BEFORE BROOKLYN NINE-Nine and Captain Raymond Holt entered his life, Andre Braugher’s career had been somewhat lacking in LOLs. A noted Shakespearean actor on the stage, on the big screen his career had focused on sombre performances in the likes of Glory, Poseidon and, most intense of all, Frank Darabont’s The Mist. On the small screen he had been electric in Homicide: Life On The Street, a show which had its fair share of chuckles, but was mainly grittier than an unwashed oyster.
Yet over the course of eight seasons of Dan Goor and Mike Schur’s wonderfully silly cop comedy, Braugher not only held his own against comic actors and natural born gagsters like Andy Samberg, Chelsea Peretti and Joe Lo Truglio, but became the show’s standout performer. At first glance, Holt was a one-joke character —a super-uptight police captain whose penchant for pedantry and love of by-the-book behaviour would be a foil for the wild antics of Samberg ’s Jake Peralta. For a while, it was funny, but familiar.
Gradually, though, Braugher began to invest the character with a truly unique sensibility, wrapping that wonderfully sonorous voice around lines like, “Madeline, if you’re here, who’s guarding Hades?” and, “The phrase ‘whodunnit’ is a grammatical abomination. Please use the proper term, ‘a who has done this?’”, all delivered with comic timing so perfect it borders on a crime that it had been hidden from us for so long.