Role of a Lifetime with Jeff Wright, Award-winning Actor
Willy Walker: Good afternoon, everyone and welcome to the Walker Webcast and my discussion with my old and great friend Jeffrey Wright. Let me dive in, Jeff, for a quick intro, and then we'll dive into the capsule.
Jeff Wright: Not so old.
Willy Walker: Not so old, exactly. You got it. Let's see. Just by the calendar years, not the two of us being so old. So speaking of that, I didn't know that you were born on Pearl Harbor Day in 1965, which is my brother's birthday. I didn't know whether you knew that my brother Taylor was born on the same day as you.
Jeff Wright: The same day. Wow.
Willy Walker: Jeffrey has received numerous accolades, including a Primetime Emmy Award, a Tony Award, a Golden Globe Award, in addition to his recent nomination for the Academy Award as Best Actor. Wright began his career in theater, where he gained prominence for his role in the Broadway production of Angels in America, for which he won a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a play. His first starring film role was as Jean-Michel Basquiat in Bastia. His other notable films include Shaft, Syriana, Lady in the Water, Cadillac Records, The Ides of March, and Rustin. He also acted in the West Anderson films The French Dispatch and Asteroid City, and has played Felix Leiter in the James Bond films Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, and No Time to Die. By the way, I thought I'd never seen that, Jeff, but like Felix Leiter in James Bond and Beetee Latier in Hunger Games, the writers, those last names of Leiter and Latier, I thought were a little bit too close to each other.
Jeff Wright: It would say Latier. I think that was actually an add-on for the movie. I don't think his last name is referenced in the books.
Willy Walker: Okay. He received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in American Fiction, which we will talk about today. Done a bunch on television which I want to dive into a little bit Jeff in Boardwalk Empire, Westworld. His voice has also been used as Isaac Dixon in the video game The Last of Us Part II, as well as The Watcher in the Marvel Studios animated series What If. Jeff has two college-aged children, lives in New York, is from Washington, DC, is a die-hard skins fan like me. Went to Saint Albans School, which is where we met and played lacrosse together. Was an All-American lacrosse player at Amherst College.
Jeff Wright: Easy, all NESCAC.
Willy Walker: All NESCAC. see Hereford said you were All-American, all NESCAC. I thought you got All-American when you jumped out of the goal and went and played attack your freshman year.
Jeff Wright: I was all NESCAC, I think freshman and sophomore year. And then I started acting and two of my buddies were All-American senior year. What happened to you, dude? Yeah, I was the lead scorer and all that stuff. And then I started acting and it all went to hell, Willy.
Willy Walker: So I was on a call earlier today with our mutual friend Johnny Rice. And he said, your acting career really started impersonating Coach Allenson McNair and Bob Brown at Saint Albans. So I thought maybe to start this off, I'd ask you to do a Bob Brown impersonation.
Jeff Wright: Bob Brown, I don't know if I do a great Bob Brown, but Johnny is partly correct there. There was a lot of work put into character study with those guys. I do a good Mr. Dubski. You remember Mr. Dubski's physics teacher? Brown, you've gotta have a dental piece in there.
Willy Walker: How about Coach McNair? I remember Coach McNair running me around the football pitch. He drove me hard.
Jeff Wright: Although Bob Brown does have one of the most stinging and lasting quotes, I think of any of the coaches we played with. And it involved one of our friends, whom he referred to, He’s Just A Pair Of Shoes Out There. You just have a pair of shoes. I'm going to protect the less-than-innocent by not naming his name, but he's Shoes to this day. But I've lost my touch with those impressions I think, Willy.
Willy Walker: You lost your dad early Jeff and you were raised by your mom and by your aunt.
Jeff Wright: That's correct.
Willy Walker: And when I was going back and forth with McGuire, get ready for this. He said, “You got to bring Barbara into the conversation.” And part of the storyline Jeff, in American fiction is that your character Monk is thrust into a caretaking role for his mother when she's diagnosed with Alzheimer's. And there are some scary moments in that movie when you're out on the beach trying to find your mom. There are some sad moments in the movie, when your mom makes that comment to your brother about knowing that he wasn't gay, which was obviously super painful at that moment. And then some really fun moments, like when the mother in the film is dancing with your brother's half-naked gay boyfriend at the wedding reception. I'm just curious, as you were filming it Jeff, any memories of your mom that came up saying, “I've been here.”
Jeff Wright: Well that section of the film, I think is a really welcoming one for a lot of people. Some of us reach that point in our lives where we are disabused of the youthful idea that life gets easier as we get older. And it can happen overnight. My mom passed away, about a year or so before I got this script of Colon cancer, it was actually kind of shockingly fast. As you said, I was raised by my mom and my aunt, her eldest sister, who came to live with us in Brooklyn immediately as my mother was ailing. And so I'm an only child. I was looking after my mom and doing the best I could with her in her final phase and, meanwhile, looking after my aunt and my kids. And this was November of 2019, just a few months before the pandemic set in. So it all came at me in a rush. So when I read this script, I was really taken by that aspect of the film. The film is a social satire. It's dealing with a lot of tricky issues around race and identity and inclusion conversations that are being had across the country right now. And it's really well drawn and it's satirical. So it's funny. We throw darts around the room, including at ourselves, we try not to take ourselves, I don't think too seriously as well. And therefore there is a framework within the film for some healthy listening, I think, maybe a little bit of an elevation of the dialog around these things while we have a laugh, at least within the two hours that the film runs. But for me, it was that family portrait that exists on the other side of the film. The guy has written a novel under an assumed name. My character, it's kind of a send-up of urban fiction. Turns out it's his best-selling novel, but he writes it under an assumed name and has to play this dual identity as this character stag our lead, this caricature that he creates based on the reference to the 19th-century pimp caricature. And anyway, he's leading this absurd dual life where he's misperceived by the outside world and he's putting on this mask. Meanwhile, in his real life, he is pretty ordinary in that it's something we all recognize. He just has to be the adult inside the room of his family managing a series of crises, and he's primarily playing caretaker to his mother. So there's something I think is so wonderfully subversive about that aspect of it because it's like, “Hey, this is the reality. This is my life, this is who I am. It's a very simple thing. It's a very recognizable thing in its humanness. And it was that side of the story that I related to on an intimate level because I was there, and I knew the pressures that it exerts on a life, creatively, professionally, personally. I know that the exact circumstances for me were not the same but I understood what that space looks like. I spent a lot of months cursing out insurance company representatives and various clinicians and answerers of the phone on various hospital wards. And so it's been really gratifying to hear from a lot of people who have seen the film that they felt seen by that aspect of the film and validated. Some say it was tough, but at the same time, it moved me in a way that was surprising. So for me, that's the soul of the movie. That's where it is. When my son saw the film, he said “I see a lot of myself in that character. I see a lot of myself in terms of trying to be my authentic self but being underappreciated or misperceived by the world outside.” And he said, “it's also a beautiful homage to Grandma.” And I said, “Yeah you got it, man.”
Willy Walker: Your mom took you to the theater as a kid. And I've heard you Jeff talk about the fact that when you went to the Ford Theater, to the Kennedy Center and watched the show that you actually would think that the show went on behind the curtain after it ended, which I thought was so wonderful, thinking about you being eight years old, saying they're continuing to act behind stage and the story continues on. And as I thought about that, when The Hunger Games came to an end, we were all really happy that The Hunger Games came to an end, but in a movie like American Fiction, isn't the idea that the story goes on? And if the story does go on there, how would you hope that the story of American fiction goes on?
Jeff Wright: Well, I think that is actually the idea with any of these pieces, whether they be plays or films, that a world is created. A reality is created. That's the beauty of what we get to do when we do this work, and when we work with people who are aspirational and who are smart, gifted writers. We in some ways inhabit a kind of idealized reality. There may be difficulties inside of it, but the perspective on these things, we hope, is somewhat heightened. Maybe if you found the right writer, the actual approach is kind of an enlightened perspective, it's elevated. We create these worlds, and the idea is for the audience to suspend disbelief and think that, for a moment anyway, that that is a reality. And so I guess it implies that the world does go on at least inside the mind. I was tuned in to that, I think in a pretty big way very early on. I remember that absolutely vividly. Maybe I was just hopeful. But it seemed to me the world was back there, in the depths of the space behind the curtain. Those were magical nights for me. They were super memorable. We saw a range of things, just everything that came through from New York. Didn't see a lot of the local theater stuff, but every touring show that came from New York, practically my mom took me to see. The Fords, and so much history there, and Kennedy Center, but mainly the Fords and the National and the Warner.
Willy Walker: And you didn't do any acting at Saint Albans. It was Michael Bennet who was the lead role. I think it's hysterical that Michael is in politics and you're the famous actor and what's real, what's Memorex, and who's actually got the acting role and who's actually got the real role.
Jeff Wright: That's exactly right. There's a pretty blurred line between politics and showbiz. But Michael was a wonderful actor. He did everything. It was A Mother's Courage they did. I remember maybe a couple of Eugene O'Neill plays. I remember one time we were sitting in the front row because we were idiots and we were giving... I think we might have really been throwing things. Throwing just trying to distract him from being complete, and immature knuckleheads. But he was a wonderful actor. But I think he's a better senator. I like his pragmatism and his level-headedness. He's a serious thinker, and he's a grinder, he always was. Pretty dogged in his efforts.
Willy Walker: We're super lucky to have him here in Colorado, I'll tell you that.
Jeff Wright: I am amazed that he has maintained a level of grace and sanity in the midst of all that's gone on in the US capital in these last few years that he's been there. He's a tough guy too. We used to play football together as well.
Willy Walker: I remember when you guys were in A form and I was in C form and looked up to you and McGuire. And Bennett is like the stars of the A-form football team.
Jeff Wright: Back then, I played middle linebacker and quarterback, that was before everyone else grew and I didn't. And Michael, I remember played cornerback and Michael, he wasn't the biggest guy. He'd spirited late in high school or maybe even after. But the little guy on the corner. I would see him, man, he would dive in there and he take it pretty hard, and he'd get back up, come back to the huddle, and go out and do it again. I always remember him being a tough one out there and he still is.
Willy Walker: But one of the things that I couldn't quite foot Jeff, was that when asked about why you hadn't started acting earlier, one of the responses you gave was that the thought of getting up on stage in front of all those people just man, that was a lot of pressure and a lot of eyes on. And then I think about you as a lacrosse goalie and there is no other position in team sports that puts more eyes on and more pressure on someone than playing lacrosse goalie. He decided to do this, but he decided not to do that until later on. It seems a little inconsistent.
Jeff Wright: You might be right. I was just anxious about being on stage for whatever reason, and even before I was acting, I think I remember having dreams about it and having experiences where the words wouldn't come. And it was just like the classic actor's nightmares, even though I had never really done it except Christmas school play in kindergarten or something like that. But goalie was thrust upon me though, which is the reason I played both goalie and extra man midfield. Because I started off in sixth grade in A form playing attack or playing midfield then seventh and eighth grade played attack. But I used to screw around in the goal before practice. Eighth grade, Steve Pryor, our goalie was sick for a game and our coach was Jake Reed. He was an All-American for Maryland, a goalie. And he said, “Who wants to play goalie? I see our play.” After the game, he said, “Dude, you have got to play goalie. From now on, you have got to play goalie.” There was a penalty on the other side and those short sticks would be brought out to me by the second string goalie, and I'd play at the top of the midfield. I think they called it Nat O, eventually. I would occasionally put one pass there, the other guy, he loved that, of course. And then I'd run back to the goal. But the thing about goalie that I came to appreciate is, exactly as you say, it's the last line of defense. And it is a combination of being a little bit sideways, a little bit touched and a little bit Zen. And I love that combination.
Willy Walker: Do you feel that way when you act? When they go Action, do you get into that same space?
Jeff Wright: There's absolutely a level of focus that's required that's identical to the focus that you employ when you're playing sports. And that was one of the reasons when I started acting in college, I was a little bit conflicted because I was drawing from the same thing, and I couldn’t quite juggle it at the time. But there’s absolutely the same focus. You’ve got to pull yourself down, you’ve got to breathe, you’ve got to find that kind of Zen-like center. And that’s what I loved about being in the goal is it’s meditative in a way. It’s a little bit crazy, but it’s meditative. And the thing that changed for me in goal was one day in practice when I was getting scored on, I think it was Paul Fear. He scored.
Willy Walker: He scored on a lot of people.
Jeff Wright: And one day it just flashed on me that it hurt more to be scored on than it did to be hit by that ball. And when that realization hit me, it was over. It was a new day because, man, it just took everything. It was being scored on and it was seeing other people celebrate at my expense that I just could not tolerate.
Willy Walker: So funny you say that just because I remember so distinctly. You may remember Tatty Hall. And Tatty was playing goalie, and one day he was in the net before practice, and I took a shot that he didn't see coming, and it caught him in the inside of the left thigh, but a welt on the inside of his left thigh. And that was the end of Tatty's goalie career. And as you probably know, he went on to play lacrosse at Yale. So it's a good thing that I got him out of the net and up to midfield. Anyway, too good.
Jeff Wright: I did the opposite.
Willy Walker: Exactly, which I love and is probably why you were such a good goalie. So Political Science major at Amherst, not drama, not acting. And in one of your first roles, Jeff, you were interacting with Harrison Ford, and he made a comment towards the director of referring to him as sir. A moment ago, you talked about these people with these great ideas and teamwork and how everything comes together. Talk for a moment about the impression that Harrison Ford had on you when he called the director, sir.
Jeff Wright: That was a film called Presumed Innocent. I think it was shot in 1989. It was very early in my career. It was the first major film that I played a very small part. I'm a bearded blur in the background as Harrison walks by early in the film. He plays district attorney, I am a young district attorney working in the office yet again. I got the gig because I had a political science degree. I just started acting, just moved to New York, had done a couple of plays here and there but I was pretty lost on a movie set. And this was out in Kaufman Astoria Studios, out in Queens. If I had a subway token to make it back to my apartment in Manhattan, I was lucky. And I go in there and I'm sitting next to Harrison Ford. He's at the peak of his career at the time, and we rehearsed for about a week, it's kind of build the authenticity of the office. And there were some other folks who were lawyers as well who had been pulled together to make up the rest of that section of the cast. Alan Pakula, who had directed All the President's Men and just a legendary, old school, wonderful, brilliant director, was at the helm with this. We got to the point of filming, and we're on set one day, he calls out from across the room, across the set to Harrison. He says, “Harrison” and the response was, “Sir.” And it set off a bell in my ear because it wasn't an environment that just anything goes and what you might expect on a movie set. People have this impression of what we do, and it's often not on the mark. I didn't know what to expect, but what I learned that day was, he was teaching me a level of respect for the director and for your collaborators and for the process. And he was showing me that there's a type of decorum that comes along with this thing that's not unlike what we learned in school. And I realized two things: One, what was expected. But I also realized that I knew how to do that. Because I had been trained in that way. And it stayed with me throughout my career. I say this all the time, what we do when we work on stage or on film, particularly in film, because there's so many moving parts, what we do at its best is collaborate. What we do sometimes at its worst is collaborate. It depends on who you're working with and how you treat one another. Also depends on the talent and the capacity of everyone around but it's a collaborative effort. I love this aspect of it more than anything. I've grown to love that we work as a kind of microcosm of society. And again, people don't really have an appreciation for this if you're not on a film set, but they're people from various walks of life, various talents, all more or less artistically inclined, whether you be an electrician or a carpenter or a grip moving the lights and the like or working in the office. You want to be there because you liked making films. You like telling stories, but you do it as part of a larger whole. When I'm in front of the camera and the camera's on me, my job is to fill the frame. But that's no more important than every piece of effort that has gone into creating that frame. And everything that everyone is a part of is about simply that. It’s about telling the story frame by frame. And I love that pressure as you described because it is like being in the goal. Okay. We're 18 hours into the day now, everybody's tired. We've got a couple more shots to get and we're rushing to get them all. And you've got to center yourself. Calm yourself. Do it well. Do it efficiently. Get on to the next one. Do that well efficiently and go home. Nobody wants to be there all day wasting a lot of time. And there's an appreciation that's shown from the crew that I really value when they see the actor who's got all the attention on him, most often making more than everybody else to do that work when he's respectful of everyone's efforts, everyone's time and of the process and Harrison, he tipped my hat to that a little bit.
Willy Walker: I heard a number as I was doing some research for this, Jeff. I heard you in a number of instances after filming big films talk about a grip who was on the set, who became a really good friend of yours and mentioned them by name. So your comment about the teamwork and everyone who goes into that production, not only did you be friends with them, but you gave them props afterward in doing a lot of the PR around the film. I'm sure that reflects upon you when you show up on a set. In other words, they're clearly got to be actors who have bad raps and actors who have great raps and someone who sits there and says, “I've worked with Jeffrey before and he's amazing. And he was really nice and he understood the importance of everyone around him.” That's got to make them more collaborative with you in helping you and saying, “We saw something here,” or what have you. It's quite something.
Jeff Wright: I met Harrison's agent. Hadn't met him before. This was in Cannes last year. I was over there with Asteroid City, Wes Anderson's movie, and I told him that story and he said, “that's pro shit.”
Willy Walker: There you go. That's it, right there.
Jeff Wright: What you want to be.
Willy Walker: All right, we just talked about Harrison Ford. I want to jump forward to Basquiat because that was your real breakthrough role. And, as we've just talked about, you'd met Harrison Ford in ‘89. I know you met Sidney Poitier somewhere in there. And I want to loop back to Sidney and what he told you in a moment. But you're filming Basquiat, and Basquiat had this incredible cast. Willem Dafoe is there, and there are all these amazing other actors. But then all of a sudden, David Bowie shows up. Now, I gotta tell you, Jeffrey, I know you've met a lot of people, but when I thought about you sitting there having David Bowie show up to be an actor in that movie and play Andy Warhol, I was just like, talk about a really cool experience. Talk to me for a second about David Bowie, because I mean, they're actors and then there's David Bowie, the musician who ends up being an actor in that movie. How cool.
Jeff Wright: He meant so much to me through his music. There were periods of my life when Hunky Dory, that album was serving as a score. He is just supremely talented. And he was cast to play Warhol. Dennis Hopper was in this film. Gary Oldman, who was a big influence on me. Hopper was a big influence. Chris Walken, a massive influence on me and Willem, as you say. But David was kind of holding the space by himself. And the first day that I met him, I was painting in Julian Schnabel's studio.
Willy Walker: And Julian was the director.
Jeff Wright: Julian was the director. And he gave me leave to basically come whenever I wanted, night or day, and paint to understand the process of painting and try to be comfortable with it when the time came to shoot the film. Some days I'd be in there and there'd be a dozen and a half actual Basquiat paintings lined up around me. And I would take images from one, images from another, and put them on a canvas and try to create my own kind of Frankensteinian Basquiat, just to really understand, again the process, but also to understand his imagery, his language, his poetry, all of that stuff. And so the producers were also collectors of art. So they were going around buying up his work in anticipation.
Willy Walker: How come you didn't get into your contract, that part of your pay was for a Basquiat. Just one!
Jeff Wright: My contract was a Schnabel. I got a Schnabel, and I was too hungry and young at the time to actually fight for it. Another thing, I didn't have an agent at the time. That's a long story. That's another story. This is after I won the Tony. I couldn't get an agent. So I had an entertainment lawyer who was Chris Walken's lawyer as well, who negotiated that contract. He did very well, but I got him a Schnabel out of it. Don't remind me, Willy.
Willy Walker: I just so some people know when I saw that and was thinking about if you got paid the Basquiat. The most expensive Basquiat yet ever sold is now $105 million, and the top ten are between $30 and $105 million. So if you'd just gotten one of those top ten Basquiat, it would have been a really good day.
Jeff Wright: Willy, I'm aware of those figures.
Willy Walker: But I guess the other piece to it is in that role.
Jeff Wright: But you were asking about Bowie.
Willy Walker: Did he sing a song for you?
Jeff Wright: We sang together, actually. But I hit a bad note. I met him, I was painting in the studio. The door opens and in he walks. I'm on my knees on this canvas, working down on the floor. And he comes down and he kneels down next to me. And he says, “Do you mind if I watch?” I do a terrible David there. And I said, “Well, I think I'm going to have to get used to it.” And we had a laugh. We were off from there. He played some music for me from his album called Outside. We were in the hair and makeup trailer. Gary Oldman and I, and David walks in and he’s like, “Hey, you want to hear some music in my album?” I’m like, “What?” This unreleased album, we're like, “Yeah, of course, we'd like to tolerate your indulgence there, Mr. Bowie,” and then f*ck were freaking out. He puts on this music and it's just brilliant. And he's a guitarist. I just remember this distinctly. This guitarist named Reeves Gabriels, who plays this beautiful, abstracted crazy lead guitar, beautiful stuff. It's just got a little abstract lyricism to it. It’s just badass. And David's air guitar to it as we were listening to it. And we're like, “What?” It's like David Bowie's in the air guitar, I do it. But one day I did. I used to love that Bing Crosby duet that he did.
Jeff Wright: He does this thing with his face at one point. Bing Crosby's moment he's doing the baseline, “parapapampam”. And David goes, “Peace on earth. Can it be. It was for my child and your child.” But he goes, he does this thing where he goes, “peace on earth.” And he kind of considers it. There's this moment where he considers it, and it's just this beautiful, just a small detail in his performance that I always notice. That was just kind of enthralled. I think I butchered the lyrics there, but I actually asked him to sing that with me. It seemed that way because they did. We had a laugh together, but I think I hit an off note and he kind of stopped. I remember it once he had incredibly attuned ears. I remember we were watching some video that Julian was showing us that related to something inside the film and like the playback was off and there was like this odd sound that came out of the speaker. And David, it was hearing something that he couldn't bear. He was a supreme musician. So, yeah. He didn't want to do too many more duets with me after that.
Willy Walker: So, you mentioned all the great actors in that movie, but one, as I’ve listened to a lot of your interviews that comes back, is somebody that you really look up to and think is at the top of this game is Gary Oldman. What is it about Gary that is so unique as an actor that puts him in your top five and what was it about him that is so unique as an actor?
Jeff Wright: Personally, what's unique is that his performance in Sid & Nancy really opened my eyes to what was possible and influenced my performance in Basquiat, and not insignificant ways, and also in Shaft, and also in Ride with the Devil in these ways, because those are the films that I did right at that time. And it was shortly after I'd seen the film, not too long after I'd seen the film. It was really in this way. He showed a range of emotional generosity that I don't think I'd seen before. He had this extreme range that he was willing to go to that I had never seen before. And so I thought, the poles were here. And he said, “No, no, they're well beyond that.” And it just gave me a license to just turn it up a few notches. Also, the ways in which he played character, I appreciated. Dustin Hoffman was one early on that really struck me just in the way he crafted personas, from one film to another. I just loved that way of working. And I thought, that's the way that it was to be done. It just seemed like that was the magic of this stuff is being able to transform and I think it also has a kind of philosophical quality to it in that it seems to me an expression of empathy. This ability to recognize oneself inside a person very much unlike you. To recognize there's more similarities between us all than difference. I think that approach is kind of pretentious when you talk about this work in that way. But I do think there's an element of that. And there are certain actors who step outside of themselves and they subsume their own egos and find something in someone new. And I think that's interesting. Gary, actually, in an interview recently said that for him playing with character in the mask was a way of hiding, and that he felt, more recently playing roles that are more similar to him. He felt naked and terrified by the idea. There may be something to that. I like the idea of playing with mask. I think it does allow a certain freedom, but I don't know if I'm necessarily terrified by playing a character closer to myself, I just haven’t found any.
Willy Walker: Before we go to American fiction, the advice that Sidney Poitier gave you, which is very interesting in the context of what you just said about Gary and how Gary had this great breadth of emotion and being able to take these roles. Poitier advice to you is you don't need to play the note. Expand a little bit on what he meant by you don't need to play the note.
Jeff Wright: Well, that's my interpretation of it. What he said was one word at the end of this film, and it was the first kind of significant role that I'd had in a major production. It was opposite him. He was playing Thurgood Marshall. The mini-series was separate but equal. I was playing based on the Brown versus Board of Education case. I was playing the youngest of the attorneys that worked with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, a guy named Bill Coleman, who went on to be, I think, transportation secretary under Ford. Anyway, my first significant role opposite Sidney Poitier. I have no clue, like what I'm in for. Again I think I was hired because I had a little background in this stuff. And I went for it. Cleavon Little was in that as well. And a guy named Albert Hall who played chef in the chief in Apocalypse Now, who was like, God, so meaningful to me. But Sidney, of course, Sidney is, he's at the top of the masthead. He was just such a gracious man and so generous and so extremely talented and naturally just elegant, beautiful guy. At the end of the production, I said to him as I would dopey 24 year old, “Mr. Poitier, you have any advice for me?” And he said. “Irony. Irony.” That's all he said. And I knew exactly what he meant because I was playing everything straight as an arrow. No spin on that ball at all. And he was saying, “Come at it. Don't just play that straight note. You have the opportunity to work with it. And really what we're doing is interpreting the word on the page. We're not reading the word on the page. It's our job to interpret it and to fill it with tone and life that makes it compelling and makes it more lifelike.” So yeah, that was his advice, “Irony, young man.”
Willy Walker: American Fiction opens up with you in a college classroom, one would assume. Doesn't actually put it on a college campus, but I'm assuming it's a college professor. And the N-word is on the white board, and there's a white student in there offended by it, and you say, “Well, I've gotten over it. Maybe you should.” And she gets up and storms out of the room. Later on, there's a scene where you're spreading the ashes of your late sister in the ocean and the neighbor, presumably on Cape Cod, walks along and says, “do you have a permit to spread those ashes?” And your brother and you simultaneously tell them to go get lost. Then you're also invited in the movie to be a judge for an exclusive literary award. And the guy who invites you to come on all but says the only reason we're asking is because you're black. So there's a lot in there, Jeff, that you and the director Cord Jefferson kind of take a hatchet at wokeness. Are you anti-woke?
Jeff Wright: I'm glad you asked that. I don't even understand what that word means. Here's why. That word has been co-opted now by the right in America to essentially mean anything that they oppose. The word woke comes from a Honey Ledbetter song. Early 20th century. In which he is speaking to his audience, black community of the South, Telling them to keep woke to the dangers of the American South at that time, the rise of the Klan, post-reconstruction, and backlash to the extension of rights to Black Americans in this country. Violence. That's the origin of it. However, that word has evolved. It's evolved in the black community to the point in the last decade or so. If you're woke, if the young brothers say you’re woke, you're certainly mistrustful of the government. Probably seriously suspicious of a vaccine. Mistrustful of a wide range of American institutions. If you're woke, you're actually a lot like these right-wingers now.
Willy Walker: As you just said that I was thinking, are you talking about Trumpers or are you talking about black Americans?
Jeff Wright: They co-opted that term and used it as a weapon against people who are just working and maybe not always working well, but working toward the expansion of rights to everyone in this country? So I'm just going to take a little bit of an exception with that term from the start because I really have no idea what it means.
One thing that Cord and I talked about in our film is that we didn't want my character to be perceived as a kind of celebrant of the perspective of the black bourgeoisie classist in his take. We didn't want the film to be that. We wanted him to be flawed. We wanted him to be perhaps an unreliable narrator at times, and we wanted him to transform over, to self-reflect and change. He's not the same man at the beginning as he is at the end of the movie. He goes through a process of self-discovery. We also wanted to be very cautious that this guy is not representing a conservative position on race, inclusion, identity, but that he's representing a perspective that comes from within, that comes from within the black community. And as well exist on the left. There is a self-criticism that we wanted to bake into this story that I think is healthy and seriously important. On the right, the idea, the conversation, is being had around these issues of race and identity and inclusion, but it's a conversation that's being had so that those things can go away. It's a conversation that's happening at the same time that the history behind these efforts to broaden rights in our country is being rejected as un-American. There's an attempt simultaneously to ignore all of the historical pressures that have led to this unlevel playing field, all of the historical pressures that have been in place really to create a permanent underclass among black Americans in this country. There's a disingenuous interest in these issues now or a destructive interest in these issues from certain segments of our society.
What we wanted to reflect was an interest in these issues, not so that they disappear, but so that they can be handled better. Handled more effectively. Handled more justly. Because they should be. Not because we want to throw darts only at the white liberal. We want to throw darts at everyone, including ourselves. And what I find interesting about our film, there are some conservative voices here if you listen closely in the film, but they're largely not present in the story because of what the take is. I love that they find the place inside this, though, because there's been a lot of interest. I've seen from various writers and trying to co-opt it but we want everyone to join us in this conversation, to join us in this film, to find a place within this film, both in terms of the personal side and also in the side that deals with these thorny social issues because we want to come together and talk about these things in a way that's digestible for everyone and in a way that leads to progress. At the end of the day, what else is there to do?
Willy Walker: I thought one of the great lines, Jeff, “white people don't want to know the truth. They just want to be absolved.” And then you turn to and you go. Fortunately, that's not my problem. It was a great line. Hey, not my issue.
Jeff Wright: But I think that's a poignant line. And I think, from the right and the left. To some, we just want to sweep it under the rug and move on. Some as a portion of the society may be white folks who want to do that. But that's not going to get the job done. That's not going to keep history from circling back and biting us in the ass, which we're seeing it do. And it's not going to keep this group of people in our society from suffering from these historical ills and acting out in ways that are counterproductive to their interests and counterproductive to the larger interests of our society. So, that's a lot of good lines in there.
Willy Walker: There are a bunch of good lines.
Jeff Wright: The best line in the movie, though, I forgot to put in.
Willy Walker: Which is what?
Jeff Wright: It was in that scene. That first scene in the classroom. Actually, it refers to that first scene in the classroom. The scene that follows is this interrogation with the colleagues in which essentially, he's asked to leave, he's canceled. He'd go on, leave for a while, take a break. And we shot that second scene after a few cuts of the movie had been done, and that was an additional day. There were a few days that we had, one day that we had to work on a few scenes. And Cord and I, we were going over the scene and talking about a response because we’re saying, “You made your students uncomfortable with this reading of Flannery O'Connor's book,” Short story, actually, “The Artificial X.” That's the name of the book. It's a book on Southern literature. She's a Southern Gothic American writer, that's the name of the book. Words on the whiteboard behind me. So the guy, one of the colleagues, says, “You made your students uncomfortable.” And I said, “Cord we should say something like, ‘Well, don't take it up with me.’” And Cord said, “Take it up with Flannery O'Connor.” And Cord said, “Yeah, I'll get you a Ouija board.” That was the line. There's a lot going on. I actually had a back issue going on that day. I had to get a chiropractor to come on set to help me walk. I got injured biking. Anyway, got to that moment and I forgot to put that line in, but I think it's certainly the best line not in the movie. “Take it up with Flannery O'Connor,” “I'll get you a Ouija board.”
Willy Walker: So there's another line that I heard you say in an interview about family. And one of the main reasons why you came to the film, as you said previously, was how it is the relationship between the son and the mother and if you will, all the dysfunction in the family. And I heard you say that a friend of yours said that family puts the fun in dysfunction. That was such a great saying because all of us have dysfunction in our families and think about family being fun as far as dysfunction is good.
Jeff Wright: I've got to credit someone you know for that.
Willy Walker: Who's that?
Jeff Wright: John McDonnell.
Jeff Wright: He came to see a screening. We actually went to SoFi to see the formerly known as The Skins play The Rams. During his visit, he saw a screening of the film, and he said, “Yes, my cousin says, they put the fun in dysfunction.” So I got a footnote, John, there.
Willy Walker: It's awesome. That's great. But then also in the movie there's that line which I think is really great, where your brother in the movie, Cliff says to Lorraine, “I don't want to impose.” To which Lorraine says, “You can’t impose your family.” And I have to say, I think every once in a while, people who aren’t members of family forget that. That you forget someone who is part of your family can't impose. In other words, you have to deal with this stuff. I thought all of that was so telling about families and dysfunction. And then also, quite honestly, you got to deal with the stuff, and particularly at the end of life, you sit there and say this isn't for me to take care of. And it is, you got it.
Jeff Wright: It's inescapable.
Willy Walker: One other one that Cliff says, which I thought was great, where they're talking about you having a blind spot to your dad in the movie, having cheated on your mom, and your brother Cliff says, “Enemies See each other better than friends.” I got to say, the moment I heard that Jeff, I was like, I went through my Rolodex of those people who I'm not all that fond of, and I said to myself, I know a lot more about them than I know about my great friends. It's such a great line.
Jeff Wright: Well, Cord he's got a sharp pen. And he just won the BAFTA this weekend for adapted screenplay, which was well deserved. Super sharp writer. He dove into this project a little bit on a personal agenda, I think, as did I, when I read it. Percival Everett, who wrote the novel Erasure, which is based in DC, recently had a conversation with Cord. And Percival said, “I don't write autobiographical novels, but there's a lot of me in this man.” Cord, saw a lot of overlaps with himself, when he read the book. Likewise, I did when I read the script. And so I think the three of us are kind of variations on a theme, but Cord really dove into this with a good deal of passion. And he says that reading that book was the most moving experience he'd had with a piece of art in his life and sense. He was on his A-game with this one.
Willy Walker: And just one aside that most people probably don't know, but Cord comes from a mixed-race family and his maternal grandfather was so disappointed at his daughter marrying a black man that he basically dis-communicated himself from Cord and his mom. Heavy stuff.
Jeff Wright: That's right. And his mom was white and liberal. His dad is a black Republican. You’ve done your homework Willy, I'm very impressed.
Willy Walker: I’ve done a little bit of homework. So, just a couple of quick things to close this out, because I know you have a lot of things to do. First of all, Nancy Nicholson and Mouse, are they still around and how often do you have to feed them?
Jeff Wright: They're absolutely around. They're not going anywhere anytime soon. My turtles that my daughter named, I should say they're our turtles. But she came home from Canal Street with her mom one day with a brown paper bag and these, half-dollar-sized turtles, which are now massive things, pancake-sized. The reason that they are not larger is because I feed them sparingly. Don't feed them every day. I tend to feed them twice a week. I'll feed them Saturday and Sunday, and then I'll give them a kind of snack on Wednesday of a calcium chew, and then occasionally I'll go out and get them their favorite treat, which is 30 rosy, red minnows, which is great. Tires them out. Sometimes a few of those minnows are clever and manage to survive. I think one survived for over a week once, but most often, they disappeared in a few minutes. But don't feed them too often because they'll outgrow the tank quickly. I got them in an 80-gallon tank which I probably need to expand. I'm going to have to break out a wall to do that. But they're characters, and they're thriving. They're doing very well. Hearty creatures if well-maintained.
Willy Walker: I know you skateboarded as a kid, broke your leg playing in a pool when you were 14. I'm just trying to foot it out. Did you miss a season with that 75-pound Metro Boys Club team, that was the best team you ever played on, other than maybe the Amherst lacrosse team your senior year.
Jeff Wright: Jesus. Willy. You know too much.
Willy Walker: It helps when you grow up with somebody, my friend. It’s one thing to go to Wikipedia. It's another thing to actually know the person's life.
Jeff Wright: No, that was after my eighth grade.
Willy Walker: You were well over 75 pounds. And so that it's pretty brutal back in sixth grade.
Jeff Wright: So I didn’t play football freshman that year because my leg was toothpick-sized because the cast was on all summer. So I ran cross-country with Skip Grant. But that happened out at a place called Skate World, I believe.
Willy Walker: Oh, I remember Skate World.
Jeff Wright: And that was like their last run of the day.
Willy Walker: You're now a surfer. Where do you like to surf?
Jeff Wright: When I'm out here, I live right by the water. So I basically just make it out to back behind where I stay here. I go out to a place called County Line here in LA. And also, I'll go down to the First Point, which is probably the most famous break out here. Really beautiful wave. Appealing point break. It's super crowded out there, but it's super fun, too. A lot of characters. That's probably where I surf the most and where I learned the most. I started out in Hawaii, went out there on vacation with my kids, and then went back to film the Hunger Games later that same year in 2012. I took a couple more lessons, bought a board of my own, and started going out. And I more or less haven't stopped since.
Willy Walker: That's awesome.
Jeff Wright: The waters softer than the concrete Willy.
Willy Walker: That's for sure. So final question. Win or lose at the Oscars. And again, congratulations on that nomination.
Jeff Wright: Thank you.
Willy Walker: But you're now playing sort of on a different playfield. You're in rarefied air being an Oscar-nominated for best actor role. Gives you a little bit more agency, if you will, as it relates to what you're doing, the types of projects, anything really that you're sitting there saying, maybe I want to write some more, maybe I want to direct, or do you want to just keep cranking along at what you're doing so well?
Jeff Wright: I've got a couple of projects that I'm thinking about from a director's point of view. I'd like to… working on a couple of scripts. One particularly that I think could be very interesting, I'd like to direct. I'd like to work with actors. I think I have a pretty good eye. I was photography editor for the Saint Albans News, senior year, so I'm kind of always, looking through a lens. And I'd like to apply the perspective that I've gained over many years of being on sets and telling stories in that way. I think I would enjoy it and it's nice to do this stuff and not be in front of the camera as well. That'd be a nice break. So looking at a couple of things.
But as far as the nomination goes, I've been doing this long enough as well to understand that I don't take anything for granted. As I was saying, I won a Tony in Angels in America. One of the greatest plays of the last several decades. I talked to four different major agencies after having won the Tony, I couldn't get an agent. After four, I stopped talking to them because if they couldn't figure it out, I wasn't going to explain it to them anymore. And I went on my own and ultimately, I linked up with my agent. And I've been with the same agent now for 20 or 26 years. I don't know how long it's been, but, so my point is, that I know this business. I know how it works to an extent. And I don't assume anything. So this is a wonderful recognition. It's coming from my peers. Super appreciative of that. It's coming as well, because we've got a massive level of support from the studio backing this film from Orion and Amazon MGM that have put the effort and resources and time and energy into our film to make sure that it was seen, to make sure that it found an audience, but also that it was seen by those who consider these things, the academy voters and the like. So that's been the difference here, in terms of this project. All of the ingredients came together in a way that cooked a dish that we can say now is Oscar-nominated. But I don't take any of it for granted. And you're only as good as your next one, Willy.
Willy Walker: That's for sure Jeff, I would just say this. First of all, I'll be sitting there watching and fingers crossed. Second of all, if you win it, my friend Jamie Lee Curtis won last year. And I've got a picture actually next to my desk at home that I took with my iPhone of Jamie on ABC. And so it's got the legacy of her giving her acceptance speech last year. And so, here's to taking a picture of you on national television receiving it. And I'll put the two of them right next to each other as the two people I know who have won Oscars.
Jeff Wright: That'd be cool, man.
Willy Walker: Thank you for your time. I am super appreciative. What a joy. I'll tell Hereford you say hi when I see him tonight. And when I see Bennett later on this week. A real trip down memory lane today for me, Jeff. Thank you so much.
Jeff Wright: It's been a long time since we've known each other. It's so good to see you today, man, and see how far you've come as well. From that little guy running around with a lacrosse stick in his hands man, it's been a lifetime from now. It is wonderful to see you, bro.
Willy Walker: Same thing, my friend. Take care. Thank you.
Jeff Wright: All right. Take care. Bye.
