When the news broke last month that Andre Braugher had died from lung cancer, aged only 61, it stunned me in a way a celebrity death hadn’t in quite a while. As Raymond Holt, the stoic police precinct captain on the sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Braugher had become a familiar presence in my life: even when I wasn’t watching the show, I would constantly see gifs of his deadpan delivery of lines like “I… cannot” on social media, or mentally hear him scream “Booooooone!!!!!!!!” with only the slighest prompting. He was the show’s secret weapon, playing a man so humorless it was hysterical, yet so kind, so thoughtful, and empathetic, that you couldn’t help but see him as a surrogate dad.
For an older generation, Braugher was Detective Frank Pembleton on Homicide: Life on the Street, a role that earned him a Primetime Emmy Award, an NAACP Image Award, a Satellite Award, and two Television Critics Association Awards. As a younger person, I first recall seeing him in the thoroughly thankless role of General Hager in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, a supporting villain who was only created because the studio lacked the rights to Nick Fury. Still, it was nice to be introduced to Braugher, who would further cement himself as a favorite after voicing Darkseid in 2010’s DTV release Superman/Batman: Apocalypse.
Braugher gave Michael Ironside, the voice of Darkseid in Superman: The Animated Series and Justice League, a run for his money as the evil New God; unsurprisingly, he became a popular suggestion among fans when discussing who could play the villain in a live-action film online. His performance is the primary reason the movie is worth revisiting, with him getting to act opposite DC Animated Universe cast members Tim Daly, Susan Eisenberg, Kevin Conroy (who, like Braugher, was a Juilliard graduate), and Ed Asner, the latter two of whom are also sadly no longer with us, further lending the film a poignant air.
I also loved Braugher in his first film, 1989’s Civil War epic Glory, where he tugged on our heartstrings as the bookish, sensitive Corporal Thomas Searles, and in what would prove to be his final movie, 2022’s She Said, where he portrayed Dean Baquet, one of the New York Times staff members who broke the Harvey Weinstein story. There, Braugher radiated a quiet, no-nonsense authority that refused to break even while being irritated by a nosy Weinstein, demonstrating the power of the written word over the spoken one, and the type of gentle masculine strength we need more of in the world.
These were the kind of qualities Braugher exemplified for eight years as Captain Holt. Despite acting on a comedy show, Braugher was aware he had a careful responsibility to avoid making the openly gay captain a stereotype, reportedly telling one of his sons he was not playing a gay character, but one who happened to be gay. He would later express misgivings about some of the roles he played, Holt included, acknowledging the role they had in romanticizing police misconduct, but there’s no doubt that, as cartoonish as Holt could be, he was a positive role model, who listened and learned, and grew beyond the robotic persona he had adopted to make his superiors take him seriously.
And now, as hard as it is to believe, the man who brought Holt to life is gone, a mere decade after the world met the character for the first time. I can’t go back in time and persuade Braugher to stop smoking well before he quit the habit in 2010, but seeing so many people around his age, like Conroy, Arleen Sorkin, Lance Reddick, Ray Stevenson, Ron Cephas Jones, and even Matthew Perry pass away recently, has been disturbing, as if there’s a silent epidemic affecting his generation we haven’t grappled with yet.
The deaths of Braugher, Reddick, and Jones last year, and those before like Chadwick Boseman, Naya Rivera, Michael K Williams, Michael Clarke Duncan, James Avery, Tommy “Tiny” Lister, and more, also puts in stark perspective the disparity in life expectations between African Americans and their non-Black peers, even among the wealthier and more successful; celebrities like Richard Roundtree and Tina Turner were not much older when they passed away last year either, respectively aged 81 and 83. To quote Holt unironically, “That makes me feel sad. I am sad.”
Rest in power Andre.
