‘Sons of Anarchy’ season 5 spoilers: Harold Perrineau on Damon Pope
On Tuesday night’s upcoming episode of “Sons of Anarchy” season 5, we are going to see Harold Perrineau once again rise to the forefront as Damon Pope puts Jax in an extremely compromising position: either turn over Jax, or have his family be at risk of getting killed. It’s definitely a precarious position for the SAMCRO head, but if there is one thing that we have learned about Pope already this season, it is that he is a man who has to be taken more than seriously.
So what does Perrineau have to say about playing this part, in addition to how he drew inspiration for someone is at his core a pretty bad man? In a new interview with Assignment X, the actor really gives some insightful commentary on the subject of just how he was able to tap into own experience to play a character who is so different than himself in many ways:
“When I got the part, I was a little concerned about it myself – can I pull that off? Then I thought about it a little more, and I think it’s the thing that I pulled off in my life if I consider my background, and then the person that you see here today, there’s not a lot of difference internally between that character and Damon Pope’s character, My mom passed away a couple of years ago, and one of my cousins said to me, ‘I’m just so glad you made it. I was really scared you would die before you ever became a teenager.’
“She just didn’t think I was tough enough to make it out of there. So there were really extreme circumstances, and you have to be able to think more creatively, be really smart, be agile, be broken, be strong, all those thins. And I think all those things are exactly the same things that Damon Pope had to/has to deal with. So it’s just me, the actor, looking for a way into the character that feels really real to me. So I thought it would be a really interesting opportunity to work on a really, really great show.”
So will Damon Pope survive the final two episodes? If he manages to work it out, then he is going to be able to somehow beat a tradition that is time-honored in many ways when it comes to actors playing “Big Bad” roles. Traditionally, they tend to come on the show and leave within a year, and on “Sons of Anarchy” you can still argue that the cockroach known as Clay is still the biggest bad of all.
What have you thought about Perrineau’s performance this season?