After ‘The Wire’ ended, actress Sonja Sohn couldn’t leave Baltimore’s troubled streets behind

Sohn was offering to help, but he figured she must have had an angle. Why else would she be here?

“A lot of the way I live my life has nothing to do with logic,” Sohn says, but Hawkins didn’t know that and didn’t know how committed Sohn would prove to be. Sohn might not have known herself, actually. But she did believe that she could understand what these kids had been through — because she’d been through it, too.

Gallery

The TV show’s memorable characters: From Avon to Ziggy: A look at some of the most memorable characters from the five seasons of HBO’s “The Wire.”

More on this Story

• The will and 'The Wire'
• ‘My entire life had become about this’

***

Landing the part of Kima was a huge break, but when filming started in 2002, Sohn was awash in anxiety, forgetting lines, feeling disoriented. She was a professional actress in her mid-30s. She had done this before. This shouldn’t have been so hard.

But “The Wire” wasn’t a typical TV series. Over five seasons, it chronicled the uneven, often quixotic efforts of police, drug dealers, junkies, teachers, dock workers, kids and ex-cons to improve their lots. The show’s writing team, led by former Baltimore Sun staffer David Simon and featuring former Baltimore detective and public school teacher Ed Burns, weren’t trying to create entertainment per se, says Simon, but rather “a dialectic about urban issues and poverty, and the drug war and economics.” They pursued authenticity above all else, ruthlessly refusing to provide happy endings and instead using language, location and narrative to pull viewers into a world of, as Simon puts it, “people who have been separated economically, socially, politically from the rest of America” — and then insisting that we all share stakes in, and responsibility for, the future we are building.

For Sohn, though, the material was “kicking my whole thing up,” she says. She had grown up in Newport News, Va., in an area much like the Baltimore neighborhoods in which “The Wire” was set. Cops were not the good guys where she came from, so even acting the part was unnerving. The show’s broader message made it palatable, says Simon. “I think that was a great relief to her, because I think she had some latent sense of horror that she was going to be working on a cop show as a cop,” but the fractured lives in the script conjured barbed memories. Her father was an African American Army vet from the poor side of Winston-Salem, N.C., her mother a Korean he had met while in the service who had grown up during the worst of the Korean War. Sohn was raised in a public housing project that resembled the West Baltimore low-rises the drug crew in “The Wire” controlled in the show’s first season. There was a good deal of fighting in the streets and in her home. Her father was prone to violent rages during which he battered Sohn’s mother and threatened to do worse.

Home became a place of pure misery, even more so when a babysitter, an older girl, started molesting her. She wanted to run away but didn’t want to leave her mother alone to endure her father’s abuse. Ducking down a nearby alley, she’d write her thoughts on the wall with a broken piece of brick. Or she’d go to a school playground, climb a slide shaped like a rocket ship, and say, again and again, “It’s going to get better,” until one day, better wasn’t enough. “It’s going to be great!” she announced.