Felicia “Snoop” Pearson may be a perfect fit for her role on HBO's
The Wire, but the circumstances that landed her the part were purely coincidental.
“I met
Michael K. Williams, [who plays Omar Little on the show] in a nightclub [called] Club One,” Pearson told
Orlando Weekly. “He kept looking at me, so I asked my cousin, ‘Man, who is that guy that keep lookin' at me?' So my cousin was like ‘Who, Omar?' And I said, ‘Who the hell is that? You know him?' And he said, ‘Yeah, that's the one that play on
The Wire.' So finally Omar came over and said, ‘Let me ask you a question, are you a girl or boy?'”
Laughing while recalling the moment, Pearson said that when she told Williams that she is indeed a girl, he said “Naw, get outta here,” and proceeded to tell her that she was perfect for a role on The Wire that had yet to be filled.
“He told me to come to the set to meet the writers and producers. The writers said they'd be calling me in weeks, and here I am,” she explained.
On
The Wire, Felicia Pearson plays Snoop, a young female soldier in Baltimore's leading drug dealing organization. In real life, Pearson was once involved in the same line of work, and even served eight years in a state prison for murder. She has shared this part of life, as well as how she became involved with drug dealing and with the show, in her recently published autobiography
Grace After Midnight.
“[There's] people that went through what I went through or probably still going through what I went through,” she said when asked what made her write her life-story. “I wanted to give them courage. And for them to say, ‘Hey, if she can do it, I can do it.'”
She added, “The book goes through my life at my darkest time and how I got past that.”
Getting past her “darkest time” is what sets Felicia Pearson from her
Wire character. Yet another difference is that Snoop “is a cold-hearted person. She don't care about nothing. I have a heart. I've always had a heart.”
-Lisa Claustro, BuddyTV Staff Columnist
Source: Orlando Weekly
(Image Courtesy of HBO)