The Shield star Michael Chiklis on playing cops, Hotel Cocaine and why he’s sick of TV reboots

Actor Michael Chiklis has opened up about his new series Hotel Cocaine and the death and destruction that follows as Miami becomes the drug capital of the US. Watch the video.

Michael Chiklis thinks long and hard before he accepts law enforcement roles these days.

In the 35 years since he burst on to acting scene channelling John Belushi in the biopic Wired, he’s played more than his fair share of cops and agents, from the title role in the dramedy The Commish, to the ex-cop turned vigilante The Executioner in superhero-adjacent series Gotham and a border patrol agent in the thriller Coyote.

And then of course there’s the one that towers over the rest and is arguably the defining role of his career – Vic Mackey in seven seasons of The Shield. The deeply flawed, violent, drug-dealing, murderous detective earned Chiklis an Emmy and a Golden Globe and was the linchpin of a show that’s widely credited with helping to usher in a golden age of television.

Michael Chiklis as Agent Zulio in Hotel Cocaine.

So when his agent let him know that the producers of Hotel Cocaine wanted Chiklis to play Drug Enforcement Agency Agent Dominic Zulio in the new crime drama set in 1970s and 1980s Miami, he was initially reluctant.

“I don’t preclude doing cops because that’s like 85% of what’s done,” Chiklis says over Zoom from his Los Angeles home. “But I like to think that I’m super discerning at this point because I have done a number of cop roles in my career and some really, really good ones. Certainly from a writing standpoint and a concept standpoint with The Shield … so I was a little reluctant at first.”

Michael Chiklis as Agent Zulio in a scene in Hotel Cocaine.

But the more he heard about the project, the more he became intrigued. The fact that it was created by Chris Brancato, one of the creative forces behind Narcos, was a big plus, and having his old friend Danny Pino as the lead role (there were no hard feelings from the time Vic Mackey burned his face on a stove in The Shield) was also a drawcard.

Most of all though, it was the world and era it was set in, and the very different character he’d been asked to play. When he was a child, Boston-born Chiklis used to regularly holiday with his family to Miami, where his father’s uncle managed a hotel. He saw first-hand how it developed from “a quiet little beach town” into a huge metropolis thanks in part to the billions in drug money that poured in during the 1970s.

“It’s a kind of a sexy world – 1978, advent of the cocaine trade in Miami so you have this hedonistic veneer of the disco era,” Chiklis says. “All fun and games, but also this dark underbelly of the death, dying and destruction that the cocaine trade wrought on not only Miami but the rest of the country and the world. So I just thought ‘wow, that’s some ripe areas for drama’.”

Once Chiklis had taken the part and relocated to the Dominican Republic, where Hotel Cocaine was shot, Brancato set him up with a friend who had been a DEA agent for more than 30 years in the Miami area. Although Agent Zulio is an amalgam of different figures – as well a product of Brancato’s vivid imagination – Chiklis gleaned a lot of information about the drug trade out of Colombia, Cuban immigrants, who was vying for dominance and the methods they used. And there was also some physical cues that Chiklis picked up on, including facial hair that would make Merv Hughes blush.

Yul Vazquez, Danny Pino and Michael Chiklis in Hotel Cocaine.

“One thing that was very valuable was as soon as he came up on the Zoom the first time he had this honking moustache,” says Chiklis with a laugh. “And he goes ‘Oh, we all wear these’. And I go ‘oh really?’. And he said ‘Yeah, in the ‘70s. I never knew a DEA agent who didn’t have a honking moustache.”

With only a week left until shooting started, Chiklis realised he wouldn’t have time to grew such luxurious lip foliage himself, so he headed straight to hair and make-up to get the next best thing. And while his costume was relatively low-key compared to the flared pants, pointy collars and flamboyantly coloured era costumes of his co-stars, their magnificently hirsute creation put him in character immediately.

“I’m not Agent Zulio until I add that honking moustache,” he laughs.

Hotel Cocaine – very loosely based on a true story – is centred on Pino’s character, Cuban exile Roman Compte, who is the manager of Hotel Mutiny, a real place that was a mecca for the rich and glamorous and fuelled by a blizzard of cocaine.

Listen to the Cocaine Inc. podcast below:

Chiklis’ Agent Zulio is an old-school, conservative cop from New York who is not afraid to use to some questionable tactics, including violence and blackmail, to put the squeeze on Roman for information that will incriminate his drug lord brother.

On a sliding scale between the “white hat”, thoroughly righteous Tony Scali from The Commish and the brutally effective but thoroughly rotten Vic Mackey from The Shield, he’s probably somewhere in the middle. Having grown-up in the ‘70s watching characters such as Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle in The French Connection and Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, Chiklis says it’s the moral ambiguities that make a role interesting to him.

Michael Chiklis as Vic Mackey in The Shield.

“I just find antiheroes to be vastly more interesting, certainly if you’re going to be living in it for seasons then it’s much more interesting to deal in shades of grey, and moral and ethical ambivalence, than something that’s so cut and dried,” he says.

“I want people to think and feel when they watch something that I’m doing. It’s not enough for me to do something where they are benignly watching. So much of what’s made out there, is sort of pedestrian … if I’m going to make a film or television show, if it’s all possible, I want to entertain you first and foremost, but I also want to make you think and feel and want to have a conversation or wonder about your own moral fibre if you find yourself rooting for someone that has certain dilemmas morally.”

As to whether he’d ever reprise the character of Mackey, Chiklis says it’s a case of “never say never” – but there would need to be a very good reason for doing so. The Shield wrapped up in fitting fashion in 2008, with Mackey’s many misdeeds having cost him his friends and family and he says everyone involved in the show is very protective of what they created.

“We finished the show on our own terms with seven seasons, with a beginning, a middle and an end,” he says. “And we felt that we kept the bar extremely high from beginning to end. We never dropped the ball on it.”

Michael Chiklis and Michelle Moran at the premiere of Hotel Cocaine in Los Angeles last week. Picture: Getty Images

He’s also not a big fan of looking backwards as a rule and is a little dismissive of what he calls a “reboot freak-out”.

“There’s a whole lot of reboots happening across the industry and in my opinion very few of them are really worthwhile,” he says. “They might make people a bunch of money I suppose but they don’t really take franchise to a new place or a different place or a place that’s really more valuable or worthwhile to the fans.”

That said, if The Shield creator Sean Ryan called him tomorrow with a worthwhile path forward, Chiklis is listening.

“If we discussed it, and I agreed with him, I think that I’d be thrilled,” he says. “To slip into that skin again would be great but it has to be something that really feels right and organic and authentic and correct. Otherwise you really run the risk of damaging something that we really feel particularly, very strongly about.”

Hotel Cocaine is streaming now on Stan, available through Hubbl.

Originally published as The Shield star Michael Chiklis on playing cops, Hotel Cocaine and why he’s sick of TV reboots