Brooklyn Nine-Nine

Season 3 Vuzu AMP 20:00

Andre Braugher (that’s pronounced “Brow-er”) stars as gruff, gay Captain Ray Holt in sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine (2013-current). While he’s played a cop before, as Detective Frank Pembleton in Homicide: Life On The Streets (19931999), he’s never been a gay character…

1 Not that Andre has a problem with his role, which has earned him two Emmy nominations and a win, for Outstanding Supporting Actor In A Comedy at the 2014 Critics’ Choice Television Awards. Says Andre, “My son asked me why am I playing a gay? I said, ‘No, I’m playing a police captain who is gay’ – there are many facets to his personality and that’s just one.”

2 Like Captain Holt, Andre is hardworking and stoic, which comes from his school days when his strict dad Floyd made Andre re-do his homework if there was even one error in it.

3 That same work ethic earned the 53-year-old a scholarship to Stanford University in 1981. He planned to study engineering but focussed on acting after auditioning for a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In 1988, he graduated with a Master Of Fine Arts degree from art school Juilliard. Andre loves Shakespeare and has

4 read all of his works and seen all of them as plays, bar one: Pericles, Prince Of Tyre. “I’d like to see one Shakespeare play that I don’t know what happens. I’ve left it for later in life,” he explains. He married actress Ami Brabson

5 (she played his character’s wife Mary on Homicide) in 1991 and they have three sons, Michael (23), Isaiah (19) and John (12). 6 Andre lives in New York, where Brooklyn Nine-Nine is set, but it’s filmed in LA, so he commutes.