It's been an interesting road for Maj. Howard "Bunny" Colvin on HBO's critically-acclaimed drama, The Wire. First, he legalized drugs in Western Baltimore in what became known as Hamsterdam. This season, he's the man tasked with radically reforming the flawed Baltimore school system. So it's fitting that the man who plays Bunny, Robert Wisdom, lives life a bit off the beaten path - finding his way to Hollywood after stops in Jamacia, D.C., New York and London. Fortunately for us, he slowed down long enough to sit down and talk about life on the road less traveled.

Okay, there's really only one way to start this interview off right where are you right now and which way is north?
(Laughs.) I'm looking west out my doorway. North is to my right and that's the big Pacific Coast Highway.

Now that we got that out of our system, where are you originally from and where do you call home now?
I call this home here. I've been here about 12 years. I grew up in D.C., born in Jamaica, but I lived in Washington my whole life. Then lived in New York, lived in Kentucky for a year, moved to London, then found my way back out here and I've been here about 12 years. I call myself, if nothing else a "Santa Monican."

How did you get into acting? How old were you when you started and how did you decide this is what you wanted to do for a living?
It was one of many things. My first acting course was my senior year in college and I took it as a gut course to fill out my last semester and had a good time, but didn't think it was something I was ever going to do seriously. Then I went to work as a banker. From banking I went into radio at NPR and I worked on All Things Considered for a long time and from there I got into the avant-garde art world and started running a place called The Kitchen in New York. From there, I did a lot of artistic direction, putting festivals together in Spain and France and went to work in London at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and I figured that was what my life was going to be.

Then, I just had this epiphany. I mean, that was great work, I did some really great projects I traveled with gypsy families all over Europe and North Africa for a year and visited Cuba a whole bunch of times and worked with some great artists, but I had this nagging feeling that there was something I was supposed to do as an artist myself rather than facilitating other people's work. I found my way into an acting workshop and I had been training as a closet actor for years, but more as a hobby. Then one day, I realized this is what I've got to do.

One of your first big movies was Face/Off with John Travolta and Nicholas Cage. How did you land the role of Tito Biondi and what was it like working on a John Woo film?
That was a prize. A great casting director out here, Mindy Marin, was the person that gave me my first gig and she was casting the John Woo movie and there was this part for Tito. She just put all her weight behind it, my agent got behind it and they paved the way for Paramount to say yes. Then I got to work with the great John Woo, I've got to put it like that. He's one of the great action directors and that was his third American movie and there was a lot of buzz around it. Nick Cage and Travolta were in their little prime and just a lot of great bullets and a lot of great diving shots. I loved it. He directs action like ballet. He came up to me the first day and said, "You make character, I make action, we make movie." That was his whole direction. So we went for it. We worked on that film for eight months and it was really a great project.

You also appeared in a very underrated show called Boomtown. And actually, you were in our favorite episode which was called "Execution." Tell us a little bit about your experience playing Chronic, a.k.a. Daryl C. Norcott.
It was one of those shows where everything came together. The audition for that was the worst - well, I've done a lot of bad auditions, but this was one of the worst ones. I stopped in the middle of it - the script wasn't finished, so they gave me some new pages and I just wasn't feeling it. So Jon Avnet just stopped and said, "Let's have a conversation." We just started talking. I figured I blew it, so I left. Then, next thing I got a call saying they wanted to offer it. So, we show up and I got the new script under my belt and just went to work on it. We did a total emersion thing. We shot in a L.A. prison. I'm not really a method kind of person, but I totally had to get in the head of being locked up and your freedom taken away. Not only that, but being on death row. That really put a whole other spin on it. Then, to live the life because we shot a lot of flashback scenes of Chronic's life. It just brought me back to living on the streets of D.C. and the gangsters in my neighborhood, so I drew on some of them. It was really, really, really a great project because it moved me to another level in my work where I realized I was ready to carry a big character. I think it was pretty much that role that led to Bunny Colvin coming into the picture. Boomtown was definitely the first pillar of the whole thing.

In 2004, you played Jack Lauderdale in the award-winning movie Ray. How did that role come about? Also, how difficult is it when you, as an actor, portray a real person? Is that more of a challenge for you?
Not so much a challenge because I didn't really know him and you're just putting the facts of his life together. Ray was one of those movies that when the word got out, everybody wanted to be a part of that movie. I was determined to be a part of the film somehow. We fought to get in on it because there were a bunch of well-known actors at the time who were up for a bunch of those parts. I just pushed my way through. My manager is a bulldog and he got it going and my agent got it going. We got the audition. I knew when I went in that audition that this was mine. Jamie Foxx was in the room and I did my best to piss on every corner in that room because I wanted to leave my mark.

I got offered the part, so I looked up who Jack Lauderdale was and just morphed. They put us in the period clothes and I was just happy to be at the party. Jamie was amazing. The first day we were shooting, I went up to him on the stage when I first meet him and put that leg on the stage. All the sudden, it was almost like I was hit with this atmosphere. I thought I was looking at Ray. The cameras were rolling and it felt like, for a minute, I totally forgot I was doing a movie. I was just looking at Ray Charles. I ended up popping my head back and realized this was Jamie. He was that deep in it and that real. I knew at that moment this was going to be the deal.

Of course, from there you ended up being cast as Maj. Howard "Bunny" Colvin on the best show on television today, The Wire. What attracted you to the show and how was the character described to you initially?
I was a big fan of the show at the tail end of the first year and I'm one of those people who loved the second year. I thought the second year was this weird, baroque fucking opera with all the dockworkers and all the parallels with the projects. I would never imagine that on American television. And then, I was literally down in New Orleans shooting Ray. My agent got a call and said, "Bob, David Simon wants to offer you this role." I had gone up for a part on The Corner a few years before and that was another "must want," every actor wanted to be a part of it. I got one of the parts, as one of the junkies. I also, at the same time, got a role in this ensemble shoot making this movie Dancing at the Blue Iguana and that was interesting to me because we were going to improvise from scratch the whole movie, so we were going to work together seven months. Artistically, that was interesting. I didn't make any money, but artistically it was a challenge. So I passed on The Corner, but David and Ed remembered me from that audition and when Bunny came up, I got the call. What that told me right there was never drop your guard. Always be ready because you just never know how it circulates.

They called me, but they didn't say much. Bob Colesberry was alive then and he and Ed came in my trailer and said, "Bunny is a major in the Baltimore police force with 29 years. He's just seen it all. There's not much that gets him worked up anymore." And that was it. As we were shooting, there was so little dialogue. This was episode 10 of season two. An actor goes in and you say, "Oh, I got a lot of words," and you can really build around the words. There were no words in it. It was just showing up in a scene, standing in a background and having a look a look of just like "What the fuck are we doing? Every time I show up at a crime scene, this kid got shot." Everything we were doing was just empty. When I look back at that episode now, everything about Bunny was in that scene. They had him perfectly conceived from God knows when, from the beginning of the series. But it was just a sketch in season two.

Season three; I had no idea, because David doesn't tell you anything that's going to go on. Ed, every now and then, will give you a look and let you know there's some weight coming behind it, but he won't say much either. He'll just give you a laugh and walk off or let you guess and if you're warm, his eyes will light up. And then you realize, "Okay, I'm on to something here." But none of them told me what Bunny was really going to be up to. So I learned of it as we got each episode handed to me and it was deeper and deeper. It was one of the most magnificent years that I've spent - second only to last year shooting season four - but that year shooting, with Bunny and Hamsterdam was one of the great experiences of my acting life. I'm really proud of the character I get to play.

In season three, Maj. Colvin is nearing retirement and decides to push drug dealers to three abandoned locations in Western Baltimore, which are dubbed "Hamsterdam." In season four, Colvin works with the school system and convinces the administration to divide the students into two groups - the street kids and the regular students. Do you enjoy having your character used as a springboard for radical ideas and do you agree with Colvin's tactics?
I have to say personally, my life has always been a bit of a maverick, so I do have that affinity with Bunny. It's this irresistible call, he winds up trying to reform situations. It's a very strange thing for him. He looks at a situation and he gets these almost intuitive bursts where he says, "If this happened and this happened, we could get something done." All he wants to do is move the shit 10 inches down the way. He can do that by streamlining things. He wanted people in his neighborhood to have a normal life. He saw the drug pushers there - so what do we do? We're not going to eliminate drugs, so you put them in one area. You can't throw kids out of school, but you can separate the ones who seriously are decent kids and have a shot from the ones who just need social adjustment. It's kind of this reformer's eye. He does it kicking and screaming.

Especially in season four, he's not happy that he has to do this again. He's not going to take it on because Amsterdam kicked his ass and ruined his life. He was counting on that pension, he was counting on so many things and his life is radically changed. So it's not something that he wants to take on, but he's the only one there and he's willing to do it. So there's a weird, almost potentially tragic flaw in Bunny and I don't know if it will ever come to that point of Shakespearean tragedy, but there's a man who is trying to redeem his life in a way. And that's what I kind of felt in season four. Season three with Hamsterdam, he pissed away his whole career, instead of just taking an easy way out or just doing it by the book and just playing along with the system when the system was broken. Nobody would speak up about it. He finally did or, he didn't and just went ahead and did it and paid for it. But it's made him stronger. I dig him. It's a vision I have of my own life if I could change things.

We know you can't give anything away.
I know, that's the closest I've come to describing any of the storyline and that's pretty vague.

Bunny returns in the third episode of this season. What can you tell us about where he is at when we are reintroduced to him?
Bunny has been trying to put his life together. He had that job offer from Hopkins to head up their security, which would have been a pretty penny. Putting that with a major's pension, you would have walked away with over 100 grand a year - 125 grand, that's big money for a former Baltimore cop. He got bumped down to a lieutenant's and you see him working security, but not on the level he was planning. But he's taking orders from dipshits - running into people who don't know their ass from their elbow, who are "yes men" and the one thing he doesn't like are "yes men." He's sees his world is covered in them. That's where we meet him. He's at another crossroads. Very quickly, he'll keep coming to these crossroads. But this one - I can't get into too much, but when we meet him in three, he has no idea how his life is about to change. I think that's all I can say.