Andre Braugher
Andre Braugher is an actor, born 1962.
Andre Braugher's first film was Glory in 1989, playing Thomas Searles, the bookish free volunteer among harder men. A year later he played Jackie Robinson in a 1990 film about Robinson's court-martial, and in 1993 he took the job that defined him: Frank Pembleton on Homicide: Life on the Street, which ran to 1999.
His gift was diction. Braugher could deliver a long, escalating paragraph without appearing to raise his voice, and he made precision itself frightening. Pembleton in the interrogation room is the reference performance, a man dismantling someone with grammar. What made the second act of his career remarkable is that Brooklyn Nine-Nine, from 2013 to 2021, used exactly the same instrument for comedy. Captain Raymond Holt is Pembleton's control with every trace of heat removed, and the jokes work because Braugher plays him with total sincerity and never once winks.
Film did not know what to do with him. He was the general in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, the Secretary of Defense in Salt, the captain in Poseidon, the district attorney in Striking Distance, cast for authority and given nothing to act. The exceptions stand out sharply: Brent Norton in The Mist, a lawyer whose confidence is the point, and Cassiel in City of Angels. Television kept serving him better, through Gideon's Crossing, Thief, Men of a Certain Age and Last Resort. He won two Primetime Emmys, one for a drama series lead and one for a miniseries or movie lead, and was twice nominated for Golden Globes. He died in 2023.
Movies (27)
- The Mist (2007)
- Primal Fear (1996)
- Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007)
- Glory (1989)
- City of Angels (1998)
- Salt (2010)
- Poseidon (2006)
- Frequency (2000)
- Striking Distance (1993)
- The Gambler (2014)
- Spirit Untamed (2021)
- Passengers (2008)
- She Said (2022)
- Goodbye Brooklyn Nine-Nine (2022)
- Superman/Batman: Apocalypse (2010)
- Live! (2007)
- The Baytown Outlaws (2012)
- The Tuskegee Airmen (1995)
- Duets (2000)
- Homicide: The Movie (2000)
- Get on the Bus (1996)
- Soldier's Girl (2003)
- All the Rage (1999)
- Thick as Thieves (1999)
- The Court-Martial of Jackie Robinson (1990)
- Class of '61 (1993)
- Live in Front of a Studio Audience: "All in the Family" and "Good Times" (2019)
TV (14)
Where to start with Andre Braugher
There is one obvious answer and it is Homicide: Life on the Street. Skip around if you must, but find an interrogation episode, because the show built whole hours out of two men in a small room and Braugher makes that more tense than any chase.
Then Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which is the better sitcom performance of the last twenty years precisely because he plays it as drama. Holt is never in on the joke, which is why the joke works.
Glory is the debut and holds up. The Mist is the best use of him in a studio film, a man whose certainty is the actual horror. City of Angels gives him something gentle to do for once. Thief and Men of a Certain Age are the forgotten television leads worth digging out, and She Said is a late reminder that he could hold a scene with four lines.