When you took the role of Robert Zane in suits, I can't imagine for a second that you thought you were going to be playing the dad of a future princess of the Royal Family of England. How weird.

Was that? I didn't believe it. When everybody was aware that Megan was dating Prince Harry, I was like, Man, you guys are making it up. Then one day I showed up on set, we were doing a scene, and she was engaged in the show and wasn't engaged yet. We were in a car, and we were about to get out of the car. They said, No, stay in the car. Stay in the car. I said, We have a paparazzi down the block with long lens. And if they get a shot of Megan with that ring on, it's going to go around the world instantaneously. So, Megan, take the ring off. Okay, now get out. I said, Wow, you guys are going through all of that. And then when we got out of the car, there was this rock solid secret agent, MI5 guy security that took Megan and Wister off and said, I'll take you from here. I was like, I heard the British accent. I said, Oh, it's real. It's the real deal. They sent security over and they had security. That's when I knew they were dating.

Okay, you've taught acting, right?

Yeah, I've tried to.

I want to try to learn something. Okay. How do I say New Orleans?

It's.

The hardest city in America for a foreigner to pronounce.

If you think of the French rhythm, or Léon.

Yeah.

We have the French rhythm without the French sound. New Orleans. That's the way to think of it. New Orleans. I thought it- Think of Orléon now.

Okay.

I knew it wasn't simple. There is the tourist trip of New Orleans. Nobody down here says Naulence, but it looks good on a T-shirt, right? N-apostrophy-a-w-l-i-n-s, New Orleans. I went to New Orleans. Nobody says that.

And then.

There is an unwritten rule of, you say New Orleans to rhyme in a song or a poem. Do you know what it means.

To miss New Orleans and miss her each night and day? And I tell you what's more. When you miss the one you care for more than you miss New Orleans.

pops, Louis and Arpshaw. Very nice. So that's the rule. That's your acting lesson for the day.

Okay. New Orleans.

New Orleans. New Orleans.

New Orleans.

There you go.

I have a funny feeling I'd be taken for a tourist anyway. I open my eyes downtown. New Orleans is important to you. You grew up here. You were here the night before Katrina hit. In fact, you would have been here with a hangover when Katrina hit. I came down- Your family had not persuaded you to leave.

I came down for a family vacation. I was meeting family here. I got to the city and there was all the hubbub at the airport. I said, What's going on? They said, The hurricane. I said, The one in Florida? They said, Yeah, it's coming here. I'm like, Oh, no. I went out that Saturday night. My mother was concerned we should leave. I'm like, Oh, we don't have to leave. It's just a hurricane. We've stayed through many. I gave the ultimatum that if they call theevacuation. If they call for a mandatory evacuation, which had never happened in the city before, and that's why I thought I could say it, if they call for a mandatory evacuation, we'll leave. The next morning they called for a mandatory evacuation. It's like my mother called my bluff, really. She said, We're leaving. I had gone out that Saturday night and brought up the Sunday morning sunrise. I was tired and hungover, and we were packing the cars. My nieces were here, and my sister-in-law, and my mom, and dad, and I'm packing the cars. And I'm like, I'll stay. You guys go. We were going out to relatives outside the city.

And I said, You go. I'm going to stay. And I went to sleep. I woke up a half an hour later and they were still packing the cars. So I said, okay, I'll leave with you. If you guys are still here, I'll leave. Had I not, I would have been in some of the deepest flooding of the city. My neighborhood of Punch a Train Park had 20 feet of water and sat in it for two months.

You lost friends.

We lost nine neighbors. We went to church that Sunday morning, and the Bynums, they lived around the corner from us, an elderly couple. My father said, Are you guys leaving? I said, No, we're going to stay. He said, No, we're going to leave. I said, All right, well, you guys take care. And that was the last time we saw them. They found Ms. Bynum in a tree. So the desperation of trying to leave the water, escape the water, she had climbed into a tree, and the tree fell over into the flood. I always think of them and how I wish they had left. And so thankful that we had. I always think that I stayed. Maybe I would have gotten around the corner to save them, but may they rest in peace.

You brought your parents back to your house eventually.

Yes.

And it was trashed.

It was destroyed. I never forget, driving back into the city when we were able to finally get back to our neighborhood, it looked like nuclear winter. Everything was gray, everything was destroyed. We finally got to the block and turning on to the block to see our entire block destroyed. My parents broke down in tears. It was like the death in the family. It was funny. Gallows humor, I guess. My mother told me to try the key. I'm like, It's not going to... We're going to kick the door. Don't kick the door in. Just try the key first. I had to show her that the key wouldn't work because the house was destroyed. And she said, Okay. I said, Kick the door in. I had a friend called me who got in before, and he said, When you come back, make sure you're here with your parents, because the first sight of it could kill them. My father was 80, my mother was in her late 70s. At the end of their life in the Golden Years to lose everything. And my father just wept and said, This is our whole life. We raised our boys here.

We raised our boys here. So I knew my goal was to get them home before they died. So I really worked hard to rebuild the home as fast as possible to get them back. And I did to the point that they were one of the few people back in the neighborhood of 1,000 homes maybe just a few people. And then neighbors said, Wendell, you got your parents back. The neighborhood is never going to come back, but you can bring attention to it. We have to rebuild. Then I realized that so much had been done to build that neighborhood. It was one of the first black neighborhoods post World War II in a segregated New Orleans who could not come and just buy a home anywhere. Because of the civil rights movement, this neighborhood was created. My parents, like a Moses generation, had created this sanctuary, and I knew that I had a responsibility as this part of their Joshua generation to rebuild it. I put together an effort of residence, and we rebuilt our neighborhood brick by brick, house by house, block by block until we returned. Now we are on the register of historic places, on the National Register of historic places, Punch a Train Park.