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"The longer I’m here in Detroit," says actor Lennie James, "the more it fascinates me."
On a sunny afternoon, I’m sitting outside the Avalon Bakery on Willis, off Cass Avenue, with Lennie James, one of the main actors in the yet-to-air Detroit cop show called “Low Winter Sun.”
James, 47, an actor who grew up in South London and lives with his family in Los Angeles, camps out these days in a rented loft in the Wayne State University area, working about 5 1/2 days a week, 15 to 16 hours a day, as a cast member of the cop show that premiers Aug. 11 on AMC.
He’s no stranger to acting. Or Detroit for that matter. He played Charlie the pimp in the short-lived HBO series “Hung,” which was set here. He’s appeared in more than 20 movies, including “Snatch”, starring Brad Pitt, and more recently "Colombiana." And he’s played roles on TV series in the U.S. and Britain including “The Living Dead.”
In “Low Winter Sun,” he plays Joe Geddes, a Detroit homicide detective involved in a fellow cop's murder. The show is based on an award-winning 2006 British mini-series.
In a lengthy interview, James talks about the upcoming show, his impressions of Detroit, his favorite building, the DIA, the demise of the Atlas Bistro restaurant on Woodward, the Green Dot Stables restaurant on Lafayette Boulevard and whether the show will make Detroit look intriguing or scary to the nation.
“The longer I’m here in Detroit, the more it fascinates me," he says. " On one level, I’m excited about the place, at the same time I have some trepidation for the place. For what little I know, it still feels like it’s walking a tightrope.”
The following is a condensed transcript of the conversation. The questions were edited for clarity.
DD: You were a pimp in “Hung.” Did they film your parts of the show in Detroit?
James: No. we filmed it in East LA. But we would come to Detroit at some point during the season to film all significant exteriors.
DD: Had you been to Detroit before that?
James: No. I had not been to Detroit. But I grew up as a big Motown fanatic. My images of Detroit were the images that Motown was selling. The neighborhood where the business was and the projects where Diana Ross and all those guys and the Supremes and Martha Reeves came from.
DD: Did you have a favorite Motown artist?
James: Marvin Gaye all the way.
DD: Any particular songs?
James: “I heard it through the Grapevine” was the one I always used to sing in order to sound like him. But i liked ‘I’ll Be Doggone.”
DD: You have an English accent. Does that ever concern Hollywood that you’re going to fall out of it when playing an American, or concern you?
James: Yeah, I do. It’s something I’ve got to be mindful of all the time. It’s not something I take for granted. If it becomes an issue, which luckily it hasn’t. If it becomes an issue we do what we need to do to make it become less of an issue. Either they bring on a dialect coach...
DD: Have you had that before?
James: I’ve been in a situation, a particular American accent I was doing. I would work before I went and did the job in order to find the voice and find the accent of the character. So I worked with a dialect coach and in some circumstances I would have the dialect coach there while I was working to keep the accent going.
DD: Do you see any particular accent here in Detroit?
James: I’m always staggered. For me, it’s not just about the Detroit accent, it’s about the African American accent in Detroit. I’m always staggered by the urban accents in that kind of south-to-north passage, by how how much of the south it retains.
DD: On this show, what kind of accent do you have?
James: On this show who I try as much as possible to be true to is my character’s path through life. He’s a guy born and bred in Detroit but educated in Catholic school, who toyed with the idea of being a priest before becoming a police officer.
DD: You play a bad guy?
James: I’ve got no idea whether I play a bad guy. I don’t think about good guys and bad guys. That’s not how I get my job done. I play a police officer who commits a murder, and there’s good reason... along with another police officer. The series is about why that murder was committed and the reverberations both for the two officers who committed the crime, the homicide division, who are investigating the crime and the underworld of Detroit. And that’s the story of “Low Winter Sun.”
My character . . . he can either go deeper into the situation that he’s found himself in or . . . he can try and scramble his way back to redemption. He needs to release himself and he chooses to do that by killing him. Whether that makes him a good man or a bad man, that’s up to somebody else to decide.
DD: You have much contact with Ira Todd, the Detroit Police officer who is a consultant for the show?
James: Ira is really helpful. Sometimes there’s a misunderstanding of what actors need when they are doing their research. It’s not always about the information that Ira gives. Sometimes it’s about the way he says it, the attitude he has about certain things. That can be as useful as the piece of information that he’s giving. He’s been exceptionally generous and incredibly useful.
DD: Does this role make you want to be a cop?
James: I have these varying degrees of admiration and whatever the opposite of admiration is for police officers. I think it’s a really really hard job.
DD: You’ve gotten to drive around the city and see a lot of contrasts. Does this city make for good filming?
James: I suspect it helps in the story that we’re telling. In the story that we’re telling, Detroit is very much a character. And that’s not just kind of a blasé statement. Chris Mundy, the main writer, says the story of “Low Winter Sun” is about redemption. And I think to a greater or lesser extent, in broad terms, it is the story of Detroit for what little I know.
I haven’t been here nearly long enough to speak with any kind of authority, but what little I know, this story of Detroit could be told as a story of redemption. It is a city that’s coming back, let’s just say from an unfortunate kind of past on a number of levels. And we use that. So we use the devastation of Detroit and how derelict it is. But also how lush and beautiful and how it contrasts.
You hear a lot about how many people have left Detroit and how people scattered. You don’t hear nearly as much about the people who stayed. And the people who had the option. The idea you’re mostly fed is that the people who stayed were the people who didn’t have an option but to stay. I regularly meet people in Detroit who had the option to leave but chose to stay.
The longer I’m here in Detroit, the more it fascinates me. On one level, I’m excited about the place, at the same time I have some trepidation for the place. For what little I know, it still feels like it’s walking a tightrope.
DD: Your sense of the show: Are you optimistic?
James: I think we’ve got a crackling idea. I think we’ve got a fantastic writers room. I think we’ve got a really really fantastic cast and crew. I think people are doing really good jobs. I saw the first episode and it certainly translated on the screen.
Having said that, it doesn’t really matter how good we are, because we’re not going to be making the decision. I can never really second guess the mindset of the executives or networks.
DD: Since you’ve been here, what is it that has been the most surprising?
James: I can’t get over, however much I try . . . driving past burned-out houses after destroyed house after abandoned house, next to burned-out house next to a row upon row of derelict house next to a gap of a lot where there are no houses and then there’s a pristine beautiful large house and it may well be either one of three houses left on seven blocks or it might be one of three houses right next to each other. They stayed and everything else is gone.
And I don’t think how ever long I’m here that that is ever going to do anything less than stagger me. We were filming in a place yesterday and it’s a lovely family of four generations. It was a great grandmother, grandmothers, mothers and son and daughters that we saw. They have four houses next door to each other on a road where virtually every other house is gone or abandoned or burned out or collapsed. and they’re there and the houses are beautifully kept, on a road that is just vanquished. in a neighborhood that just seems abandoned.
We started filming there half past 9 in the morning and finished at 1 o clock at night. And you come onto the streets and the lights have literally been turned off on the street. There’s no street lighting. The only lighting along the streets is what’s coming from the houses. And there were very few houses.
I find it surprising when you can drive half an hour up the freeway and your at Lake Orion and it’s just a completely different world, which I did last weekend. I was like “Wow, am I still on the same planet?” And quite obviously I wasn’t, and but quite obviously I was. I was just on the next planet along.
DD: You’re living in midtown, in the Wayne State area in a loft. How do you like that?
James: Love it. It’s kind of a cool neighborhood. My building seems to have a really good mix of professionals and artists and kind of entrepreneurs. There’s head barmen of restaurants around town. My next door neighborhood is a doctor working in infectious diseases. One of the guys who lives in building is “Tony Detroit.” He’s a photographer. He does fantastic photographs of kind of derelict buildings that he takes on his iPhone and then dresses them up and makes beautiful art. They’re kind of cool, happening people who have moved back to the city and are trying to reclaim the territory.
"The DIA was mind-boggling -- the quality and the variety and breadth of art they’ve got there was really beautiful."
DD: If you had to name some of your favorite places you’ve found so far, what would they be?
James: I like Avalon. It’s kind of a cool place. It feels to me that it’s a place that the community comes to. I really enjoyed the Atlas Bistro. It was a very cool place. I liked the bar, I liked the menu. I liked the cross section of people that were there. I liked what it was trying to say about Detroit and the possibilities of Detroit and I’m really sorry it’s gone.
I hope it comes back in some place. Those two would be my favorite places. We went down the other day to the Green Dot Stables. I really enjoyed myself there. I think it’s really a simple, reasonable idea that they’re doing really well. Both times that I’ve been there they’ve been busy. So it was good to see that.
DD: Any other spots besides restaurants?
James: I like the African American Museum. The people are really cool, They made me laugh. I think their exhibition is stunning. I went with two of my daughters and there were a lot of kids there. I think that was fantastic. I think the DIA was mind-boggling -- the quality and the variety and breadth of art they’ve got there was really beautiful.
DD: Are you surprised to see a art like that in a city like this?
James: I’m surprised that they held onto it. It reminds me, in a weird, way, along with lots of other things like the ballpark and your sports teams and all that. It’s another thing that reminds of Detroit of what it was and what it can be again. And I think the DIA does that. Just the building that it’s in.
One of my favorite spots is the art deco building (the Guardian). I love that. That’s a staggering building. I like going down there and grabbing a coffee. It’s almost cathedral like. You walk in and you feel like you want to be hushed. And I like that a lot. One of the things that surprised me about Detroit was just the size and beauty of the old buildings. A lot of them are empty or semi-empty, but they’re here. How ever much people say, once upon a time Detroit was the second or the third or the first richest city in America; You don’t really get a sense of that until you come here and see the buildings.
DD: Do you think when people watch the show they’ll develop a fascination for Detroit or the opposite?
James: Patrick, who is our cinematographer, who shoots it . . . I think he’s shooting Detroit beautifully. I think he’s making Detroit look like some place that people might want to come to even though we’re telling a dark and dangerous story. I don’t think we’re doing anything that’s going to put people off about Detroit. I think we’re trying as much as we possibly can within the story that we’re telling to try and give a realistic depiction of this city as we can.
DD: Are people surprised to hear your real accent?
James: I had one occasion where a guy came up to me in the street and was very excited to meet, “Oh my god, oh my god I love you.” And he walked up to me and I said “that’s very kind of you (in English accent) and he said “oh no, sorry brother, I thought you were the guy on TV. I’m so sorry.” I didn’t have the heart to call him back. The moment he heard me being English, he thought it was somebody else. But it happens quite a lot, where people do a double-take.
I was out shopping the other day. And a guy said “Where do I know you from? “ I said ‘I don’t know.” We met at the checkout and he went ‘I know where it is, it was in “Colombiana.” “I did not know who you were because you got that funny voice going on.” That happens quite a lot.
DD: Do you get recognized a lot here?
James: I do. I’m always surprised. A lot of the time, fame can be kind of death of an actor. I don’t want people see me in the roles I’m playing and thinking about Lennie and what underwear he wears or what club he was at last night. Or what drink he likes or who he’s been messing about with.
DD: Does it matter if you’re perceived as a good guy or a bad guy on screen?
James: Not all all. I like playing characters, as I phrase it, that have kind of internal dilemmas. I like guys who are trying to do good but bad comes out the other end. Or trying to engaged in something bad and have moments of clarity but also moments of doubt and confusion. And this is very much one of those guys.
Charlie the pimp on HBO's "Hung."
