Jeffrey Wright - Interview

Interview, July, 2000 by Martha Frankel

THE ACTOR TALKS ABOUT RACE, RAGE, AND GETTING THE SHAFT IN AMERICA

Sitting outside a small park in New York's SoHo, 34-year-old Jeffrey Wright is continually approached by fans who remember him either from his Tony-Award-winning performance in Tony Kushner's Angels in America: Perestroika [1994] or as the artist Jean Michel Basquiat, whom he portrayed so brilliantly in the film Basquiat [1996]. Wright is gracious to all of them. When a young man comes over and shakes his hand, Wright seems taken aback by the guy's familiarity, and it takes him a minute to place him. But when he finally does, Wright stands and embraces him warmly. It turns out to be a cousin of Basquiat's, whom Wright met while filming the movie. "Life is so strange," he says with a shrug after the guy leaves. "I moved to New York the month Jean Michel died. I later found out I lived on the fourth floor of a building where he used to hang out and cop [drugs] on the first floor. We have a lot of mutual friends, but we never met."

Wright, who was born and raised in Washington, D.C., didn't start acting until his senior year at Amherst College in Massachusetts. And the way he tells it, it might never have happened: "For lack of any clearer idea, I just started acting one day. It had been in the back of my head for a while, but I think in some ways I was afraid to do it, and finally I just stepped up. I think I was afraid of what I might say when I got onto someone's stage or in front of someone's camera."

Wright has been working on a number of films due out over the coming months: D-Tox with Sylvester Stallone; Too Tired to Die with Mira Sorvino, and Cement with Sherilyn Fenn. On screen this summer, he's the grave digger in Hamlet with Ethan Hawke, and he's impossible to miss as the bad-to-the-bone drug dealer (with the mellifluous name of Peoples Hernandez) in the much anticipated remake of Shaft.

MARTHA FRANKEL: Before Basquiat was released, there was all this hype about how great your performance was, how you were a shoe-in for an Oscar nomination. How do you steel yourself and keep it all in perspective?

JEFFREY WRIGHT: Before I did Basquiat, I had already won the Tony for Angels in America. But I still couldn't get an agent! I had dropped my agent at some point during the run of Angels, and it took me about a year and a half after winning a Tony to get another one. So that kind of makes you cautious about things. And I've never lost that caution. And for some reason, the work I do sometimes is perceived as not being accessible to a greater audience.

MF: Which of your earlier films do you think will stand the test of time?

JW: A Civil War film that I did with Ang Lee, called Ride With the Devil [1999].

MF: Oh, I loved that movie....

JW: You're one of the few people who saw it! I am so proud of that film. For me, it was speaking from a point of view that I really feel very aligned to and at home with. Ang Lee's point of view, which belies any kind of cultural lines and is actually a humanist one, really took me. It's about seeking the truth behind the mythology of America. Too often a story is examined through biased eyes, without a sensitivity for everyone who forged it. It's seen from the point of view of the great white savior, and rarely is the perspective of the slave a part. But for whatever reasons, certain powers that be felt that Ride With the Devil was too difficult to market. I think a lot of times audience sophistication is misunderstood by people who are marketing the films. If we could find film promoters who are as sophisticated or as smart about what they do as a lot of filmmakers are about what they do, then it'd be OK. If they couldn't market Ride With the Devil in the South, then they shouldn't be in the marketing busin ess.

MF: Tell me what it was like shooting Shaft. Because the stories about how Samuel Jackson and John Singleton didn't get along are legendary.

JW: Well, I look at it like this: When you go to a restaurant, the less you know about what happens in the kitchen, the more you enjoy your meal. If the soup tastes good, everything's cool, and you don't necessarily want to know what's in it. The same thing holds true with movies.

MF: Were you a fan of the original Shaft [1971]?

JW: Yeah, very much. It came out when I was about seven. I remember I shot something down in North Carolina years later and went to a place called Wrightsville Beach. I happened to call my mom from there, and she reminded me that when I was about three, we had gone to North Carolina, and we couldn't go to Wrightsville Beach because it was still segregated, as was much of the south. So, we had to go to the black beach, which was called Topsail. This was in '68. But for me, going to the black beach wasn't a bad experience, because everybody was there; it wasn't like I was missing anyone. It wasn't an issue. And that's the way I felt about Shaft. As a kid, it wasn't a big deal. I just figured this is the way things went, that there were always these black cinematic heroes who defined themselves in their own terms and had this social and sexual strength that they were allowed to admit. It wasn't until I got older that I realized what kind of cultural impact Shaft really had. Shaft was a pop culture figure along t he lines of, I guess, Dirty Harry--except that he wasn't as much of a racist. So yeah, I was always a fan.