27-02-2025
The Wire's Clarke Peters on ‘absurd' colour-blind casting: ‘I wouldn't want to see Dominic West play Idi Amin'
Clarke Peters has the sort of career that would be implausible in fiction. He played one of the most crucial characters in one of the greatest TV dramas ever made – the quietly brilliant detective Lester Freamon in The Wire. He wrote the musical Five Guys Named Moe. He's starred in Guys and Dolls at the National and Chicago on Broadway; he's played Othello several times. He was the principled police chief in the garlanded Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. He even appeared on a succession of top 10 hits in the mid-70s…
That's his deep bass singing 'Oh give me love' on Joan Armatrading's Love and Affection, and 'Got to keep on dancing' on Heatwave's disco classic Boogie Nights, and even the 'bom bom bom' on Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel's Mr Soft.
'Oh brother,' he says with a sigh, when I ask him how much the world has changed since those far-off, free-love days. 'It might be because I was younger then, and we were all children coming out of the Sixties, carrying with us some blissful idea of how we wanted the world to be. [But] it is unrecognisable.'
He's just flown back from the States where he's been shooting The Boroughs, the under-wraps Netflix project from Stranger Things creators the Duffer brothers. The 72-year-old plays, as he puts it, 'a dope-smoking, spiritually-seeking retiree who's been in his relationship for the past 40 years, and nothing is exciting… until things begin to get exciting,' He says he was 'resistant' at first to taking on a major TV series that might run and run like The Wire. 'I had the feeling that I was going to be chasing monsters for the next five years, and I just don't feel like chasing monsters when I'm 80 years old.' But it's not like that, he insists. 'It's been fun.'
We're just about to see him, too, in a new adaptation of Agatha Christie's 1944 novel Towards Zero. You won't find the crime writer in his bookcase, he admits, but his wife Penny is a fan, so he's been happy to take on another Christie after his 2015 role in Partners in Crime (alongside Jessica Raine and David Walliams). In this one, he plays a family lawyer, Mr Treves – 'He's a paternal character, and so am I' – who delivers the three-part drama's key speech: 'I like a good detective story… But, you know, they begin in the wrong place! They begin with the murder. No, no, no… the murder is the end. The story begins long before…'
It's almost word for word as the novelist wrote it. And whereas recent Christie adaptations have been criticised for taking the concept of updating way too far, even changing the identity of the murderer, Towards Zero sticks lovingly to the feel of a classic Christie, even if it does introduce some slightly older vernacular and adds a very racy scene on Lady Tressilian's grand staircase. 'Racy is an understatement,' says Peters, slipping into Treves's magisterial tones. 'It was downright pornographic!' He laughs. 'The older I get, the more prudish I become, you know, and the more conservative in some respects.'
He exudes great warmth. When I wonder if he'd tell me a little about his Mr Treves, he tilts his head knowingly, and says, 'You tell me about your Mr Treves.' He knows that there are those who will question his casting, and he raises the concept of colour-blind casting later. 'I think you have to really be particular about how you do that, I wouldn't want to see [his fellow The Wire alumnus] Dominic West play Idi Amin for example, and it would be absurd for that to happen.'
But he feels different rules apply to historical drama than to fiction such as whodunits. 'It's a story,' he says. 'I would not exist in Agatha Christie's world in that role – that doesn't mean that there were not black barristers or black lawyers, there were, but she was not a party to those people, and therefore would find it difficult to fit a character like myself into her narrative.'
He applies a similar fine lens to the of-its-time racism that has been excised in at least one recent publishing. Yes to excising racism, sexism and classism for a contemporary TV audience, he says, but not to changing the original texts, 'I don't think that you want to erase that, because when you begin erasing history, you wind up where most people in the diaspora from Africa are now; not knowing their history.' Modernising the books for television to make them more accessible to younger audiences is a good thing, he suggests, 'as long as we don't throw away the past.'
Towards Zero looks back to a time before the Second World War. 'I'm familiar with the era, because I've done lots of period things,' Peters says. His British accent, he admits, 'was my main concern, that it was plausible.' In one mildly surreal moment, he found himself sitting on a bed opposite fellow American Anjelica Huston as Lady Tressilian, both playing Brits. 'I was starstruck. I was like, 'Oh, it's you, and you've got a really weird accent.'' For his own, he was channelling an old friend, the broadcaster and stage director Ned Sherrin. The two met in the 1970s, when Peters moved to London after getting his start in show business on a production of Hair in Paris.
Peters was born in 1952 and grew up Peter Clarke in Englewood, New Jersey, the second of four sons. His father was a draftsman and his mother a clerical worker. 'I was at school with John Travolta and the Isley Brothers' Ernie and Marvin,' he told the Big Issue in 2016. 'Ben E King lived round the corner, Dizzy Gillespie up the hill.' He was bitten by the acting bug early, abandoning thoughts of becoming a minister in the Episcopal church. As a teenager, he was arrested for protesting against the Vietnam War.
Since then, he has lived and worked in Britain for many years. He's a twice-married father of five, who suffered the agony of losing his four-year-old son Guppy to cancer in 1992. His youngest son Max once played the young Michael Jackson on stage. Has Peters reassessed the singer since the Leaving Neverland documentary? 'I have no idea whether Michael was a paedophile or not,' he says, 'but I do know he was weird.'
Recently, he has given memorable performances as a caretaker who comes under suspicion of child abduction in Netflix's Eric and a former SAS operative in Channel 4's Truelove, which explored an assisted suicide pact between a group of retirees. The series aired 10 months before the assisted dying bill was passed in parliament and, Peters says, it was an issue the cast discussed in depth. 'First of all, life is to be lived, and if you can live it to its fullest, even if you are incapacitated in some way, there's still so much more to explore,' he insists. 'And I think this is part of society becoming more myopic, that we don't share all of the options that are available to human beings.' But he adds: 'If a friend of mine was on life support, and they are suffering, and they say, 'Clarke, when the nurse leaves, would you pull out that plug?' [I'd say], 'Yes, if that's your desire, I'll help you with that.' I think the choice is down to the individual.'
He's enjoying being back in what he describes as 'the quaintness of England' after 'the madness of America' – 'it's very disconcerting… this shift away from our humanity, into something that's more technological and isn't rooted in anything spiritually sound.' During the previous Trump administration, he refused to talk about the 45 th president by name. I wonder what he makes of the 47 th? 'He's worse,' he says, flatly. 'There will be no middle class in America if they can help it, it'll be the elites and the slaves.'
He understands why America and Canada enjoy a good Agatha Christie, though. 'There's a bit of nostalgia that is romantic… those are two new nations that are born out of this culture.' He's fully embedded in that culture himself, although one of its institutions may be beyond him now. 'Well, I've got two metal knees,' he says, 'I don't think I'm going to be doing grands jetés on Strictly… maybe Doctor Who. I'd love to do that.''
