By Ramona Prioleau

And I know if I’ll only be true to this glorious quest
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm when I’m laid to my rest.

The Impossible Dream, Lyrics by Joe Darion

Life is about dreams. Once you have one, you gotta go for it and try to achieve it to the fullest. Otherwise, you’ll have a lifetime of regrets and that life is not worth living.

Andre Royo

Like many, Andre Royo dreamed of artistic success. What distinguishes Royo is not that he dreamed in Technicolor, but that he had the mettle to persevere and wait for the right moment to nudge his foot, then body through the door of opportunity that eventually opened. But Royo readily admits that what kept him striving early on was the support of his friends and family.

“The support of my friends, my family, all the guys and women helped me by believing in me even when I didn’t believe in myself,” reflects Royo. The love and support strengthened Royo’s resolve as he realized the obligation that comes with such backing. “I’m not just doing it for me… I’m doing for my daughter and for my friends who didn’t go after their dreams. So I couldn’t give up,” Royo states.

Royo’s characteristic resolve was evident before he began his acting journey. As a college student in Florida, Royo tired of his humdrum existence as a coed majoring in marketing and advertising. At 21, he left school, returned to his New York home, set his sight on loftier goals and began building a firm financial foundation. Royo had an uncle down with the union; so he spent a few years working construction and enjoying the economic security and ample benefits that accompany union membership. Interestingly, words of wisdom from more senior co-workers encouraged him to re-evaluate his options.

“A couple of the older guys were telling me not to get hypnotized by the money because [you’ll] wake up 40 years old, laid off and all you’ll know is how to shovel cement,” recalls Royo.

So despite having a measure of financial stability, Royo started articulating long-range aspirations. However, initially, he hadn’t formulated concrete plans.

“[Years ago], when it came to acting, I just assumed that people who were on TV were either picked or discovered,” he says. “I used to go to clubs and wait for [someone] to say ‘Let’s go to Hollywood,’” Royo ruefully admits.

A friend’s invitation to monitor a class at HB Studios changed all of that. “I sat in a class one day and saw kids doing scenes and I fell in love. I enrolled there the next day.” Studying with Uta Hagen, Royo immersed himself into the method and art of performance.
As a youngster, Royo admired the work of several movie stars. However, after his formal training, he didn’t chase the big screen ideal. His first and long-lasting love is the theater.

“Theater is just instant gratification,” insists Royo. “Once you step on stage, you feel the energy of the audience. I’ve done all types of acting and there’s nothing that replaces stepping on stage and feeling that audience. You can tell when that energy dies and they’re not into it or you can tell when they’re really into it and you start milking it,” he muses.

Committed to feeding off the energy of a live audience, Royo formed a theater company on NYC’s Lower East Side with friends called Room 203. There Royo was content promoting and performing original sketches and one act plays. But, upon receiving the good news from his wife that he was to become a proud papa, Royo shifted gears and began actively pursuing opportunities in film and television.

To support his long-range plans, Royo kept his union gig for a while. However, he realized that if he didn’t walk away from the construction safety net, his acting career would stall. So Royo turned in his hard hat and traveled the path of many actors before him by donning the traditional waiter’s garb.

Royo worked at a variety of nightclubs and restaurants in New York City, including those on the buppie dining circuit. Royo longest gig was at the ever-popular Shark Bar for 5 years. Although he ran into folks like Samuel L. Jackson and Denzel Washington, he wasn’t discovered at the Shark Bar for his acting.

“At the Shark Bar, I became somewhat of this little celebrity – a little weird,” Royo confesses. “I got suspended every other day. I was the worst waiter. If you didn’t know what you wanted to eat, I wasn’t coming to your table. Don’t ask me for any recommendations – I used to say go home and cook…But right before someone would get mad, I’d crack a joke or I’d tell them I wanted to be an actor,” Royo says. Luckily, the Shark Bar proprietors liked Andre and kept him around despite his antics.

While many restaurant patrons offered Royo words of encouragement and advice, a few had one-track minds. “When you tell people in the game that you’re an actor; they just look at you and [say,] ‘All right, can I get my chicken?’ or ‘Good luck with everything, but I want my catfish fried,” Royo jokes.

Nevertheless, Royo’s stint at another eatery led to an opportunity to advance his career – the Acapulco Black Film Festival. One of the proprietors of the Soul Café knew Jeff Friday, co-founder of ABFF. That was the lead Royo needed and he put his hustling skills into high gear. He hounded festival management with emails, letters and faxes, expressing his desire to volunteer for the event. Once Royo got a meeting with festival producer, Reggie Scott, Andre impressed Scott with his eccentric style.

In Acapulco, Royo was smitten with the festival’s dynamic vibe. The access ABFF afforded him was also invaluable. “Seeing the Hudlin brothers, seeing Bill Duke and being able to go up to them and say ‘this is what I wanna do, give me words of wisdom,’” were experiences Royo appreciated.

“[Celebrities] were more open at ABFF than meeting them in a restaurant or meeting them in a club,” Royo surmised.

A lasting impression was also the boost the festival gave to Royo’s confidence. He realized that celebrities, while living comfortably, were no different from him and were just trying to actualize their dreams. That realization sharpened Royo’s focus towards offering his distinctive voice to the performance dialogue.

Volunteering at the festival for two summers also yielded incidental dividends for Royo. Working the door at Manhattan’s Cheetah Club during a hot party several summers ago, John Singleton strolled up to the door with friends in tow and Royo let them into the exclusive and posh event. Having briefly chatted with Singleton at ABFF, Royo engaged Singleton in conversation once again and went one step further to request an audition for Shaft. Singleton took Royo’s information and followed up soon thereafter with a call to Andre’s manager.

Although Royo completed several rounds of auditions for a supporting role and bit parts, initially, he didn’t get an offer. Weeks later, returning home from an afternoon in the park with his daughter, he got a message that he’d been offered the part as Tattoo, replacing another actor. He was to report to the set the next day.

After Shaft, Royo was no longer at “DefCon 1” as casting directors began taking him seriously and his friends and family easily related to the widely distributed film. Even with his success in Shaft, Royo continued his work in the theater and actively pursued indie films. In 2001, Royo appeared as Fruity Pebblez in Mad Matthewz’s Big Bank, Take Little Bank, which became a film festival fave. Royo followed up with 2002’s G where he portrayed Tre, a smart-mouthed chronicler of the bling-bling world of hip-hop.

A Great Gatsby-esque tale of financial success and excess spiced with themes of love lost and betrayal, G stars Richard T. Jones as the title character and features a fine ensemble cast. Royo reflects fondly on his G experience because he appeared in Sky, the Charles Drew Off-Off Broadway play on which the film is based. In addition, Tre was a role that didn’t require Royo to rat anyone out and he got a chance to work with Blair Underwood, Jones and Sonja Sohn (who also appears in The Wire).

Working with Sohn on G seems to have contributed to the onscreen chemistry that Royo and Sohn exude during scenes from The Wire, the gritty HBO series that pits cops against robbers and dealers in a high stakes surveillance game. In The Wire, Royo plays Bubbles, Detective Shakima Greggs’ (Sohn) drug-addicted confidential informant.

Royo’s audition for Bubbles came at a time when Andre was in flux. Still stunned by the events of 9/11, Royo had lingering feeling of helplessness in light of the World Trade Center tragedy.

“After 9/11 happened, people in the arts felt small [and] that we weren’t doing anything of importance to help the community,” Royo said. “All these people are risking their lives and I’m out here trying to make somebody laugh. It just didn’t seem to make sense,” he added.

Heeding the advice of colleagues who encouraged him to take one role at a time and make the most of the opportunity presented to him, Royo diligently prepared for his audition as the witty, frenetic heroin-addict. In addition to studying Al Pacino’s performance in Panic in Needle Park and Richard Pryor’s Piano Man in Lady Sings the Blues, Royo visited drug outreach programs on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and talked to recovering addicts.

“[By] talking to junkies, [I was] trying to find a specific through line that all junkies have or go through and there wasn’t any,” he said. “The drug affects everybody in there own different way,” Royo learned.

Undeterred, Royo set about assuring that his audition would be credible. To get a sense of an addict’s withdrawal syndrome, Royo kicked his television, junk food and Coca Cola habits for two weeks. Without hesitation, Royo admits to consuming about four 2-liter bottles of cola a day and the thought of drinking water to satisfy his thirst repulses him.

Referring to H20 as bottled saliva, he confesses, “When I was thirsty, I wanted Coca Cola. I used to get that can and start sweating, [thinking] ‘I’m just gonna go buy one right now; it’s just an audition.’ But, I didn’t do it.”

Arriving for his audition, Royo walked in with the edge of a kat jonesing for a jolt of carbonated corn syrup. Even meeting with David Simon, Clark Johnson and Robert Colesberry didn’t faze Royo.

“I started ad-libbing and just talking frantic and put my little spin on Bubbles,” Royo says. “They called me up the next day and said ‘we love you, we think you’re great for the part, everything is wonderful, we definitely might use you, but we gotta go to LA first and check out what’s out there,’” Royo remembers with a sigh.

Familiar with the post-audition waiting game, Royo reveals that the wait after The Wire audition wasn’t nearly as difficult as it used to be. “I went on with my life, went on taking care of my daughter, going to other auditions and damn near forgot about it,” he said. Going cold turkey from Coca Cola obviously worked because Royo was offered the role even after the producers made their obligatory star search on the west coast.

To Bubbles, Royo brings a sensibility and depth that goes beyond the surface portrayal of a funny junkie. Royo’s Bubbles is multidimensional – at times poignant, earnest, strategic and, of course, humorous. It’s important to Royo to avoid cliché in his portrayal. He is well aware that Bubbles must show a realistic humanity so as to avoid disparaging the life that is reflected onscreen. Sensitive to concerns that Bubbles could add to the heap of stereotypical images about Blacks, Royo felt comfortable before taking the role that The Wire’s creators were more interested in fleshing out a complex character, rather than putting forth a caricature.

“This is very painful addiction that people are dealing with so [the creators and I] didn’t want to belittle their pain,” he said. “We discussed [wanting] to make sure this character has layers and this character is able to break through the similarities that junkies and drug-dealers have,” Royo acknowledges.

Appearing on a critically acclaimed HBO series hasn’t dulled Royo’s desire for theater work. Although time is an issue, Royo is blessed to have friends and collaborators with a similar theatrical passion. “I’m around creative people like my friend muMs and we’ll write. We’ll do one acts. We’ll do monologues,” he says.

The pair has performed at New York’s Joe’s Pub, an intimate performance space run by The Public Theater. Joe’s Pub’s flexible staging format enables Royo to produce shows “Little Rascals-style,” which doesn’t allow for extensive rehearsing. Despite that, the experience of doing so is worth it.

“[Performing] sharpens your instincts. It sharpens your ability to work with the audience and your improv skills,” he states. “It makes you stay on your toes because that audience will tell you right then and there whether they felt you or not. You gotta love that. That’s my rush,” he adds.

Recently, Royo directed muMs at the Downtown Urban Theater Festival in the production “In the Last Car…” which muMs wrote.

What’s next for Royo? Jokingly, Royo summarizes, “Let’s just do a recap, Tattoo, Bubbles, Fruity Pebblez…I’m just waiting to play a character like John or Trevor.”

No worries, with Royo’s talent and determination, those opportunities are sure to come. M

June 2003