Darrell Britt-Gibson Did “Everything In His Power” Not To Play Rayam in HBO’s ‘We Own This City’

HBO Max‘s We Own This City is an unsettling look at the deep rot of corruption that’s held the Baltimore Police Department in a chokehold for the last few decades. The limited series looks specifically at the rise and fall of the notorious Gun Trace Task Force, or GTTF. For years, the BPD heralded the GTTF and its members for their high number of arrests and gun seizures. However the GTTF’s members were stealing money from civilians, falsifying police records, lying about overtime, and maintaining their own agreements with local drug dealers to pad their own pockets. The cops in the Gun Trace Task Force were criminals, only caught thanks to a number of fluke events that alerted Maryland narcotics officers and the FBI to their misdeeds.

Created by The Wire alums George Pelecanos and David Simon, We Own This City juggles the stories of various members of the GTTF, the victims of their grift, and the saga of their eventual convictions. While Jon Bernthal‘s Wayne Jenkins often takes center stage, he’s not the only GTTF officer whose descent into crime we see. Jemell Rayam (Darrell Britt-Gibson) was one of Jenkins’s most trusted lieutenants and one of the earliest officers to turn witness for the prosecution. In We Own This City Episode 2, Rayam passionately explains to investigators that trying to stay straight in a police department full of Jenkinses is a losing game.

For actor Darrell Britt-Gibson, the decision to play Officer Rayam offered its own challenges. Even though Britt-Gibson has worked with Pelecanos and Simon before on The Wire, he told Decider that he did everything he possibly could to avoid playing this role.

“I tried everything in my power to not do this role. I could not bring myself to [play Rayam]. I couldn’t justify me playing this person who I so fundamentally disagree with, every single thing about him and what he’s doing and what he stands for,” Britt-Gibson said.

Over the course of Decider conversation with Britt-Gibson, the actor revealed that he was not only named for a loved one who had been shot and killed by police, but that he himself had also never had a positive interaction with law enforcement (outside of a relationship with one close cop friend who passed away recently). To play a nakedly crooked cop like Rayam, was an emotional and spiritual stretch for the actor.

So what convinced him to take the project on? A number of factors, starting with his old friends from The Wire.

“George [Pelcanos] and David [Simon] are just, they’re just good dudes, you know? I just enjoy them. They just feel like uncles, which makes it so easy. And makes it so fluid working with them,” he said. “You feel safe, you feel seen, you feel loved on their sets, which are all so important in this thing that we do and oftentimes can feel the opposite of that.”

Britt-Gibson also revealed that series director Reinaldo Marcus Green and Dwight “D” Watkins spoke with him about the “care” they were going to be putting into the complex role of Rayam.

“I knew that as hard as it was going to be for me to play this person, I was in the safest, most capable hands in this space. But it’s a tough role. It took a lot out of me. There’s stuff that that’s left me that I’ll never get back. There are scars that will never leave. There are moments, days I’m on set that are seared into my memory that I wish weren’t because the feeling of it is just so awful. But the people behind it made me feel safe enough to do it,” Britt-Gibson said.

“I had to ask my mother for permission to do this because the man I’m named after was shot and killed by the police,” he said. “I had to seek the counsel of a few of my brothers and my mother, and when they said that it was okay, I felt it was okay. I’d never fully felt like it was okay.”

“But I felt that I was being drawn to it by a higher power. And I can’t not listen to that. So here we are.”

To step into the role of Rayam, Britt-Gibson said he leaned heavily on We Own This City‘s police consultant, Dre Severino. “He’s been around these men. He’s worked around them. He knows them, some of them. And you know, he’s actually one of the few police officers that I know of who were actually trying to do the job the right way.”

“You know, one of my best friends in the world passed away this year was a Montgomery County police officer. Again, the only other man I’ve ever met who was doing the job the right way,” Britt-Gibson said, before he opened up about his own personal experience with law enforcement.

“I’ve never in my life had a good run in with a police officer. And it’s not because I’m seeking it. You know, I would love to have a positive interaction with a police officer, but I’ve been beat up in my own neighborhood by a police officer. You know what I mean? So to be able to play that is, it’s just, it’s so heavy.”

Britt-Gibson said that although it was “very helpful” working with actors like Jon Bernthal, Josh Charles, and McKinley Belcher III on this project, that didn’t “make it any easier.”

The silver lining of We Own This City — and what Britt-Gibson hopes viewers get out of it — is the show’s ability to create conversation about police corruption.

“My personal hope is that this sort of sparks legitimate conversation that can lead to a tangible change that we are so desperately in need of and in search of. But it’s going to take the community. And when I say the community, I don’t just speak about Black people. I speak about all of us, everybody on this earth. You, me, anybody listening.”

“You know, it takes every single one of us. And until every single one of us is ready to get into that fight, we’re going to be here having the same conversations over and over and over. And we’re tired of having them.”