CCH Pounder takes her wonderful voice to ‘NCIS: New Orleans’
For CCH Pounder, the voice often comes first.
“I’ve always been conscious about people’s sounds, and I’ve always been fascinated by it,” reminisced the veteran character actress, who stars as coroner Dr. Loretta Wade in “NCIS: New Orleans.” “I remember as a kid, I was always called the Parrot.”
The British actress has an eclectic resume that includes her stint as Detective Claudette Wyms, the secret heroine of FX’s hard-boiled cop drama “The Shield,” multiple stints voicing DC Comics supervillain Amanda Waller for an animated series and video games, and turns on cult favorites like SyFy series “Warehouse 13” and HBO’s “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.”
Claudette Wyms initially had another first name when showrunner Shawn Ryan first conceived of the character for “The Shield:” It was originally Charles. But when Pounder won the part, she asked the writers not to change her lines.
“I want to do it just the way you wrote it for that man,” Pounder remembered. “I want to be able to have those words come out of my mouth. And it gave me a wonderful challenge, because there were things I was saying, as a woman and myself, I would not speak this way. … It was a great lesson in the fact that we are servants of our environment, we become part of our surroundings,” she said.
With “The Shield,” there were people who were fans of the Michael Chiklis characters and they wanted him to get away with it, she said.
“Through Michael, they got to live out this fantasy that empowered them some way. … They would heckle me. And real officers were going ‘This is so real, it’s crazy, you’ve got to get him.’ It’s kind of like football, and choosing teams.”
To nail Amanda Waller’s voice, Pounder says she uses her own body, and tries to imbue her lines with a sense of how Waller would be moving and acting.
Her stint as San Joaquin District Attorney Tyne Patterson on the biker drama “Sons of Anarchy” was a different challenge. Pounder came in late in the series’ run as part of a plot arc in which a young boy commits a deadly school shooting with a gun trafficked by the motorcycle club. Patterson targets club president Jax Teller (Charlie Hunnam).
“She is still to me an undeveloped character, because I think I came in in season six to do a job,” Pounder told me. “I came in like gangbusters, methodically going after this man, and seeing something in him, a kernel of – I wouldn’t call it doubt, but purity maybe – that she kind of niggled away at, a little opening, and then he clammed shut again.”
Playing these authoritative figures has sometimes left Pounder feeling a little type-cast, though she says the way casting directors see her has forced her to reach for new opportunities and to deepen her approach to new characters.
“For instance, I might have to go to the theater to really get something really sexy, sassy,” she said.
“It’s a wonderful transition of going from a younger actor who would say ‘I don’t want to do that, I want to change, I’m tired of playing women of authority, they have no husband, they have no children,’” Pounder said.
“To come to this place where it’s like girl, just get in the door, the character that you want to play with or without children or husbands or extremities, you put out she seems like a woman with a whole bunch of kids. … You just try to create it in your head and it just kind of manifests in reality.”