Frankie Faison makes authority figures and ordinary men believable without much fuss. We value his steadiness in supporting parts, though even a dependable actor cannot make up for a film that gives its characters too little room.
Fi1m perspective
As Ervin Burrell, Baltimore’s police commissioner in The Wire (2002–2008), Frankie Faison makes authority look like a daily occupation. We accept the job and the man doing it, without needing a performance that announces his importance. That realistic approach had already served the supporting film work that brought him notice in the late 1980s, including Coconut Sid in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989). He makes a small part worth attending to without treating it as an audition for a larger one.
His role as the Eulogist in Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning (1988) points to the difficulty for an actor whose work so often supports somebody else’s story. We found the thriller tense and the performances strong, particularly Gene Hackman’s, but its FBI-led account gives the black community too little space to speak or act. Faison’s presence cannot solve that problem. There is a limit to what a convincing supporting actor can do when a film has decided to spend its time elsewhere.
In Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991), where he plays Barney, the attention is also firmly elsewhere, but the reason is more persuasive. Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling holds her ground against Anthony Hopkins, and Demme keeps us close to her. We were frightened because that closeness left so little distance between us and her encounters. The investigation sometimes comes second, but this is a film we recommend without hesitation. Faison’s plain, believable manner suits a thriller with such forceful leading performances; he has no need to compete with them on their terms.
Television supplied longer-running parts: Burrell across five seasons of The Wire, then former boxer and bar owner Sugar Bates in Banshee (2013–2016). His physically and emotionally demanding work in The Killing of Kenneth Chamberlain (2021) also deserves attention beyond the familiar supporting credits. Those credits can make it easy to take his reliability for granted, particularly when the leading actors have most of the talking to do. For a longer look at what he can do, choose The Wire.
Biography
Frankie Faison is an American actor. He was born Frankie Russel Faison on 10 June 1949 in Newport News, Virginia. He studied drama at Illinois Wesleyan University and received an MFA from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 1974.
Faison is known for playing Barney Matthews in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Hannibal (2001) and Red Dragon (2002), and for his role as Ervin Burrell in the HBO series The Wire (2002–2008). He is the only actor to appear in the first four film adaptations of Thomas Harris's Hannibal novels, having also appeared in Manhunter (1986). Other credits include Coming to America (1988), Do the Right Thing (1989) and White Chicks (2004). On stage, he received a Tony Award nomination for his performance in the Broadway production of Fences.
