Yet she has also felt “the stickiness of the structure that we all have to abide by,” as she puts it, grinding through some “lean years” in which the business didn’t show up for her in the way that it should’ve. She’s learned to “see that as a message that my attention should be somewhere else. I will create something else.”

Ever since The Wire’s end in 2008, Sohn had noticed her passion for acting begin to wane. Then the ABC pilot Will Trent cast her as a law-enforcement official, what she expected to be a typical authority figure in a typical broadcast crime drama. “I came into it understanding what those limitations would be, just keeping my expectations within reason,” she says. “You do your own work as an actor, but you’re building a character only based on what you can see, right? I just didn’t expect, being the boss in a network crime procedural, that there was going to be a whole lot more.”

Last week’s Will Trent reveals the backstory of Sohn’s Amanda Wagner. Her deputy director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation survived a brutal attack in her youth, then framed the assailant for a different crime later on. The episode allows Sohn to peel off the character’s steely mask and show both her vulnerability and rage. Up until this point, she’d played Wagner with a cool, unflappable sense of power; here, the façade cracks.

Sohn speaks of this episode, this moment, as a high point for her as an actor, one that has “reignited” her love of the craft. She hasn’t had the opportunity to do this kind of deep character work in a long time. “I fell in love with acting by realizing that by allowing myself to be this channel of expression, there was going to be some reciprocity within the art,” Sohn says. “Being able to use some of my personal history, the stuff of my life, and seeing that that had real use and value in this [work]—as a color and a tone and a tenor—is what we’re doing through the art. [I learn] about myself.”

Sohn initially came to acting through poetry. After having two children, she decided to pursue an English degree and discovered a talent for writing, eventually immersing herself in the slam scene. At an open mic, the producers of a film—called, appropriately, Slam—watched Sohn perform one of her poems, “Run Free.” It’s a striking text, rooted in that moment in Sohn’s life. “I was making that first turn, that first moment in a young adult’s life when they’re becoming self-aware,” she says. The piece, indignant and strong and anguished, ends in Sohn reflecting on her brother’s tragic murder, a trauma she’d never written about to that point. Following the performance, she was offered the part of Slam’s female lead, and accepted. Here was an acting job that didn’t feel superficial.

Sohn is also credited as one of the writers on Slam, which went on to win the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Her turn as Lauren Bell, a writing teacher who mentors the film’s young hero, is incandescent—especially her recitation of “Run Free,” which is included in the movie. For someone who’d been resisting the form for much of her life, this was quite a breakout—and the industry noticed. Suddenly, Sohn was nabbing small but memorable parts in films helmed by Martin Scorsese (Bringing Out the Dead) and John Singleton (Shaft).

“You’re a little enamored by the whole thing,” she says of those early years navigating Hollywood. Her skepticism of the mainstream didn’t abate, though. “I live in the world—I don’t live in my head,” she says with a smile. “I’m like, I’ve got kids, I’m getting a divorce, somebody’s got to pay the bills!” How to balance fulfilling work with those material needs? “It’s always been a challenge,” she admits. “It’s still a challenge, not going to lie.”

Sohn with The Wire co-star Dominic West at a premiere event in 2004.

 Scott Wintrow/Getty Images

There are, of course, exceptions. As we get to discussing The Wire, Sohn’s best-known project to date, she exits her Zoom box for a moment to find a tissue. She’s started crying while trying to express how much the show has meant to her.

David Simon’s sprawling, layered, polemical portrait of contemporary life in Baltimore is now regarded as one of (if not the) best series ever made. But back in the early 2000s when Sohn signed on, it was an Emmy-less underdog at HBO, scraping by as the network coasted on megahits like Sex and the City and The Sopranos. It was also Sohn’s first TV job, and really, her first extensive work inside the Hollywood system. Playing one of the lead characters, hardened detective Kima Greggs, she struggled to find her bearings, tripping over lines and seemingly always playing catch-up.

“I had never been on set like that and had never had to move at that pace. So there was a lot to learn that I was not taught,” she says. (She’s worked with multiple acting coaches over her career, beginning with Actors Studio veteran Susan Batson, but never attended drama school.) “And we were working in neighborhoods that were very familiar to me culturally, [which] was triggering in some ways.”

Gradually, she found her footing. Kima was one of The Wire’s principal anchors through its brilliant five seasons, with Sohn afforded the kind of long-term arc most actors dream about. Kima explored her queerness, fell in and out of love, struggled with alcohol abuse, and fought for her city within a profoundly broken system. Sohn approached these storylines with grit, subtlety, and a kind of weary empathy that matched her own growth in the role.

She fell in love with the city and crew, keenly aware of the idyllic nature of the production. “The people who were on that set, making and building the world, their purpose was in alignment [with mine],” she says. “We were creating art for this corporate structure, within this corporate structure. It was the perfect way for me to exist in this business.” Confronting some of the scars of her past, through both the narrative content and physical locations of The Wire, “ensured that I could not escape what had shaped me,” Sohn adds.