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Boardwalk Empire returns for its fourth season on HBO Sunday and with it, a slew of new characters: speakeasy owner Sally Wheet (Patricia Arquette); Roy Phillips (Ron Livingston), a new business and romantic prospect for Gillian; and, of course, Dr. Valentin Narcisse, a powerful Harlem gangster played by Jeffrey Wright. We rang up Wright for some insight on what to expect from the doctor. (See also: the Boardwalk Empire Vol. 2 Soundtrack, due out Tuesday with era classics from the likes of Patti Smith, for all of your Prohibition-themed party needs.)

GQ: Dr. Narcisse is a fictional character, but there are others on the show based on real-life figures like Al Capone—who did you look to in preparation for your role?

** **Jeffrey Wright: Dr. Narcisse is kind of a funhouse mirror distortion of an historical figure named Casper Holstein who was, during the early 1920s in Harlem, the king of the numbers game. He was making millions annually from policy rackets but was also one of the biggest philanthropists in the country, and an advocate on behalf of rights for his native country, the Virgin Islands. He was a courier, at one point, and was asked to deliver a package for a Wall Street-connected family. The woman had put the wrong address on the package but he delivered it anyway and she asked, “Well, how did you do that?” And he said, “I went to every house on the block until I realized which was the right address.” And so she said, “Well, you’re very resourceful, why don’t you come work for us?” And he ended up getting a menial job on Wall Street; he found himself, apparently, during his time there, hiding out in closets at night and reading the reams of stock indices. He ultimately cracked a way to tag a daily number to the day’s stock results, so there could be no fixing and no ambiguity about whether or not you had a winning ticket. And so, because he’s more reliable, he paid his winnings, his game became that much more popular and he rose to prominence.

A guy who becomes a millionaire in the early twenties, a black man at that time, coming from a pretty meager background—you think about the resourcefulness, the intelligence, the innovation, the ingenuity that that required, it’s pretty staggering. Anyway! I’m getting off the point but my character is drawn from him, but is really Casper Holstein with much of the benevolent blood sucked out of him.