Dominic West may be a star in west Baltimore but he is still unused to being noticed on the streets of the UK. “This gorgeous woman came dashing across the road shouting, ‘I love you!’ the other day,” he says in his polished, public-school accent. “I said, ‘That’s great! Do we know each other?’” The woman turned out to be novelist Zadie Smith, an enormous fan of HBO’s The Wire, in which West has played Detective James McNulty for the past five years. “The show provokes a kind of obsessive following,” he says. “Those who love it kind of cherish the fact that it’s not quite as world-renowned as The Sopranos. It’s like being in a secret club.”
Although it is not HBO’s biggest commercial hit, few shows have received the same level of critical acclaim as The Wire. Ostensibly focused on a drug war in the port city of Baltimore, the show is both a sprawling depiction of urban decay that’s Dickensian in its scope and a good-old fashioned tale of cops chasing criminals. This unique blend of novelistic depth and televisual excitement has attracted a diverse mix of fans. As well as Zadie Smith, West has recently been recognised by both the local drug dealer and the neighbourhood policeman near his north-west London home. This minor upsurge in fame is timely: The Wire’s fifth and final series starts in the UK this month.
Since 2002, West, 39, has been the closest thing that The Wire’s ensemble cast has had to a star. Jimmy McNulty is a drunken, obnoxious but strangely lovable detective with a dogged and destructive approach to his work. In a show famed for its meticulous authenticity, West seems every bit the hard-nosed Baltimore native, swaggering through the drug-swamped streets like he owns them, and machine-gunning sometimes impenetrable dialect as if it were his mother tongue. Which is all the more impressive considering he was born and raised in Sheffield and schooled at Eton.
Sitting opposite West in a scruffy office above a Soho pub, listening to him chat affably about his love of Chekhov and Tolstoy, it’s difficult to comprehend that this is the guy you’re used to seeing mooch into the DA’s office in downtown Baltimore, drawling his catchphrase “What the fuck did I do?” Similarly, there is little that gives away his upbringing as the youngest of six children in an Irish Catholic family on the moors that fringe Sheffield. It was hardly a theatrical brood; his father worked in the plastics industry, making vandal-resistant bus shelters. “I remember him taking me to an estate and saying proudly: ‘Look, this is the roughest estate in Sheffield and that bus stop is the only thing without any graffiti on it!” It was his mother who got him involved in a local drama group when he was nine.
The bus-stop game proved lucrative for his father, who decided to send his final child to the most elite of private schools. “And that was the start of my struggle!” says West, with a grim chuckle. “I was miserable for the first couple of years. Going there aged 13 was a bit of a wrench and I’ve been recovering from it ever since. It sounds like a cliche but acting was how I ended up finding my place there. I played Hamlet in the school production when I was 16 and that gave me an identity in the school.” David Cameron was a couple of years ahead of him. “I didn’t know him then but I do now. I know his wife a bit because my best friend used to be crazy for her. When she wound up marrying Cameron, we were like, ‘Why do you want to be with that fucking Tory boy?’” West now lives just a stone’s throw from the Camerons in west London but claims not to have infiltrated the Notting Hill set. “I must try harder to ingratiate myself with them,” he laughs.
After Eton, he studied English literature at Trinity College Dublin, then went on to drama school. He found early success in the theatre, with the Peter Hall Company. Agents soon began to push him towards Hollywood: his square-jawed looks lend him a leading-man presence that is rare among highbrow British actors. Roles followed in “a series of terrible, terrible Hollywood rom-coms”, starting with 28 Days, starring Sandra Bullock, which hardly inspired him to stick around. Later that same year, he joined the acrobatic Argentinian circus De La Guarda. “I’d turned 30, it was almost the millennium, and I got this urge to try some physical theatre before it was too late,” he says. “I’d seen this show, which was a blend of acrobatics and dancing that had started in the clubs of Buenos Aires, and I just loved it. I approached them and they made me do five auditions. I wasn’t very good at the acrobatic stuff but they could see I was very enthusiastic and took me on that basis.”
West was trained to run up walls and perform extravagant aerial dance routines while suspended on wires from the roof of the Camden Roundhouse. He lasted five months. “We would swoop down and pick people up from the audience. It was great fun,” he enthuses. “But it became that year’s favourite place for a Christmas office-party outing. People were turning up pissed. Some of them would try to assault the performers. That wasn’t how it was supposed to work – we were supposed to be assaulting them!”
Soon, he was lured back to Hollywood, first for a supporting role in Chicago opposite Renée Zellweger. “I learned a lot from working with her,” he said. “She was so tough. I would hear the director say, ‘Cut’ and then wait for instructions; she would demand another 15 takes until she was absolutely happy with the scene. These leading ladies have it tough: they have to be girly enough to remain attractive but retain a steeliness to get their own way too. Plus, they seem to starve themselves all day to stay in shape.”
Next came a role opposite Julia Roberts in Mona Lisa Smile. “The movie didn’t make much sense. We would be given new scenes to film out of the blue which, it transpired, had been written by Julia’s agent, who was doubling as a producer,” he says. “I don’t know what anyone was doing there. No one seemed to enjoy it. Especially not Julia. She had just got married and just wanted to be off having sex with her husband. Trouble was, she had married the cameraman on the movie. You can’t really relax in a sex scene when the husband is staring right at you.”
Typecast as “the drunken-arsehole English boyfriend”, West was ready to turn his back on the US when he he was asked to send in an audition tape for The Wire. “I set up a video camera in my living room and started doing my best Robert De Niro impression,” he says. “My girlfriend was supposed to be reading the other lines but she was laughing too much so I just had to leave pauses where necessary. Anyway, within 10 days I was in Baltimore shadowing a homicide cop.”
He was initially reluctant to sign HBO’s five-year contract but was reassured by his agent, who told him: “Don’t worry, it’ll only last one season.” On his arrival in Baltimore, a taxi driver apologised to him for the state of the city. “I said, ‘Are you kidding? I’m from Sheffield! This looks beautiful!’” he recalls. But working alongside real detectives proved challenging. “Within a day I was standing in the trauma unit of a hospital with the family of a guy who had just been shot three times in the head but was still alive. I was thinking: I just hope nobody speaks to me because I hadn’t learned to do the accent yet.”
His agent, it turned out, was wrong. The Wire was repeatedly recommissioned. As a result, West has spent a large chunk of the past five years living in Baltimore in an apartment block he shares with the show’s other principal actors. Also among the cast were east Londoner Idris Elba and Irishman Aidan Gillen. Why would a show so preoccupied with realism cast so many actors from this side of the Atlantic? “I know we’re cheaper than Americans. Maybe we’re more malleable too,” says West. “I think we’re more used to the idea of being part of an ensemble. Maybe we’re just better actors.”
He filmed his final episodes last year. Recent film work has included 300 and Hannibal Rising but he seems ambivalent about US movie roles. “I’ve never really seen myself as a Hollywood leading man,” he says. “My plan remains what it has always been: to do whatever comes up that seems interesting. Trouble is, there’s very little interesting stuff that comes up.” He directed one of The Wire’s final episodes and developed a taste for being behind the camera. But will he ever get to work with material as unique as The Wire again? “Its one of those shows that comes along every 10 or 20 years that redefines a genre,” he says. “I think there might be more shows of that standard in future because it has taken writing on in some way – you can’t be less than The Wire now and still ring true”.
· Season five of the Wire begins on FX on Monday.
is a senior contributor to Heavy specializing in celebrity and reality television. She has an extensive background in entertainment, fashion, PR, lifestyle and journalism. Follow her on Twitter @NYCPRTeam. 
