David Harewood is still changing the game

David Harewood is scrolling through his phone, searching for the music that crystallised his new Channel 4 legal drama Pierre. Then he happens upon it: French DJ St Germain’s jazz-house fusion track ‘Rose Rouge’. Playing it out of his phone’s speaker, its infectious rhythm filling our quiet corner of a South London branch of Soho House, a big grin crosses his face. “So late ’70s, jazzy, New York,” he muses, almost to himself. “People just wandering around, busy.”

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This was not the refrain we’d associate with Pierre, a dignified-if-flawed British duty solicitor who “keeps chasing justice” or with the Birmingham-born Harewood, who grew up in the early ’80s, listening to The Specials and the synth sounds of OMD and Heaven 17. “It just felt right for the character because it’s percussive, and the story for me is percussive,” he says, noting just how its rhythms fit Pierre’s lifestyle, rushing from one case to the next.

Dressed today in a cap that might give the Peaky Blinders a run for their money, Harewood is bursting with pride over Pierre. Remarkably, after nearly forty years in the industry with roles in Homeland and Supergirl, as well as the occasional blockbuster such as the Leonardo DiCaprio-starring Blood Diamond, this is the first on-screen lead of his career – aged 60. “I wanted that position,” he admits. “It’s like being captain of England. You want to be captain of your country. So for me, it was like getting the armband.”

Harewood is no stranger to game-changing roles. In 1997, he was the first Black actor to play Othello at London’s National Theatre. “I was very proud…but there were still broadsheet newspapers saying, ‘Who the fuck is this? Why can’t we have blackface?’” He was all too aware that he must navigate issues of race. “It was a very different world back then. There were no Black leading actors on television in those days. I could never break through to being a leading actor and it was frustrating…that’s why I had to go to America.”

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Even winning a role in 2011’s hit post-9/11 political/espionage show Homeland, playing Claire Danes’ no-nonsense CIA boss Estes, was fraught with emotion. “That was probably the worst time of my life,” he says. He hadn’t worked in a year and had just £80 in the bank, but worse was to come. “My best mate Louis, an Italian kid who always said I was going to make it as an actor, died.” After Louis lost his life during a routine operation, it hit Harewood hard. “I just lost my confidence because he was always my rock.” After psyching himself up, he not only auditioned for Homeland, but got the part. The start date, in an eerie coincidence, was Louis’ birthday. “It was as if he said, ‘Get on with it.’ And I’ve not stopped working since.”

He’s racked up plenty of impressive accomplishments in the years that followed, including becoming the president of the Royal Academy Of Dramatic Art (RADA), where he studied  in the Eighties after a spell at the National Youth Theatre. He’s also a campaigner for mental health (he hosted 2019’s David Harewood: Psychosis And Me, based on his own issues in the past) and, to top it all off, was awarded an OBE in 2022.

“The acting is the easy thing. Surviving is the tough bit”

Amid all this, his continuing stage and screen work saw him gain a well-deserved reputation as a trailblazer for Black British actors. “What’s wonderful now is for me to look out and see David Jonsson – a British actor playing Black Panther [in the forthcoming third movie outing for the Marvel superhero], Letitia Wright, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Daniel Kaluuya, John Boyega… to see the fantastic global careers these young Black actors are having… because it wasn’t like that. Those things were just off the table for us.”

All of which brings us back to Pierre. Throughout the six episodes, it deals head-on with racism in the police force. “I’ve seen it with my own eyes over the years, particularly with Stephen Lawrence,” Harewood says, alluding to the 18 year-old Black British student who was murdered in 1993 in a racially motivated attack. “Just watching the fallout from Stephen Lawrence’s murder and how evidence wasn’t collected…a systemic police failure. The fact that they got away was a travesty. It’s not something I’m plucking out of the air.”

Growing up with a mother who was a caterer and a father working as a lorry driver, Harewood can recall incidents of racial profiling. “That has happened to me,” he says. Can he say what happened? “That’s a funny one…it’s…it’s…maybe another time,” he stammers, perhaps unwilling to stir up a hornet’s nest. “I’ve got friends of mine who, when I spoke to them about the show, would say, ‘Oh, yeah, standard. Arrested, cells, a couple of digs, and then you’re released three or four hours later.’ But it was endemic and systemic.”

While Pierre smartly confronts such subject matter, that it offers Harewood a long overdue lead is also to be celebrated. Being first on the call sheet was a responsibility that he didn’t take lightly. “Knowing your lines, turning up on time…those things are important when you’re in that position and you see how hard people work. It’s your duty really not to be a twat, because it’s so easy to do that, I think, as an actor, People will do things for you. Get you coffees, get you drinks. People will do their best to make you feel comfortable.”

He says he learnt from afar how to conduct himself, watching the likes of Homeland’s Claire Danes and Melissa Benoist, who plays Supergirl in the 2015-21 series – a show  in which Harewood featured as Martian Manhunter, as well as directing several episodes. “Both of those ladies never moaned, kept it in. Sometimes to their detriment. Weren’t divas. Would know that it’s their responsibility to get through [sometimes to] 5 o’clock in the morning. I learnt that discipline from them.”

Carrying an air of an elder statesman, Harewood is keen to pay it back – particularly with his role at RADA, helping prepare students for the real world of auditions and rejection. “I remember that feeling…dealing with not working, your friends not working,” he says. “The acting is the easy thing. Surviving is the tough bit.”  He recalls hustling on the set of 2006’s Blood Diamond for more lines for his character Captain Poison. “I just saw an opportunity,” he grins.

Even then, life got in the way. “I just had my second child [with his now-wife Kirsty Handy], just barely making ends meet,” he says. Decamping to Hollywood wasn’t an option. “So it was back to shoulder down and get on with it. That was my career.” For the moment, he’s back to the grind, shooting the second season of divorce drama War (playing a very different lawyer to Pierre) and Biblical epic movie Zero A. D.: The Birth Of Christ. Maybe there will be more leads to come. “You never know with this business.”