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Role on the other side of the law

Andre Braugher, a former Homicide detective, gets to show his stuff as a mastermind of high-yield heists who tries to keep family life separate.

By wire services
Published March 28, 2006

There's a problem with creating a classic TV character. Andre Braugher, who played zealous Detective Frank Pembleton on Homicide: Life on the Street , calls it the "Bob Denver effect."

Laugh if you want to. Braugher does. But he's serious. Since leaving the revered NBC crime series in 1998, Braugher has had good reason to fear he would end up a thinking person's Gilligan.

In other words, he has had a hard time putting the Pembleton image behind him.

Braugher hopes to do that with his new series, Thief, which premieres tonight on FX in the slot previously held by The Shield , another tough act to follow.

Braugher gets to show his stuff as Nick Atwater, criminal and family man.

On the job, Nick is a coolly methodical pro who masterminds high-risk, high-yield heists across the country. Meanwhile, he maintains a separate domestic life in New Orleans. (The pilot was shot there in summer 2004. With the season's five additional episodes scheduled to start production last September, days after Hurricane Katrina struck, Shreveport became New Orleans' stand-in.)

Then Nick's carefully managed world is upended.

From that moment, it's any viewer's guess where the story will go. And Braugher is pleased to take viewers there.

"I liked the man," Braugher says when asked why he signed to do the series. "Nick doesn't stick guns in people's faces, he doesn't violate their privacy or their safety. He steals from insurance companies and banks, which can afford it. At least, these are the rationalizations that allow him to do what he does. He's a better man than he might be. But he is a beast.

"I also liked the fact that his worlds are in collision: the straight life and his other existence as a thief. He has a fantasy that it's possible to live them both. But you can't have your cake and eat it, too.

"I wanted to be a part of all that," Braugher says, "because so often TV dramas are formulaic. And this one is as wacky and dangerous as life itself."

The role is the best to come Braugher's way since Pembleton. Week after week, the intense, intelligent, hard-driven Pembleton broke down Baltimore murder suspects in the interrogation room by using pure psychology. Braugher jokes about it now: "It's TV - you know what I'm saying? So quite often, one of my great complaints with Tom (Fontana, one of the writers and producers) was, "How come nobody ever wants a lawyer on these shows?"'

After Homicide, Braugher was cast as a doctor in the ABC drama Gideon's Crossing . It lasted one season.

Then came CBS's Hack, in which he played a supporting role as a dodgy cop. It, too, tanked in the ratings. So much for the major networks.

Offcamera, Braugher, 43, has been married for nearly 20 years to Ami Brabson, whom he met while they were studying drama at Juilliard (and who played Pembleton's wife on Homicide), and whom he describes as "the best thing to happen to me - period." The parents of three boys, ages 13, 8 and 3, they call home a New Jersey town far removed from show-biz hustle bustle.

"I think I'd work a little more if I lived in L.A.," Braugher says, grinning, "but my boss says we live in Jersey, so that's just the way it is." This is not the only time he affectionately speaks of Brabson as the boss.

What fuels that love for acting?

"It's an emotional release," he says. "Men are not usually forthcoming in the expression of their emotions.

"As an actor, I'm allowed - encouraged! - to explore emotions that have been basically unacceptable in my life. I have a huge well of emotional stuff, and once I give myself permission as an actor, it all comes to the surface. But (I can't) give myself permission to bring it out as a man.

"As a father, I've tried to encourage my children to have a broader and deeper emotional life than I've had. I want my sons to be able to express their feelings about things," he says, with feeling he seems fully able to express.

[Last modified March 28, 2006, 03:01:29]