Transcript: Mayor de Blasio Appears Live on MSNBC's Morning Joe

February 27, 2020

Mika Brzezinski: That was a scene from yesterday’s performance of the Broadway show To Kill a Mockingbird. The free event was hosted at New York City’s Madison Square Garden in front of a crowd of 18,000 public school students. Wow. Mayor Bill de Blasio declared February 26, “To Kill a Mockingbird Day” as the nation honors Black History Month. And the historic event marked the largest attendance of a single play performance in the world. That’s amazing. I love that. Joining us now, the man you saw playing Atticus Finch, Ed Harris, and the Mayor of New York City, Democrat, Bill de Blasio. Great to have you both. That’s so cool.

Joe Scarborough: So, Mr. Mayor, tell us about the inspiration.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Let me tell you, first of all, let’s give Ed Harris, and the cast, and the Aaron Sorkin, and Scott Rudin, and Jim Dolan of Madison Square Garden – everyone did this as a labor of love and what they – it was audacious to think we’re going to take this play, which in some ways is very intimate, and we’re going to put it in front of the biggest audience in history in the greatest arena in the world. And it’s public school students, middle school and high school students. And I heard – you could have heard a pin drop, I think you can tell there, you’ll tell us that people were – these kids were feeling they were part of something so powerful and so important. So I give real credit – you know, in a world where we often talk about the struggles, look at the good news here, look at the power of bringing our young people theatre and waking them up and showing them what it means for them and boy did they respond, Ed. I mean you saw it.

Scarborough: And Ed, you said – it’s interesting, you said, boy they liked that line about, they don’t deserve an explanation. Were there certain lines that the kids responded to more than the people who go out every night, do you get [inaudible] –

Ed Harris: Oh definitely, yeah. For instance, when Tom Robinson is on trial, giving his testimony, he’s the man who has been accused of rape, a black man. And he, early on when I meet him, he’s – I say, you know, what is your response to why did you go to visit – do chores for Mayella Ewell – who is the young woman who accuses him of rape. He says I felt sorry for her, and I say you can’t say that in court, you know – you’re not allowed, just you can’t say that. Just say she could use a hand. When he’s doing his testimony, the prosecuting attorney drills him, and drills him, and drills him, and finally he says, I felt sorry for her. And he said, wait, say that again. And he said I felt sorry for her. And all the kids went “yeah” because he says –

Mayor: The truth.

Harris: The truth.

Willie Geist: Can I just ask you, as an actor, I would think there’s just not a better role than being Atticus Finch. He’s just such a remarkable 20th century character.

Harris: You know, Will, it’s really interesting because when I was asked to do this, I knew Jeff Daniels had been doing the thing for a year and I got an email from Scott Rudin saying do you want to play Atticus and the thing that jumps in my head, okay, how do you get rid of Gregory Peck because that’s the image – and such an indelible performance, but Aaron’s script is such that he’s a different character than the one depicted in the film. He’s much more conflicted and he’s not nearly as perfect a human being as Gregory kind of portrays.

Scarborough: So in what way is he more conflicted?

Harris: Well he’s struggling – he’s struggling to hold to his belief that there is goodness in everybody. That even though this town is full of people with very strong racist views that they’re still good people underneath and that there’s still a way to, you know, appreciate their goodness, you know, and that gets – he really gets put to the task with that. And by the end of the play he’s going, I don’t know these people anymore. I thought I knew them, I don’t know them.

Scarborough: I actually said that over the past year or two about people I used to –

Mayor: That’s familiar to you.

[Laughter]

Geist: That’s one of the modern themes that comes in the rewrite of the play. Ed, let me just ask you, as a performer – as a stage performer, to stand in the center of Madison Square Garden with 18,000 people. You’re used to doing it in the more intimate setting, obviously, with a couple thousand people. What’s it like to walk out there?

Harris: Now we have to go back to the small [inaudible] –

[Laughter]

Its 1,400 people.

[Laughter]

Well, you know, I was just – they had the monitors, right, so I just – I couldn’t look at that. I didn’t want to be able to see anything on the screens so I kept my focus down and I just focused on my fellow actors and what I was doing. I was just trying to do the best job I could doing the play and let the rest take care of itself. I mean you’re certainly aware that 18,000 kids there, and appreciated their responses to certain things, and changes the timing of certain things because of their reactions, but in essence I was really just trying to do the play as well as I could.

Brzezinski: So, Tina, you mentioned timeliness – and 18,000 kids just all – they really were there in the moment. You could hear them responding. They were engaged. That’s kind of actually surprising in itself. It’s hard to keep the attention of 18,000 students.

Tina Chen: That’s what I was thinking [inaudible] as a mom who has raised teenagers.

[Laughter]

Harris: You know the Mayor and his wife spoke before the play and then Spike Lee said a few words. And he said to the kids, he just really said, ‘Just listen to the words,’ and they did.

Mayor: They did.

Harris: I mean it was – you could have heard a pin drop at certain points – 

Mayor: Because [inaudible] about them. I mean that what was so powerful, we said it at the beginning. This looks like it’s another time and place, it’s actually about your lives right now and how you value your lives and how your lives are treated. And they feel that. They are trying to figure out their place in the world, and this play is very pertinent to their lives.

Brzezinski: And, Tina, this is an environment that we live in where there isn’t a lot of affirmation for messages like this and for deep thinking for young people.

Chen: Well, that’s the thing, you know, there’s – we’re so focused on this 30-second sound bite for them. You know they paid attention to an entire play. I think we underestimate the degree to which young people – if we give them the time and the space and we give them the quality production to listen to and to learn from that they will do that. They will absorb it. It doesn’t have to be a Twitter feed. It doesn’t have to be an Instagram, TikTok thing. You know, they will accept long form studious, thoughtful, deep content if we give it to them.

Harris: That’s a really good point, you know. They couldn’t leave, they couldn’t put it on pause, they couldn’t go to the bathroom. And they watched the damn thing and they really got into it. It was really very exciting.

Scarborough: You know –

Harris: I’m really proud of the cast too, you know, and Bart, the director – because we had to rehearse thing all over again. We had to [inaudible] the whole deal.

Brzezinski: Wow –

Scarborough: You know there’s this – for me, there’s this tragic undertone to, To Kill a Mockingbird being as timely as it is now. As a guy that grew up in the South, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, north and west Florida, went to the University of Alabama – and you always felt a sense of superiority reading that book in the ‘70s and reading that book in the ‘80s and thinking, my God, I’m glad we got through that time. And here we are in 2020 and whether it’s Muslim bans, whether it’s moral equivalency at Charlotte, whether it’s calling Hispanics breeders, I can’t imagine that To Kill a Mockingbird, that what Harper Lee did to expose what was happening in the South before I was born is now relevant when I’m a 56-year-old man.

Mayor: Yeah, and that line about, ‘It never went away,’ you know, that it’s not ancient history, you’re saying it, Joe, it’s still here and it’s a fight we all have to fight in our time. But I do think there’s a battle for the soul of the nation going on right now. They’re actually bringing it out and I think this correlates to these young people. They want the truth. They want the real talk. And the whole country is coming to grips with this and maybe that’s the birth canal, you know, maybe that’s the time you have to go through to get to what we were supposed to be.

Brzezinski: Mike Barnacle is at the flash cam and he’s got a question. Mike?

Mike Barnacle: Yeah, Ed, one of the more interesting aspects of yesterday’s performance with this iconic work, To Kill a Mockingbird – in this culture that we’re a part of you could go to the best high school, you could have a fabulous grammar school education, and yet the true, real deep history of injustice and race in this country is basically skimmed over. And has it ever occurred to you that in a performance in a palace like you performed in yesterday, with the emotion and the content of this play, the media provides young people with an education – the sort of an education into those issues that they just will never get from a textbook.

Harris: Well, for sure, I mean I think that’s one of the reasons that Scott Rudin had this idea in the first place. I mean he was hoping, at least in his words that the audience for the show on Broadway would be more diverse, which it really isn’t. You know, to be perfectly honest. And he said, well, okay, let’s give it to them, let’s bring them in, let them watch it.

Mayor: We got school buses. We made it happen.

[Laughter]

We’ll get you all sorts of diversity.

[Laughter]

Geist: So, Mr. Mayor, while we’ve got you here, we want to ask you about the coronavirus. President Trump, obviously, and the CDC had that briefing yesterday at the White House. What are you doing here in New York City and what do you say to families right now who are genuinely worried. I know a lot of them are just like should I put my kid on the subway? What are you saying to families in New York?

Mayor: It’s very similar. Look, it’s been five weeks since I said to New Yorkers it will come here, it’s just a matter of when. And New Yorkers heeded the warnings, the common sense stuff. If you might be sick, get to a doctor right away. If you have any nexus to that travel that might connect you to coronavirus, take it seriously, don’t ignore it. Do the basics, wash your hands, cover your mouth when you sneeze – all this basic stuff, people have been doing it. So we had only seven cases that might have been coronavirus. Every single one negative. There’s not a single case right now in New York City.

But that said, we have literally 1,200 hospital beds that we can turn on if we need to if it turns into something bigger and we have every element – public health and every other element of government – out there trying to make sure that people know to get to care, and they’re making it easy for them to get to care. If we do that all over the country I think this country is going to be good.

The federal government does need to speed up, step up, in terms of making the testing available locally so it’s not always waiting on Atlanta, making sure that things like surgical masks get where they need to get around the country, making sure there are resources for local areas that can’t afford, you know, to put people up in hotels if they need isolation. It can be done so I’d like to see a little more energy on the federal side but I think we can get through this.

Scarborough: So, Ed, Mika and I don’t get out much. We’re sad we missed Jeff Daniels in this role, we will be sad if we miss you in this role. So, how long do Mika and I have to actually [inaudible] –

Harris: Until April 19th.

[Laughter]

Scarborough: [Inaudible] April the 19th. Tell me what has this meant to you to be able to do this role at this time?

Harris: Well, you know, it’s so hard to put into words. What we do as actors is so public in one way but it’s so intensely private in another way, and intimate and personal in terms of what you go through to do what we do in terms of your life experience and your training and your awareness, hopefully. And so, it’s just been a great acting experience. And the cast that I’m working with are just wonderful people and they’re not only great professional actors but they’re just really great people. They’re really – very positive energy. There’s no complainers [inaudible] 30 people in the cast.

Brzezinski: That’s always good.

Mayor: Love that.

Brzezinski: Mayor Bill de Blasio and Ed Harris, thank you both.

Geist: Thank you guys so much.