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'Wire's' Andre Royo ready to leave 'Bubbles' behind

With roles in Amazon’s “Hand of God” and Fox’s “Empire,” the actor who made his reputation playing a recovering addict acquires a couple of new nicknames.

* HAND OF GOD. Friday, Amazon.

ANDRE Royo is ready for new nicknames.

Because Reginald "Bubbles" Cousins, the drug addict and confidential informant he played for five seasons of HBO's "The Wire," may have been a bit too memorable.

"Keeping it honest, after 'The Wire' was over [in 2008], I was by the phone," said Royo last month, after a press conference in Beverly Hills, Calif., for "Hand of God," a new drama whose first season becomes available to Amazon Prime subscribers on Friday.

"Everybody says it's really good, so let the phones start ringing. And it wasn't happening. And then I would have these certain encounters with producers here, and they would be saying like a plethora of things, like, 'Yo, you're a junkie.' And they only see you coming out of jail, going to jail or being in jail."

It's taken a few years, but Royo's broken out.

In "Hand of God," he plays Mayor Robert "Bobo" Boston, a friend and associate of the show's main character (Ron Perlman), a corrupt judge who thinks he's found God and whose erratic behavior threatens a development deal in which the mayor's involved.

Royo, in this coming season on Fox's "Empire," also will have a recurring role as Thirsty Rawlings, the lawyer trying to get Lucious Lyons (Terrence Howard) out of jail.

"Bobo, Bubbles, Thirsty . . . I'm a nickname type guy," said Royo (who also had a role in Showtime's "Happyish" as a character named, boringly enough, Barry).

What the 47-year-old actor isn't, and never was, was Bubbles.

"People really - like Mark Wahlberg, other people, after the first season - people really believed that I was a true junkie. Because they knew [show creator] David Simon was grabbing people off the street" and putting them in his Baltimore-based show.

"So, people were coming up to me like, 'Yo, Bubs. You have a good job now. Don't f--- it up,' " Royo said.

"When I showed up in little things here and there, a lot of people . . . weren't saying, 'Oh, there's Andre Royo.' They were, 'Look - Bubs! Bubs got another job!' I mean, I don't know if it's true, but certain producers were saying they didn't want that in their movie. They didn't want to pull somebody out of the story - 'Oh, look, they hired the junkie to do another character.' "

Things began to change, he said, when he was cast as a high-school teacher in the 2013 film "The Spectacular Now."

"I wasn't on any list," he said. "It just so happened that one of the producers knew another one and said, 'How about this dude?' 'I love Bubs. That'd be cool.' And wasn't scared about Bubbles being in it.

"That was the first time I felt I was on a big screen in a really, really fantastic movie, surrounded by a young cast that somebody said, 'He does look good in a . . . pair of slacks. I guess he can play.' "

More auditions followed.

"It's always been true about Hollywood," he said. "We as actors always know it. They don't know it until they see it." After "The Spectacular Now," "casting people realized, 'Oh, he can do that well, too.' "

Working on "Empire" has been "a blast," he said.

He and Howard "have a little bit of history," he said.

"Terrence is the reason I guess my career started. Because he walked away from 'Shaft,' " the 2000 revival in which Royo replaced him as a character known as Tattoo.

They later met while working on the 2012 Tuskegee airmen film, "Red Tails," and "we laughed," he said.

"He's a very dynamic dude on ['Empire']. I mean, the whole cast is like walking into a show where they just go off. It's probably the closest to that theater feel. 'Cause the script is there and that's just like the blueprint," as opposed to coming from 'The Wire,' [where] 95 percent was on the page, don't even try to ad-lib," Royo said.

Not that he's dissing "The Wire," which he insisted was a "full blessing," not a mixed one.

Still, his one concern about "Hand of God," he said, was that his character not end up on drugs.

"As a huge 'Wire' fan, to see Andre Royo come in, you know, my eyes lit up," said "Hand of God" creator Ben Watkins, while acknowledging concerns that Royo might not be right for the role.

"He sort of took the bull by the horns and forced us to see him as the mayor by the strength of his performance. Then, when you see him over the course of Season 1, hopefully you'll feel the same as I do, that the defining role for him will not be Bubbles anymore - it will be Mayor Robert 'Bobo' Boston."

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