“Left Side, Strong Side”: Remember the Titans at 20

Near the end of Remember the Titans, star T. C. Williams High School linebacker Gerry Bertier spends a moment alone with his teammate Julius Campbell. It’s just before the state championship game, but Bertier is resting in a hospital bed, paralyzed from a recent car accident. It’s almost too much for Campbell to comprehend. Shaken and misty-eyed, the two gently talk about how much progress they’ve made—how, as former rivals, they learned to embrace each other while representing the first integrated high school in Virginia. “When all this is over, you and I are going to move out to the same neighborhood together,” Campbell tells his ailing captain. “We’ll get old, we’re going to get fat, there won’t be all this Black-white between us.” Bertier, crying, raises his arm. “Left side,” he whispers. “Strong side,” Campbell tells him, clasping his hand.

It’s a powerful moment, and in the 20 years since Boaz Yakin’s movie (which earned $136 million around the world) debuted, actors Ryan Hurst and Wood Harris have remained bonded by it. Their portrayals of Bertier and Campbell, respectively, supply the movie’s emotional center, and elevate a Disney-fied true story about school integration into a moving parable of tolerance, compassion, and friendship. In the shadow of Denzel Washington’s towering performance as T. C. Williams’s head coach, the relationship between Bertier and Campbell—from its chippy beginnings to unified conclusion—still induces goosebumps and requires tissues. It’s genuine, enhanced only by the pair's real-life chemistry. “There was a soul contract that was made between the two of us while we were shooting that movie,” Hurst tells me. “We're going to be in this together for a long time.”

On the occasion of the movie’s anniversary, left side and strong side—their defensive nicknames and motto—reunited for a rare joint phone interview with GQ to reflect on the project that helped shape their young careers and the relationship that emerged from it. Over the course of a two-hour conversation, the actors (who have continued working in and outside of Hollywood) shared previously untold stories about the classic’s creation and recall the moments that still impact them. Inspired by a year of immense moral reckoning, Harris eventually took over the second half of the conversation to preach about and engage with America’s history of racial injustice. It’s a subject he’s passionate about—and one he’s glad he can share meaningfully with an old friend he hasn’t spoken with in a while. “Though we might be racially different, I feel brotherly with Ryan,” Harris says. “I don't have a lot of cats in my life like that.”

GQ: How long has it been since you've talked? What's your relationship like now, 20 years later?

Wood Harris: Well, we communicate mostly through social media, because that's how people do it these days. I don't really talk to too many people from the cast. I did Blade Runner [2049] with [Ryan Gosling]—I call him "the other Ryan"—and I knew Donald Faison 10 years before we did the movie. Those are probably the only guys [from the movie] I chop it up with.

Ryan Hurst: Yeah, we hit each other up on social media every once in a while. There's nobody on this planet that I hold closer to my heart than Wood Harris.

How did you guys get involved with this project? What about it appealed to you?

RH: I read the script, and I wasn't too taken by it. The first couple of drafts I was like, “Eh.”

WH: It had a TV vibe to it. It was very sensitive. The cast really did some work with it. I know what you mean, Ryan.

RH: Yeah, I remember Wood and I talked about this having the capacity to affect people. So my agent said to read it again. I said, “Who's directing it?” She said, “Boaz Yakin.” I was like, “What?” Fresh was one of my favorite movies. “The guy who did Fresh is doing this?” I was like, “Sign me up.”

WH: I was excited to work with him. His track record of Fresh was all it took. And then Denzel. I mean, come on!

Wood, were you surprised you got the role as a 30-year-old playing a teenager?

WH: Nah, man. I've got that fresh shit going on. When I was 30, I pretty much was 18 anyway in my mentality. I basically felt like I could still go pro. [Laughs]

RH: About six months before I auditioned for the role—I've never told anybody this except Wood—I had this reoccurring dream that I was on a football field, running with a football, and then I ran up to the stands and I pointed at this Black man standing in the stands, and he pointed back to me.

WH: I do remember this story!

RH: [The dream] came back and it came back, and then it went away. I auditioned for the role. I actually wrote Boaz a letter, and I was like, “I'm supposed to play this role.” Four months went by. I’m at the premiere at the Rose Bowl, where they've flown in high school football teams from all over the United States. I walked into this stadium, turned around, and looked up into the stands. I look at all of these people, and the only person I see is Wood. I stand there, and I just reflexively point. And he pointed at me, and something left my body. I was like, “Am I still in a dream right now?” It was one of the most otherworldly experiences of my entire life.

WH: That's deep. I totally remember you pointing to me. I didn't put the two of them together.

Because this was a football movie, did you know what you were getting into from an athletic perspective?

WH: I assumed we'd be genuine to the sport, which means we're going to have to work out. I actually had to put on 20 pounds because I had just [played] Jimi Hendrix. I was skinny.... Ryan also lost so much weight. He lost like 100 pounds. He got in shape for the movie in such a way that was inspiring. We would go to the gym—this dude was curling 100 pounds on each arm, and I was like, “Get the fuck out of here.”

RH: We were in the gym together side-by-side. If I'm trying to take it off, Wood was putting it on. I remember being in the gym starving and looking over at Wood with an ice cream sundae.

Did you guys hit it off with each other right away? Did it take a little while to know how your characters would mesh?

WH: We instantly hit it off. It was brotherly right away. Chemistry is something that you can't explain all the time.

RH: The moment that I shook Wood's hand, I was like, “Wood is electric.” He has electricity, and it rebounds outward and outward. I met him, looked in his eyes, and was like, “Yo, who are you?” Wood is a poet, Wood is a musician. Wood does everything, and he does everything with passion.

WH: Ryan, send me your Cash App, I've got to get you some bread on this. [Laughs] For real, I felt like that too. I felt like this is a good guy, an undeniably good-stewarded person. I'm pretty quiet on the set. I don't really eat lunch with people. I tend to be by myself. Until there's one person when you're like, “That's my guy right there.” And that's kind of what happened.... The most unique part of the movie was really done by Ryan. No one talks about it. When you see the montage of the players and it’s in 16 millimeter [film] all of a sudden, we're sort of building camaraderie—Ryan created that.

RH: I'd shown [Yakin] a couple little short films that I made, and then he came up to me in the middle of shooting. He goes, “One piece of stage direction says, Montage of team winning.” He says, “I don't have the time to do this. Do you want to do it?” I was like, “Give me a budget and I'll [story]board the whole thing.” He said, “Here's your producer, here's your budget, go shoot whatever you want.” I was like, “Really?”

That’s amazing. I remember there's a scene in that montage where you and Earl Poitier are folding up waffles and scarfing them down.

RH: Yeah. [Laughs]

WH: Yeah, we smashed some cars and did this pep-rally stuff. Received all kinds of awards. It actually is very important to the film. It makes it look like we spent a lot of good time together. Not just on the field but off. It doesn't show that anywhere but there. It's brilliantly edited into the film.

RH: There were lots of little things that we just came up with. The whole “What kind of power? Soul power. How strong are you? Too strong!” That was us going to Boaz: "Just roll the camera, we've got something we want to try." None of that stuff was scripted.

WH: Also, when I go to the house to see your mom, no one scripts you to pick up his mom and swing her around. I was just supposed to cross the street, say hello to Ryan, and walk in the house.

RH: Boaz needs such a hardcore shout-out. This was a dude coming straight off of independent films, labors of love. He came into this giant studio film with Denzel Washington, and he still created this atmosphere of, "The best idea wins."

Ryan, there's a moment before the team's training camp starts, when Denzel addresses you by the bus, stares you down, and asks, "Who's your daddy?" What is it like going toe-to-toe with an actor like that?

RH: It was great. All you can hope, being a 20-year-old, is that you can keep up. People always make fun of that scene—Oh, he puts you in your place. But for me, it was a really pivotal, emotional moment for the trajectory of the character. If he couldn't be humbled in this moment, then there's no change in the character. I was really trying to get it right.

WH: I had met Denzel a couple of times. The way he treated me was kind of like a little brother. Later on, he came and saw me on Broadway doing A Streetcar Named Desire. He always made me feel like I could be an actor. When I first started seeing Denzel, I felt like I could do this. Spike Lee and Denzel made me feel like I could do this.

RH: [Denzel] kept everybody at a safe distance. He was just like, "I am playing the coach. The coach is going to be the unifying factor. You don't have to like me, you just have to do what I say.” He sort of stayed in character. And then right after shooting, I was like, "Well, it was really nice filming with you." He's like [in a joyous tone], "Hey!" and came up and gave me a hug.

One of the best scenes takes place when Coach Boone takes the team down to the Gettysburg battlefield—in the middle of the night—and gives a speech about coming together as one group. What was it like to watch that take shape?

RH: I remember reading that monologue and thinking, If this is not done right, it can come off as really soapbox-y. I remember both of us thinking that.

WH: The whole movie felt that way. It had a way of feeling campy at times.

RH: It was such a masterful move—he starts it with his back to everybody. It’s not like he's sitting there and preaching to these guys. He's including them in his experience. It was a tiny piece of blocking that he's talking over his shoulder at the beginning of it. I remember going, “Oh, that's why he's Denzel Washington. He's making those moves.”

WH: When we shot that scene, it was the middle of the night, probably early morning. The way Boaz shot it, you really felt like you were running through these areas, it really felt genuine to the mood you experienced.

The very next scene is when you start chanting, "Left side, strong side." It's one of the most quoted and recognized lines in the movie. What do you remember about that?

RH: To know that a couple of lines are resonating in thousands of people's heads—that they take with them a message of peace and unity. All it takes is you're walking down the street in New York and you hear somebody yell, "Left side!" And you're like, “I did my job.” I'll never get over that. I'm just so honored to have been a part of it, honoring the people who actually did this.

One of your last scenes together is in the hospital room. How did you approach such an emotional moment together?

RH: The scene was much longer. It kind of went off on a tangent that didn't quite work. We found the heart of the scene when we started talking like an old married couple, going to live in the same neighborhood and get fat and old together. That was the part that resonated the most. [Wood] and I rewrote part of the scene to honor that. Hopefully, at that point, we emotionally earned that place to land that.

WH: I had to come into the scene and discover that he was paralyzed. It was a scene that had a lot of fat on it. Me uttering “Superman” in the scene was something that triggered Ryan's response. I just let the floodgates go.

RH: Wood's performance when he walks through that door is the whole movie for me. It's the entire movie. Watching this stoic character who is hard as nails from the get-go. If you watch his performance, it's so nuanced, it's so brilliant, it's so eloquent. After those first couple lines, and you see this innocence and gentleness, it's master calligraphy brushstrokes. It's so beautiful.

Race obviously plays a big part in this movie—a lot of it revolves around white football players learning about the hardships that their Black teammates have to endure on a daily basis. With respect to the #BlackLivesMatter movement and recent protests within sports, what have you made of the discussions about race happening today?

WH: Sports really puts people together. Now, the business of sports is racist because we live in America, where the place is pretty much founded on racist principles. My older brother, Steve Harris, was born in 1965. That's only 100 years after slavery was abolished. There has not been a lot of time. It just seems like it because we've had a lot of technological changes and advancements.... If I'm a white guy, I can just watch Monday Night Football. I don't have to worry about a guy taking a knee for a cause of a culture that I'm not in. Those are the things that white people don't have to think about.

RH: A protest is a unifying factor to me. It brings people together against something else. I'm in full support of every sport that has been protesting in the way they have.

WH: Protests used to be associated with there being an issue or a problem. But even the word “protest” or “racist,” it's being weakened. They don't carry the same meaning. Most of the time, when you're looking at old footage, you're basically seeing municipalities like the police and fire departments hosing people down. You see them walking, peacefully protesting. Most protests have been in that vein. But they've done a good job at painting protesters as bad people, or rioters. I'm all for the right kind of protest.

RH: We both had a meeting [around shooting the movie] with this white woman, I won’t mention her name. And [Wood] said, “Just watch how she treats you, watch how she treats me.” We went in there, I sat down, and I was talking with her, and she was on her elbows leaning close to me. Then Wood walked over and she moved her chair back a little, leaned back, crossed her legs, crossed her arms, and Wood looked over at me and nodded at me. It just showed me, it doesn't matter how socially aware [you are]. Experientially, as a white man, you're born to be fucking ignorant.

WH: I realize white people don't think about it because they don't have to. You can wake up in the morning and think, I want to study and get a job. You can just go think about money. But I never had that as something I could do. I don't have the advantage of just being able to think about the necessity. We belong to a criminalized culture—it's perceived as criminal before we show up. It comes from 100 years of ideological placement. It's like a house on fire on the block. We're right next to each other. It's almost like there's a culture that doesn't see the house on fire. You don't see this? White people are like, “Nah, what house?” That dichotomy that creates a distinction that's hard to bear.

“Attitude reflects leadership.” That's a meme, and it pops up with me and Ryan all the time. People send it to me every day, and it's true. Think about this country. Look at [Donald Trump’s] attitude. Now look how the attitude of the country is, based on his leadership. I never thought about how true it was, until we all see the burning building now.

It reminds me when Ronnie Bass attempts to take a group of Black teammates into the local restaurant. They all know they won't be served, but Ronnie doesn't listen and ends up embarrassing them. He couldn't comprehend there was racism at play.

WH: It’s difficult for us to feel it. My mother grew up in that era where she couldn't go to a restaurant, but I can't feel that. Sometimes white people might understand something, but not garner a feeling for it. Sometimes the feeling is what makes you really get it. That's why George Floyd was so paralyzing for everyone to a certain degree. We all saw it like a snuff film, and we didn't know we were going to see a snuff film. There was an era where you wouldn't see somebody dying online. Now we can comfortably watch an officer put a knee on a person. It's showing you the degree of darkness that we've been ignoring. Even people like me, we ignore when we get to a certain class. Class does most of the ignoring.

I'm glad that we have a film, Ryan and myself and everyone involved—that is apropos to the times. We told the right story. It's like perfect vision. You can rub your eyes and see clearly if you want to. The sidewalks are already here, but now we're in this undeveloped area. We are participants and contributors. If we're building sidewalks for people to walk on, we need to [make] a path that's inclusive and has justice. I feel like Remember the Titans is a contribution in some way to that path that's undeveloped—it's a film that gets to stick around and be a part of this developed country.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Originally Appeared on GQ