Little did I know it would be Andre Braugher's final utterance himself. Braugher died this week at 61 after a short illness.
I'm devastated.
This assessment of my feelings naturally occurred to me to type in a Facebook chat with some friends after I found out of his passing in that chat. One of them came back with a gif of Holt saying "I'm devastated." I hadn't realized this was an actual line of his dialogue, spoken in a total deadpan, as consistent with the apparently narrow emotional range of this dedicated career police officer. Of course, we all knew Holt for the softie he really was.
Like most people, I became aware of Braugher through his great work in Homicide: Life on the Street. But it was another TV show that ingratiated me to a different version of Braugher, one with a little more levity, which paved the way for his Brooklyn Nine-Nine work. That show was the sadly short-lived Men of a Certain Age with Ray Romano and Scott Bakula. My wife and I loved it. No one else seemed to have heard of it.
Because this is a movie blog, of course I should talk about Braugher's movie work, of which there was less, but still, some important and good examples.
Most recently he appeared in She Said, my #11 movie of 2022, where he played the uncompromising newspaper editor Dean Baquet, who went toe-to-toe on phone calls with Harvey Weinstein, and didn't blink even in the presence of implied and actual threats from the powerful Hollywood mogul. That movie belongs to its two female newspaper reporters, of course, but the extra support provided by Baquet is invaluable, and Braugher's performance of it steady and true.
It's surprising how few others there were. One I hated, which was Stephen King's The Mist. One I loved but haven't seen in ages, that being Edward Zwick's Glory. I'm due for a rewatch, and Braugher's presence in the cast might make me prioritize that early in the new year.
When it comes to the death of a beloved favorite like Braugher, though, I don't need to sit here and justify to you why I'm writing a memoriam piece about a TV star on a movie blog. Braugher was a lovely presence on my screen, no matter what form of viewing entertainment it was. He was intense on Homicide, establishing himself as an incendiary dramatic actor. He steadily took the path toward becoming an even better comic actor, the most compelling presence on an enduring sitcom that was characterized by the strength of its ensemble. Everyone probably had a non-Holt favorite character on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, but I can't imagine anyone wouldn't have selected Holt as their favorite overall.
And consider the character he played. A Black precinct captain who worked his way up through the ranks due to his impeccable demeanor and policing skills, but who met roadblocks at every step of the way due to his race. Brooklyn Nine-Nine did not shy away from discussing matters of race, and in fact, it was the real-world race-related police brutality in 2020 that caused the whole show to consider whether it was still funny to make a show about police officers. Eventually they decided it wasn't, and are so far going out gracefully, while also being topical about the reality of a show about police officers.
But oh wait. Holt was also gay. For the entire series, through some ups and downs, he was in a loving relationship with Kevin, played by Marc Evan Jackson, who put a photo of them posing in a loving embrace on Instagram as a tribute. Holt was Black and gay and still a police captain with aspirations for even more senior positions within the NYPD. Every part of that was in Braugher's performance, but it never defined his performance. His performance was defined by incredible comedic timing and an even-keeled delivery that prompted jokes about him being a robot. That only made his occasionally bouts of succumbing to one emotion or another all the more hilarious.
I would have missed Andre Braugher at the end of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which we will get to in another four episodes or so. But I would have assumed he'd rise again, and in fact had heard he had already been cast in a new Netflix show, though not a comedy in this case.
Now he'll only rise again in content I haven't seen, but should probably seek out, because if Braugher was in it, it was probably great.
Rest in peace.
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