Why Andre Braugher Was Taken Aback By Maria Schrader's Directing Style On She Said
Andre Braugher passed away this week at the age of 61, and his loss has been deeply, acutely felt by pretty much anyone who had ever seen even a moment of his work. Braugher was a powerful actor, capable of humor and grace and humanity relayed through just a line or a look. His entire filmography is well worth revisiting, but his final film role, in 2022's "She Said," stood out to the actor himself.
In the film, Braugher played Dean Baquet, the real-life former executive editor of The New York Times who oversaw the bombshell article exposing disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein's long history of sexual misconduct involving women written by Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) and Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan). In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter around the time of the film's release, Braugher admitted that director Maria Schrader did something he'd never seen before: allowing the actors to perform without rehearsing.
For the first time ever, Braugher didn't rehearse
"It's part of her genius, but we never rehearsed," he told THR in 2022. "We just started filming, and there was a broad outline, like, 'You go here, and you go here, and you're sitting here and there.'" Braugher said the change was "quite shocking coming from television, where you get rehearsal time and everything's programmed [with] three cameras." Braugher began acting on screen with a role in the film "Glory" in 1989, and it's pretty remarkable that he was still discovering new approaches to his craft more than three decades into his career. While some actors may have bristled at the idea of digging into scenes without rehearsal, Braugher said he actually found it freeing.
"The most shocking part — which I thought was actually liberating in its own way, because it was new for me — [was that] we just started acting," he said. "Mistakes will be made, but there's a spontaneity I felt in the film that was quite refreshing. That was, for me, the most challenging part." Braugher had a supporting role in a film that worked to spotlight the women who ushered the Weinstein story into the world — including the women who came forward to talk about the producer's prolific, violent abuse. Yet the actor still grounded every scene he appeared in, and his performance betrays no hint of the movie's unorthodox shooting style.
Braugher had a lifetime of performances worth watching
Baquet's role in the film is that of an unshakeable authority figure, someone who represents good journalism's ability to stand on its own. "The Dean of the script was very much a father figure, a mentor, a friend, a guide through treacherous borders, and that's what I tried to play," Braugher told THR. In several scenes, the character speaks to Weinstein (Mike Houston) over the phone and ignores the man's veiled attempts at intimidation. Once, after sitting through 90 minutes of blustering and rage, he abruptly tells Weinstein they'll have to wrap up and hangs up the call without saying goodbye.
In every scene, Braugher is great ... because he was always great. The fact that the actor was still doing new things, still experimenting and learning as a performer his entire life, makes his loss feel even more abruptly painful than it already did. As Vulture critic Roxana Hadadi pointed out on Twitter, the actor was entering an era of hard-earned "elder statesman status" and in a more fair world, he would've been gracing our screens for years to come. As it is, he will be remembered through the incredible work he did do, the characters he brought to life, and the performances that looked perfect even when he didn't rehearse them at all.