From Baltimore To Kyrgyzstan: ‘The Wire’ Duo Dominic West & Clarke Peters Talk Saddling Up For ‘Beyond The Silk Road’ With A Little Help From Sting

EXCLUSIVE: For a very Zen film, Dominic West and Clarke Peters’ Beyond The Silk Road documentary has a colorful backstory. It dates back to when The Wire stars rode out on stallions owned by a former Motown artist. Fast forward to recent times, they prepared for this film by saddling up on steeds owned by the rock star Sting.

West and Peters were hard-bitten Baltimore cops McNulty and Lester Freamon in HBO’s seminal series The Wire. To wind down from filming in the tough inner city, the duo would ride out into the Maryland countryside on horses owned by Jean Albert Renault, a former Motown singer. With a shared love of horsemanship established, the pair signed on for a Silk Road adventure, but knew they needed to hone their riding skills before traveling to Kyrgyzstan.

“A few days before we left, we thought it’d probably be good for us to get our asses onto a saddle so we went over to Sting’s house,” Peters recalls. West picks up the thread: “Trudie Styler said, ‘Look, if you want to practice, I’ve got horses in Wiltshire… so Clarke came on down and we had a day on those horses.”

Exploring The Silk Road

Once in Kyrgyzstan, the pair traced one of the country’s ancient trading paths – part of the Silk Road network. Alexandra Tolstoy, an expert on Kyrgyzstan, its people, and culture was their guide. As they wend their way through the country, highlights include a front-row seat to a local sport that resembles polo, but where teams compete with a headless goat instead of a ball, drinking mare’s milk, traversing some dangerous paths and generally embedding themselves with the Kyrgyz people. The country’s varied landscape serves as the stunning backdrop.

For West, seeing the locals’ way of life up-close left its mark. “I went swimming in the evening after a day’s riding and I was walking back and remember seeing this tiny little kid leading his donkey. He had a job, and everyone in his family, in his household, had a job. It really struck me how perfect the life was there in that these children were helping, but they were having fun because they were chasing pigs or chasing chickens. I just got an incredible sense of this being a lifestyle that has been going for thousands of years, where everything slotted into place.”

Speaking to Deadline at the doc’s world premiere in London, he added: “Obviously we love supermarkets and mobile phones and everything here. But the children there really struck me in that they just seemed incredibly happy, incredibly self-possessed and with incredible purpose and skill.”

In the doc, which is produced by Blink Films and is being distributed internationally by Blue Ant in both a feature-length and series format, the two stars both have reflective moments. “You know, when the water that Dominic was swimming in has just melted from a glacier… you start putting it all together and you can’t help but to expand and open your mind,” Peters says. He was also moved by seeing the lives of the locals they spent time with. “It feels very purposeful and intentional. There’s nothing excessive, but there’s enough.”

As the expert and guide, Tolstoy’s role was helping reveal an authentic piece of life in Kyrgyzstan. “The people really live like that,” she says of the lives and culture seen in the doc. “When they work with me, it’s just a small slice of their life, but they really are working shepherds.

“There’s an amazing Tolstoy line,” she says, referencing her namesake: “‘One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between man and nature shall not be broken.’ And they exemplify that. I guess the message of the film is to live a bit more simply.”

Men On The Wire

In Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek, Tolstoy recalls a fan club of The Wire convening: “They knew absolutely everything.” West was also known locally for his turn in Zack Snyder’s epic 300and both of the doc’s stars have a long list of high-profile credits. But all roads lead back to The Wire in this instance. That was where they shared screentime and became firm friends.

The legacy of the David Simon series is enduring. “You know, it started out being a job, and up until a year after it finished, I didn’t realize what a hit it was, I didn’t know the influence it had,” Peters says

There is a high body count in the world of Baltimore drug-dealing and he adds he never knew when Lester’s number might be up. “Every day that I got a script I was expecting someone to say: ‘Did you hear what happened to Lester, he caught one last night.’ I never, ever thought I would be in it that long, because it was Baltimore. You could be standing on the corner one moment and gone the next.”

It was also Peters’ introduction back into the U.S., having been born there but then lived in England for decades. “To come back to America and to be in Baltimore was culture shock and it was an acting challenge. We were dealing with civilians who were drug addicts, who were gangsters, who were undercover cops. There’s a whole generation of people who have no idea of what life was like then.”

West, meanwhile, says The Wire “is the gift that keeps giving. Almost every day I get people coming up in the street and saying it’s their favorite show.”

Will The Wire pair be getting together for another horseback adventure? Peters has an idea. “The sequel is going to Africa, and we’re going to go to Lalibela through Ethiopia, or possibly to Timbuktu. And on Arab steeds, of course.”

Peters looks across to West at this juncture: “And I’m not doing it without him.”