Local Actor Lands TV Series

Clarkston resident Luc Robert Poirier hasn’t forgotten the first series he worked on. It was as a Featured Extra on HBO’s “Hung.”

“I appeared five times throughout ten episodes in Season 1…but if you weren’t looking, you would’ve missed seeing me.”

As a background actor, it was his job to make movies and TV shows look and feel more authentic by playing non-speaking roles in the background, like a restaurant guest or someone walking in a park or whatever the scene called for, to make the primary actors—the ones with speaking parts—appear more genuine and believable in the foreground of the stage.

That was in 2009. Fast forward to 2023, and Poirier is in the foreground of a new gritty crime drama slated for the Fall Network Premier season.

The “Street Legal” series is a fast-paced roller coaster ride of Detroit crime, law enforcement, and the legal system. Poirier plays “Detective Wolf,” a seasoned cop whose troubles at home make him a difficult person at work. “The long work days have complicated his relationship with the wife and kids, so he takes things out on criminals and colleagues,” Poirier said about the character he portrays. “Yeah, ‘Detective Wolf’ is a smart-mouthed jerk.”

Poirier isn’t new to episodic work. He was the longtime host of “Michigan Film News,” a weekly web series about Michigan film industry news, casting calls, and crew jobs, and he’s made multiple appearances on TV One’s “Fatal Attraction,” a true crime reenactment series where he portrayed different detectives.

“I’ve even done sitcom pilots,” Poirier said. “’ The Hardwood Diaries’ was where I played an ex-football coach trying to build an amateur basketball team. It was critically acclaimed, but the creators had creative differences right before the second episode was shot, and the series died before it could score.”

What makes “Street Legal” different for Poirier? This was the first time he could film an entire season of a television series as a recurring character.

“It was tough work. We worked seven days a week. Monday through Friday on various sets either at the studio or around Michigan, then the next week’s script would come out, and we’d have table reads Thursday and Friday nights after the filming concluded for the day. Saturdays were spent rehearsing because we were expected to be off-book by the final Sunday rehearsal so we could get right to business first thing Monday morning. This process repeated every week, for every new episode, until the complete first season was done. It was fast-paced, the expectations were set very high, but the results will speak for themselves,” Poirier said.

Season 1 finished filming at the end of March and is now in the post-production/editing stage. The network that picks it up will be announced later this year.

Poirier expects his character will be returning for Season 2. Still, in the meantime, he is currently producing a film that will be shot at Clarkston United Methodist Church in May, plus working on other projects.

More details can be found on his Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram pages.

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