Clarke Peters: From ‘The Wire’ to ‘The Boroughs’

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I am Terry Gross. So many of us became aware of what a great actor Clark Peters is from his role in one of the best TV series ever made, HBO's The Wire. He played police detective Lester Freeman, who helped track down the drug dealers the detectives were looking for through his research and his analysis of wiretaps. The series was co-created by David Simon, who also co-created the HBO series Tremay, Set in New Orleans shortly after Hurricane Katrina.

Peters co-starred in that too as a Mardi Gras Indian chief who returns to his damaged home and tries to rebuild his life. In Spike Lee's film The Five Bloods, he was one of the four Vietnam vets who returns to Vietnam decades after the war. Now he's one of the stars of the Netflix series The Burrows, who Clark plays one of the residents in the retirement community that promises an almost utopian chapter of your life. But some of the residents start dying, while others start experiencing some very disturbing, inexplicable encounters and visions.

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