r/TheWire • u/nidson • 4d ago

Different actor for Whiting?

Watching S5 E5 React Quotes. In the final few minutes in the scene with McNulty at the Sun, talking to Scott about his made up phone call, they seem to have a different actor play Whiting. Was this a continuity error or the subtitles messing up? I haven’t seen anything else posted about this. Help convince me that I’m not losing my mind.

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u/gbmontgo 4d ago

that's not whiting that's the paper's attorney

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u/gbmontgo 4d ago

I do see where the subtitles indicates that it's whiting, and I do agree that it seems odd to have this meeting without Whiting, but there's just no way that everyone on set just forgot who played whiting. Now, in the whole scene, there are very few shots that include the entire group, so it's possible that it was written as Whiting talking, but they didn't have Whiting's actor that day, so they shot it with a stand-in, with the intent being to sub in shots of just whiting saying the lines looking into the camera with stand-ins now subbing for the other 4 actors (and I do just now have some vague memory of something similar happening in a bunk scene), but that just seems like a lot of work. And all due respect to Sam Freed, but he's not exactly the most famous guy in the world--I'm guessing that once he booked the wire, that was taking up all his professional bandwidth. Not to mention that they had him for another scene from earlier in the episode.

I always just assumed he was the paper's attorney because of the way he invoked laws during the discussion but now I'm not so sure.

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u/nidson 4d ago

Totally agree, never gave it a second thought before watching with subtitles last night. The attorney makes sense for the conversation, but it’s odd to introduce him one time with no introduction at all. And that does seem like a meeting Whiting would be at. All that, plus the old white man with a white shirt and suspenders… plus the subtitles.. leads me to believe the stand in theory.

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u/azk3000 4d ago

Max does get the names wrong sometimes 

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u/gbmontgo 4d ago

Definitely true. So it seems to me that either:

a) Max got the name wrong and it's unnamed paper employee/counsel, or

b) the wire shot it as whiting with a stand in, realized they wouldn't have whiting to do the re-shoot, and decided to remove any verbal references to it being whiting (if they existed in the footage in the first place)