phone number. I called him and said, ‘Yo, holla at your boy. Let me get in that room.’ And I got in the room and killed the audition.”
After Hand of God, Royo will have a recurring guest role on Fox’s brilliantly campy Empire this fall as Thirsty Rawlings, the lawyer to Terrence Howard’s yet-incarcerated Lucious Lyons.
When I ask him whether working alongside Howard and Taraji P. Henson is a master class in acting, he takes a minute, and it’s here that Royo’s Bronx-bred swagger falters. “I had a crazy feeling when I came in, because I’m a new guy. But then again, I am the guy from The Wire, so I do have a tiny bit of legitimacy.”
“It’s more of a master class in preparation,” he admits. “Taraji is going 100 miles per hour. If you’re good, you can jump in and play, but if you’re not, fall back, wait for your turn. Howard, he’s a veteran, Oscar-nominated motherfucker. He does it a different way. He’ll look at you with those pretty goddamn eyes and say, ‘You forgot your line, didn’t you?’ He commands the space by not doing much.”
Royo moves on to what arguably has been the most terrifying part of shooting Empire in Chicago: the weather. “It’s my first time in Chicago, and I’m loving it,” he says. “I’m in the Gold Coast, right next door to a lake with a beach. But Chicago people, they know I’m not from here. They’ll come up to me and ask, ‘Are you having a good time?’ and I tell them, ‘Yeah, man! Loving it! Chicago is great!’ And they always go ‘Winter. Is. Coming.’ I feel like I’m on Game of Thrones.’”
Spend five minutes with Royo and it’s easy to see his talents were being wasted playing nearly identical prison informant roles on three different franchises of Law & Order. He’s of a shrinking breed of natural performer; a skill evident as he recounts the story of the time he told Marc Maron about the teenage loveshack he used to run for neighborhood kids.
“I’d make up those rooms, I’d feed people hot, fresh Steak-Umms sandwiches when they were done. I’d listen at the door! ‘Oh they’re done? Time to go fry up a Steak-Umms,’” he recounts of his time on Maron’s podcast. In exchange for his…innkeeping, Royo received protection from older, more popular neighborhood kids. And from the less popular ones? “I’d join in. I was a freaky little kid. I’d watch and tell them, ‘You’re not doing it right. Move. I got this.’”
“I wasn’t mean, I was just wild,” he says. “I didn’t want to be boxed in by the rules.”
Now, he’s the father of a high schooler himself. He laments his teenage daughter’s lack of neighborhood friends, blaming (what else?) Snapchat, FaceTime, and social media; he does admit with a tinge of pride however, that there are more shows than ever featuring black and Latino actors and actresses for her to watch — a rarity when he was her age. “The climate has changed so much. Our culture [black culture] has integrated so much with American culture. Hip-hop is everything. Our look is everything. We can confidently say we’re part of American culture.”
I ask him if he ever has a hard time reconciling that black culture is being appropriated piecemeal, while seemingly recurrent shootings and riots keep happening in city after city to African-American citizens.
He sighs and leans back. “Yes. Yes, yes, yes. It makes me uncomfortable. I’ve been chasing one goal my whole life. I’ve wanted to be an actor and have a platform, but I’ve never thought about what to do with it. But now I have a daughter and while I do look at my TV and say, ‘Shit, they got black people everywhere now!’ I look at my daughter and go, ‘Holy shit, black people are getting shot all over the place.’ It feels like the world, or rather, the powers that be are saying, ‘If you’re going to take over our televisions and our culture, we’re going to let you know in the streets that we still fucking hate you.”
“But it is a confusing duality that we’re dealing with; where we see successes, but a lot of injustice at the same time. I’m not sure how to deal with it.” He points to a case earlier this year – the riots that erupted in the wake of Baltimore man Freddie Gray’s death as a result of unnecessary police force during arrest – as one such example of not wanting to step into the fray until he knew where he stood.
After Royo sent out a single tweet during the riots sending support to Baltimore alongside a request for “discipline not destruction,” his message was picked up by multiple major news organizations, alongside headlines such as “Cast Members From ‘The Wire’ Plead for End to Violence in Baltimore. “I didn’t plead for anything…I got the little machine, I can say something. But I’m not going to be on the news when I’m not well-versed enough on what’s going on.”
Before we can linger on the thought, Royo is off again, bouncing onto a tangent of how I can improve my dating life by turning his wife’s restaurant, Canele in Atwater Village, into my regular date spot.
Sufficiently tipsy enough to give Drip another try, we meander back up the street, loudly debating Royo’s newest role: roller derby dad. He admits that when he told his daughter she could pick any sport she wanted to play, he didn’t expect her to pick one based on an Ellen Page movie, much less one that involved skating around in fishnet tights with risqué nicknames emblazoned on her shirt. “I swear to god, there’s a girl in her league whose nickname is ‘Cum Bucket.’ I don’t know where that girl’s parents are, but I will say this, Cum Bucket has been having an excellent season.”
Back in the store, we briefly peruse a wall of running shoes where Royo tries on a classic Nike running sneaker, but everything feels too athletic and we’re two people who had just eaten Umami burgers and boozed, all before noon. We head back to the wall of Jeremy Scott Adidas, looking for something with a little more flash. He pushes me to squeeze my toes into a child-sized pair of Space Jam Air Jordan 5’s (no luck), while he circles through a few more Jeremy Scott options and points out a pair of gold-splattered Adidas Superstar wedge sneakers for me to try on. We ultimately both go with our metallic Adidas, but not before Royo is recognized two more times for the role he’ll never fully eclipse.
Before we part ways, Royo makes me promise that I’ll come have wine with him and his wife at her restaurant one day soon. “We’re friends now, I’m not just Bubbles from The Wire!” he admonishes. He’s right, he’s not just Bubbles. But where Royo’s second act will take him — both on screen and off — remains an open road. Either way?
“The foot is on the gas, man,” Royo purred. “The foot is on the gas and we’re going one hundred miles an hour.”
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