In Always Great, Awards Insider speaks with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this installment, Sonja Sohn discusses the thrilling evolution of her role in Will Trent, and why it is starting to remind her of her career-making turn on The Wire.

When Sonja Sohn first started getting noticed by Hollywood, she didn’t take the attention as a compliment. “All of that represented a certain level of vanity and superficiality,” she says. “I was a child of the late ’60s and ’70s. My father was politically active. I sold the local Black newspaper and Jet magazine door-to-door. We had one Black Panther in our neighborhood in Newport News, Virginia, who was always having conversations with my daddy. Those were the seeds of a punk sensibility—a very extreme antiestablishment point of view.”

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Sohn still carries that conviction in conversation nearly 30 years into her screen-acting career—one in which she’s experienced just about every corner of the industry. From her breakout roles in the indie Slam and the HBO series The Wire to her extensive work across film and TV since, she’s demonstrated impressive longevity and versatility.

Yet she has also felt “the stickiness of the structure that we all have to abide by,” as she puts it, grinding through some “lean years” in which the business didn’t show up for her in the way that it should’ve. She’s learned to “see that as a message that my attention should be somewhere else. I will create something else.”

Ever since The Wire’s end in 2008, Sohn had noticed her passion for acting begin to wane. Then the ABC pilot Will Trent cast her as a law-enforcement official, what she expected to be a typical authority figure in a typical broadcast crime drama. “I came into it understanding what those limitations would be, just keeping my expectations within reason,” she says. “You do your own work as an actor, but you’re building a character only based on what you can see, right? I just didn’t expect, being the boss in a network crime procedural, that there was going to be a whole lot more.”

Then, there was.

Last week’s Will Trent reveals the backstory of Sohn’s Amanda Wagner. Her deputy director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation survived a brutal attack in her youth, then framed the assailant for a different crime later on. The episode allows Sohn to peel off the character’s steely mask and show both her vulnerability and rage. Up until this point, she’d played Wagner with a cool, unflappable sense of power; here, the façade cracks.

Sohn speaks of this episode, this moment, as a high point for her as an actor, one that has “reignited” her love of the craft. She hasn’t had the opportunity to do this kind of deep character work in a long time. “I fell in love with acting by realizing that by allowing myself to be this channel of expression, there was going to be some reciprocity within the art,” Sohn says. “Being able to use some of my personal history, the stuff of my life, and seeing that that had real use and value in this [work]—as a color and a tone and a tenor—is what we’re doing through the art. [I learn] about myself.”

Sohn initially came to acting through poetry. After having two children, she decided to pursue an English degree and discovered a talent for writing, eventually immersing herself in the slam scene. At an open mic, the producers of a film—called, appropriately, Slam—watched Sohn perform one of her poems, “Run Free.” It’s a striking text, rooted in that moment in Sohn’s life. “I was making that first turn, that first moment in a young adult’s life when they’re becoming self-aware,” she says. The piece, indignant and strong and anguished, ends in Sohn reflecting on her brother’s tragic murder, a trauma she’d never written about to that point. Following the performance, she was offered the part of Slam’s female lead, and accepted. Here was an acting job that didn’t feel superficial.

Sohn is also credited as one of the writers on Slam, which went on to win the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Her turn as Lauren Bell, a writing teacher who mentors the film’s young hero, is incandescent—especially her recitation of “Run Free,” which is included in the movie. For someone who’d been resisting the form for much of her life, this was quite a breakout—and the industry noticed. Suddenly, Sohn was nabbing small but memorable parts in films helmed by Martin Scorsese (Bringing Out the Dead) and John Singleton (Shaft).

“You’re a little enamored by the whole thing,” she says of those early years navigating Hollywood. Her skepticism of the mainstream didn’t abate, though. “I live in the world—I don’t live in my head,” she says with a smile. “I’m like, I’ve got kids, I’m getting a divorce, somebody’s got to pay the bills!” How to balance fulfilling work with those material needs? “It’s always been a challenge,” she admits. “It’s still a challenge, not going to lie.”

There are, of course, exceptions. As we get to discussing The Wire, Sohn’s best-known project to date, she exits her Zoom box for a moment to find a tissue. She’s started crying while trying to express how much the show has meant to her.

David Simon’s sprawling, layered, polemical portrait of contemporary life in Baltimore is now regarded as one of (if not the) best series ever made. But back in the early 2000s when Sohn signed on, it was an Emmy-less underdog at HBO, scraping by as the network coasted on megahits like Sex and the City and The Sopranos. It was also Sohn’s first TV job, and really, her first extensive work inside the Hollywood system. Playing one of the lead characters, hardened detective Kima Greggs, she struggled to find her bearings, tripping over lines and seemingly always playing catch-up.

“I had never been on set like that and had never had to move at that pace. So there was a lot to learn that I was not taught,” she says. (She’s worked with multiple acting coaches over her career, beginning with Actors Studio veteran Susan Batson, but never attended drama school.) “And we were working in neighborhoods that were very familiar to me culturally, [which] was triggering in some ways.”

Gradually, she found her footing. Kima was one of The Wire’s principal anchors through its brilliant five seasons, with Sohn afforded the kind of long-term arc most actors dream about. Kima explored her queerness, fell in and out of love, struggled with alcohol abuse, and fought for her city within a profoundly broken system. Sohn approached these storylines with grit, subtlety, and a kind of weary empathy that matched her own growth in the role.

She fell in love with the city and crew, keenly aware of the idyllic nature of the production. “The people who were on that set, making and building the world, their purpose was in alignment [with mine],” she says. “We were creating art for this corporate structure, within this corporate structure. It was the perfect way for me to exist in this business.” Confronting some of the scars of her past, through both the narrative content and physical locations of The Wire, “ensured that I could not escape what had shaped me,” Sohn adds.

So she never left it behind. Shortly after The Wire ended, Sohn launched the Baltimore community initiative ReWired for Change. Years later, she made her directorial debut with the visceral documentary Baltimore Rising, which examined the outcry over the death of Freddie Gray while he was in police custody. (Six police officers were charged in Gray’s death, but the charges were later dropped.) Sohn spent years on the project, which meant putting acting on the back burner. It’s no secret that, following The Wire, the roles coming her way weren’t quite as satisfying anyway—but Sohn’s pragmatic view of the business never changed.

“I think I always knew what it was,” she says of Hollywood. “I was aware that there were limitations for me, but I find purpose and meaning in the world in other ways than this career.”

Sohn has done plenty of great work onscreen over the last decade, mostly in small doses. She’s harrowing in The Chi, otherworldly in Star Trek: Discovery, and wonderfully fiery as a players rep in the ticking-clock basketball drama High Flying Bird. On that latter film, she giggles remembering director Steven Soderbergh whirling around the set as he shot it entirely with an iPhone. “Finding freedom in that [format] is the challenge, but it was fun,” she says. “He used a wheelchair as a dolly—the dude would push the iPhone along it! It was like being in art school. It was awesome.”

But again, this was not The Wire, nor the blazing introductory showcase of Slam. Which brings us back to Will Trent, and a certain lack of expectation that comes with decades in an unforgiving industry. Sohn had done plenty of network TV before. Who can blame her for not getting her hopes up?

But Trent has subverted expectations in a few ways. The Karin Slaughter adaptation is a rare ratings bright spot in the broadcast landscape, already renewed for season three and a weekly top-charter on Hulu, where it streams. Star Ramón Rodríguez has already received some awards attention, and one might hope that Sohn does as well.

The most thrilling surprise of the show—and in retrospect, the thing it’s figured out like no other project in the 15 years since The Wire—is its reverent understanding of Sohn’s presence. She’s treated like a star here, someone who can truly hold the screen. “[Co-showrunner] Liz Heldens is very adamant about showing this middle-aged woman in her fullness,” Sohn says. “Not as someone that’s put out to pasture as the boss, who’s climbed this ladder and is just out there being the rudder, but someone of use. There’s leadership, there’s wisdom, there’s power.”

You could say this of Sohn as well. It’s evident in Wagner’s devastating showcase episode; in the wry dialogue she gets to play around with each episode and especially in her vivid costumes, with bursts of color and exacting fits that scream confidence. In this week’s episode, a drag queen tasked with helping out on a case gasps upon Wagner’s entrance. They snap their fingers in approval and proclaim, “Yes! Everything about you!” Sohn allows for a little smirk in reply. The sentiment, after all, feels overdue.