Mayor Clarence V. Royce

Royce is Baltimore's mayor, a career politician navigating the city's crime, poverty, and machine politics with the ease of a man who has learned to smile through anything. He wants power kept and a second term secured, and he behaves accordingly — charming, transactional, quick to calculate who benefits and who doesn't before he decides what he believes.

Glynn Turman plays him with silky, unhurried command, a politician who never seems to be trying because he's already three moves ahead. The writing refuses to make him a cartoon of corruption; he's genuinely capable, occasionally decent, mostly self-interested — and Turman's warmth makes the compromises land harder, because you can see exactly why people keep voting for him.