You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service. This is Hard Talk with me, Sean Lay. Thanks for downloading this edition of the program, and I hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Sean Lay. Sometimes a TV drama does more than entertain. It brings alive to an audience a world they failed to see.

For many in the United States and beyond the

wire, which methodically dissected America's war with drugs, was an eye-opener. Playing Detective

Bunk Moreland brought Wendell Pierce international attention. Now he's on stage in London as

Willie Loman, the protagonist in Arthur Miller's play, Death of a Salesman. Wendell Pierce

describes the party's playing as the American Hamlet.

It's today's American reality. You're on your own. Wendell Pierce, welcome to HART Talk.

Thank you very much for coming into the studio. Thank you for having me, Sean.

Let's begin, if we may, 14 years ago. Hurricane Katrina, you were visiting your parents when the evacuation was mandated.

Yes.

It was your family home, the city you'd grown up in, the city where all your friends were from, and where your family still lived.

How vivid now are the pictures in your mind, the memories of what you saw when you returned to what had been your home?

Oh, those images in my mind are indelible.

They will always mark a distinct period in my life.

There's always pre-Katrina and post-Katrina, New Orleans.

It will be the defining moment in New Orleans history.

You know, my father was 80.

My mother was in her late 70s and kept in their golden years. And to see everything that you have built to be destroyed in at that time of your life,

I'd lost my older brother years before. And those are just two of the darkest days for my parents.

And vowed then to make sure to get them back into the home before their dying day

so that they could actually have some sort of sense of redemption.

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