CCH Pounder continues strong TV streak with 'NCIS: New Orleans'

For CCH Pounder, the voice often comes first.

“I've always been conscious about people's sounds, and I've always been fascinated by it,” said the veteran character actress, who stars as coroner Dr. Loretta Wade in CBS' new fall drama “NCIS: New Orleans.” “I remember as a kid, I was always called the Parrot. I was always good at imitating the way that people spoke.”

The British actress has an eclectic resume that includes her stint as Detective Claudette Wyms, the secret heroine of FX's hard-boiled cop drama “The Shield,” multiple stints voicing DC Comics supervillain Amanda Waller for animated series and video games, and turns on cult favorites like FX's “Sons of Anarchy” and HBO's “The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.” Now, she is helping to anchor the latest installment in the “NCIS” franchise born from what CBS President Nina Tassler brags on as “the most watched show in the world.”

Pounder's performance as Claudette Wyms on “The Shield” stands out as an important exception to what has become the rule in the Golden Age of Television. Rather than being the nagging wife of an anti-hero like Walter White or Tony Soprano, Claudette was a colleague of corrupt cop Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis). And instead of being dragged down with him, Claudette beat Vic.

That does not mean that fans necessarily embraced her.

“With ‘The Shield' there were two leagues. There were the people who were the Michael Chiklis characters fans, because they wanted him to get away with it,” she said. “Through Michael, they got to live out this fantasy that empowered them some way. ... They would heckle me. And real officers were going ‘This is so real, it's crazy, you've got to get him.' It's kind of like football, and choosing teams. That was the biggest part of how I dealt with that.”

Pounder's performance as Amanda Waller, by contrast, has won her a legion of dedicated fans.

“I always considered that my invisible work, and I can't tell you how many young men I've met, who (after hearing Pounder speak) have said, ‘Wait a minute! Are you Amanda Waller?' You've got to be kidding. It's three words. But they say, ‘I know that voice.'”

What drew her to “NCIS: New Orleans” and to the part of Dr. Loretta Wade was partially her sense that New Orleans has a transforming effect.

“I used to come here for the Essence Festival a lot,” Pounder said. “A lot of straight-laced people become other personalities here. It allows you to be that other person within you. I wanted to portray a bit of that, where (Loretta) is a little bit dogmatic at her job in terms of getting to the bottom of the mystery, but outside of her job, she can still cut a rug on the dance floor, she can still have a kind of life force that you don't necessarily think (of as associated with a) coroner.”

For Pounder, shooting on location in New Orleans has been a gift. And once again, it all comes back to the voice.

“Now that I'm here, I realize that what we imagine to be New Orleans is kind of like when I grew up in England, what we imagined America to be, that everyone spoke with a Texan drawl. That was what we practiced as young acting students, we had this terrible, awful Texas drawl that we called American,” she explained. But once she got to New Orleans, she realized, “There really isn't a wrong accent. By the time that Polish, German, African, French mix gets into the gumbo, it's all gumbo, but you can pull out a different taste every time you take a spoonful.”