Jeffrey Wright: ‘I find it odd when people call me a Black actor’
“I find it the oddest thing when people refer to me as a Black actor,” says Jeffrey Wright. “What is a Black actor? Is the process different for a Black actor? Is the outcome different? It makes absolutely no sense.”
At the same time, he thinks, considering the history “of limitations and false judgements” of Black people, maybe it does.
This tension is at the heart of Wright’s new movie American Fiction, liberally adapted by debut writer-director Cord Jefferson from Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure. Wright plays Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a highbrow novelist who maintains that his race shouldn’t define him. When his latest novel is rejected, Monk dashes off a furious caricature of what he thinks publishers want – violent and profane – under the pseudonym of an escaped convict, Stagg R Leigh. To his horror, it becomes a sensation. His own voice is deemed less “authentic” than his parody.
Reality, fortunately, is more encouraging. American Fiction is up there with Barbie and Oppenheimer in the race for the Best Picture Oscar and has earnt Wright a Best Actor nomination – the first in the 58-year-old’s three-decade career. This interview in London is one of many stops on the campaign trail. He seems both flattered and exhausted by the tsunami of interest.
“I liken it to being inside a hamster wheel on a circus train,” Wright says. “It seems at times a bit disproportionate but, yeah, it’s gratifying to be acknowledged.”
American Fiction is small and thoughtful. It was, he says, “budgeted at the same amount as the catering for the last James Bond film that I worked on. We’re a little film punching above our weight.” He sees it as a kind of bookend to his first lead role, in the 1997 biopic Basquiat. Both Monk and Basquiat, he says, are “bucking up against the resistance to their voices and their desires to be free”.
Wright’s own voice is unmistakeable. Crisply attired in a navy suit and sweater, he has a professorial manner, crafting and editing each answer as if it were prose. Linguistic precision delights him. When I ask him about the history of Black representation in Hollywood, his answer involves an erudite detour about the historical neglect of silent-movie comedian Bert Williams and the use of blackface in the first ever talking picture, 1927’s The Jazz Singer.
It’s this calm, thoughtful authority that has made Wright one of cinema’s most reassuring presences, whether as the CIA agent Felix Leiter in the Bond movies or the expat food critic Roebuck Wright in Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch. In the MCU he voices the Watcher, the omniscient narrator of the universe.
When debut writer-director Cord Jefferson was writing Monk’s dialogue, it was Wright’s sonorous voice he heard in his head. “Well, I was in his bedroom closet calling out lines to him,” Wright jokes with a deep chuckle. “Monk is reasonably smart but arrogant at times. Angry. He’s caring but he’s pretty frustrating and shut off. So I do wonder what Cord saw in me.”
American Fiction is two movies in one. The satirical premise is the hook but it was the story of a middle-class family buffeted by grief and dementia that most attracted Wright. The double narrative reinforces the movie’s questions about the relationship between Black art and art about people who, as Monk would put it, just happen to be Black.
“I think the family story comes out of a bit of a Trojan horse,” Wright agrees. “Within that story is a type of answer to the absurdity of the satirical side – the attempts to narrow this man’s life. You very rarely see a family like this. It’s almost subversive.”
As a writer, Monk’s obstacles aren’t overt racists but the kind of white liberals who, in their panic to do the right thing in response to Black Lives Matter in 2020, revealed a different set of biases.
“It’s a big conversation around identity and inclusion and the desire to create a more just society,” Wright says. “Some have responded to this post-George Floyd period by attempting to have a more productive conversation and just don’t do it well. Others don’t want to do it at all. What the film is trying to do is do it better. The one thing we don’t do in America is have smart conversations around race. We’re good at being racist, at times, but we’re not great at talking constructively around race.”
I start to ask a question about Donald Trump. “He’s really good at being racist,” Wright cuts in. “He’s Olympian in his ability to be a racist ignoramus.”
For several years Wright was Trump’s most elegantly cutting celebrity detractor on Twitter. “I liked it because you could have fun and throw darts at political stupidity,” he says. “It was important not to be afraid. Lately, under the control of this…” – he takes a long, deliberative pause to find the right epithet for Elon Musk – “neo-ethno-fascist, it’s become rife with vitriol and misinformation and divisiveness. It’s not a useful tool for society any more.” He laughs. “It’s just not as funny as it used to be.”
Wright was born and raised in Washington DC. At St Albans, a private school, his passion was lacrosse, rather than acting. He studied political science at Amherst College and considered becoming a lawyer, like his mother. He notes the irony that Michael Bennet, the school’s star actor, is now a Democratic Party senator: “It’s curious that he went from theatre to the Senate and I went from political science to acting. There’s a lot of overlap between politics and showbiz these days, especially in America.”
It was Wright’s mother who gave him a taste for the theatre. Was she cool with his decision to trade law for acting? “Er, eventually, yeah. Initially there was a little confusion but when I won the Tony she was receptive. In a lot of ways she was responsible for my career.”
Wright won a Tony award in 1994 for playing Belize in Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s epic play about the Aids crisis, and then an Emmy for the 2003 TV version. As an actor in 80s New York, he had lost many formative directors and teachers to the disease. “Acting can be a range of things,” Wright reflects. “It can be pretty silly and frivolous. It can also be pretty poignant and powerful. There was no other place I wanted to be than on that stage, telling the story we were telling, at the time that we were telling it.”
Since then, Wright has worked with Michael Mann, Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney. He’s played Muddy Waters, Martin Luther King and Colin Powell. He’s appeared in The Batman, Westworld and The Hunger Games. Recently he’s joined Wes Anderson’s family of regular actors. “I love his aesthetic, I love his tone, I love his humour,” he says rhapsodically. “I just like to play that music with him. And it’s unlike any other working environment. Good wines and good fun.”
At the same time, Wright is happy to plug himself into a big franchise machine. “Yeah, I don’t always need to be the lead in a film. I think it’s healthy to play supporting roles, too. It’s good for the ego.”
If Wright’s recent awards run (seven so far) feels long overdue, then it’s because this is the first time a studio has gone all-out to promote one of his movies. “I’ve never had that in my career before. Never. These awards are not a reflection necessarily of the quality of the work. There are so many wonderful performances that go unrecognised.”
Has American Fiction raised his expectations? “I don’t know,” he ponders. “I make choices that are more creative sometimes, more pragmatic others, relative to my responsibilities to my family. But in the last few years I’ve enjoyed almost everything that I’ve worked on. Everything has its own value for me. I have no complaints about my career.”
He gestures around the extremely nice hotel room and laughs. “I’m sitting here in lovely confines. Just been nominated for an Oscar. It’s all good.”
‘American Fiction’ is in cinemas now
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