Sonja Sohn
Sonja Sohn is an actor, born 1964.
Before The Wire there was Slam, the 1998 independent film that Sonja Sohn co-wrote and starred in. It is a useful fact to keep in mind, because it explains something about how she works: she came to the camera as a writer as well as a performer, and it shows in how carefully she uses silence.
Kima Greggs is the role, and it is one of the best written police characters American television has produced. Sohn plays her across the entire run of The Wire, from 2002 to 2008, with almost no showboating: the character's competence is established through attention rather than dialogue, and her frustration is played several degrees below where a lesser show would put it. If you only watch one thing here, that is the one.
Since then she has been cast, repeatedly and correctly, as the person in charge. Captain Betty Audrey on Marvel's Luke Cage, Detective Samantha Baker on Body of Proof, Chairman Fisher on Incorporated, a detective on Shut Eye, and Amanda Wagner, the GBI chief, on Will Trent. Earlier film work runs from Kanita in Bringing Out the Dead and Alice in Shaft through G and Step Up 2: The Streets, with more recent turns as Nancy Foreman in Big George Foreman and in Breakwater.
She is also a filmmaker and an activist. Born in Newport News, Virginia, in 1964, she founded and runs ReWired for Change, a Baltimore outreach program working with young people who have been through the criminal justice system, in the same city she spent the whole run of The Wire playing a police detective in.
Movies (6)
TV (9)
Where to start with Sonja Sohn
The Wire is not a suggestion, it is the assignment. Start at the beginning and pay attention to how little Kima Greggs does with her face; almost everything is carried in where she chooses to look. It is the most disciplined performance in a show full of good ones.
When that is finished, Will Trent is the easiest current sample. Amanda Wagner is the boss role done properly, dry and slightly dangerous rather than merely stern.
Marvel's Luke Cage puts her back in a police uniform in a Marvel show that took its city seriously, and Body of Proof is the network procedural version of the same energy.
For the older film work, Bringing Out the Dead is a Scorsese picture worth seeing on its own merits, and Shaft gives her a small part in a very confident remake. Big George Foreman is the recent one.