Wendell Pierce on His Role in “Between the World and Me”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: How much of that work, that book by Ta-Nehisi Coates resonated with you? What made you want to take that role?

WENDELL PIERCE, ACTOR: Well, I thought it was a very special, very special book. It was seminal for our time and what’s happening now. What “The Fire Next Time” by James Baldwin was a generation ago, this book, “Between the World and Me,” had for this generation. It reflected exactly what the dangers are, macro and micro, in our community, how it’s connected to the legacy of a violent past in America. One of the most strident lines in the most memorable lines is that there’s a tradition of destroying the black body in America. It’s the part of our tradition to kill black people, and that it multiplies in all of its amorphic ways, but you have to come back to that reality, that, whether justified or not, there is an ongoing cultural tradition of killing black folks and destroying the black body. And that was one of the most powerful lines. It’s one of the things that spoke to me. And when I heard that the book was being done in film, as an artist, that was something that I wanted to do, because that’s what our role is. While we have political advocacy to change structure and legislate change, that’s one purpose, but there’s a duality to this progress, which is, the hearts and minds have to be changed by the artists. And that’s what our job is here, to bring this book, this powerful book to change people’s hearts and minds. I wanted to be a part of it.

AMANPOUR: I must say that line that you just highlighted really struck me as well when I heard it in the clip that we played. It is a very, very hard line to listen to and to hear. And, again, this book by Ta-Nehisi Coates was written for his 14-year-old son at the time.

PIERCE: Right.

AMANPOUR: And I want to play a little clip, because here you are narrating a part of story in which Ta-Nehisi Coates is kind of pushing back against a white woman who decides to lash out at his son, who was 5 years old at the time. And this is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ reaction to his own action.

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PIERCE: Not all of us can always be Jackie Robinson.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Not even Jackie Robinson was always Jackie Robinson.

PIERCE: But the price of error is highest for you than it is for your countrymen.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I’m ashamed of how I acted that day, ashamed that I endangered your body.

PIERCE: But I am not ashamed of being a bad father. I am ashamed I made an error, knowing our errors always cost us more.