Jeffrey Wright: The Invisible Man (part one)
by Dennis Leroy Kangalee
Gordon Parks’ photographic rendering of Ralph Ellison’s spellbinding novel, The Invisible Man. (1952) This image correlates well to the dilemma of the Black artist who excels at his own pace, owns his own work and is less interested in joining than he is in expressing.
The image above by Gordon Parks is one I always drew enormous strength from. In my early twenties it hung on my bedroom wall, above my writing desk. It’s an example of an image overwhelming the power of its original source (or inspiration) and more effectively expressing its meaning. I think Invisible Man is a stunning work, despite how overrated and overlong it may be. It has one of the greatest opening and closing passages in all of literature and its form and style itself was a supreme example of an American tragicomedy; a literal Black comedy that has remained as elusive as it is now perfunctory and expected to discuss. In fact the book is so great, it has actually become…invisible.
Ellison’s first ten pages and closing 500 words are examples of the greatest writing in the English language and one of the most stunning portraits of existential angst, political uncertainty and racial consciousness ever created. And it works because the political is personal and it's intertwined with the entropy on the rise and the bleakness of living. There is a great deal of pain and anxiety. And while its virtuosity is unmatched, Richard Wright - a slightly better artist perhaps, but lesser craftsman - unintentionally outdoes Ellison in his novel The Outsider. It puts all of Wright’s previous fiction to shame as his audience now is solely the marginalized, the alienated Black intellectual, the dispossessed neurotic clinging to the outskirts, bobbing between acceptable mores, morality, ideas, and challenges. It may be in sync with Dostoevsky’s underground man as Ellison’s unnamed hero is - as it digs into the angst of being alive in a decaying, meaningless society – and not merely the horror of being a “Black” victim. Violence in society is a result of racism. For Wright, even Ellison, in spite of his blues laments for African-American, the Black person is humanity. To not identify with the Black person is to be cut off from the soul. But Wright’s antihero Cross Damon is a murderer like Raskolnikov, a kind of ever demented Hamlet. Ellison’s Invisible Man seeks refuge in inaction, essentially, carving out a way of living separate from society.
Both ideas are as haunting and searching and philosophical as Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, Godard, etc. Baraka never mentions him, but Wright’s darker works like this preclude his own existential and then revolutionary terror apparent in his early four remarkable one-act plays. Both, along with Baldwin and Ellison, transmit the blues. But each in their own way. I wish we had just this small variation in our popular Black filmmakers. Or…in the expression of our popular actors. It’s a shame we hold them to such debatable criteria like the Academy Awards or the New York Times or IndieWire. The variables and talents exceed such pat and easy categories and standards. Their touchstones are more complex and fascinating. Such actors do exist, but they are underground. (It’s your job to find them!)
The Blues is Black existential angst. The singers don’t have to remind you of that. One day our dramatic arts will catch up. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t attack racism. On the contrary. We should seek to eradicate it but through our own lens. Ways that are personal and not palatable to the oppressor class. It certainly doesn’t include asking for permission or being “given” a chance from Hollywood or Broadway. When we understand this we will advance in the arts, therefore culturally, and obviously politically.
When I used to look at Parks’ photo, I took great joy in the alliance the picture contained. I understood this man. I, too, had decided to live underground. As an artist there is great power in such a decision. Activists too. Certainly, Harriet Tubman knew the possibilities of being underground. Even languages and words that existed below the surface were once filled with a kind of love and power we are unlikely ever to see again - above ground.
Sometimes I feel this way about acting and our Black Hollywood actors.
Why do Black actors participate in movies that end up killing their subjects cinematically (i.e. destroying their intellectual impact or cultural gravity), if their characters are based on Historical figures or “famous artists,” or important athletes? Why do we feel we must impress white people or prove something to them? And in these films, in a bizarre twist, why do we feel it is ok if we give less than? That Whitney Houston or James Brown don’t deserve the same complicated, charismatic and theatrical interpolations that we endow Johnny Cash, Chet Baker, and Judy Garland with? Political figures are an altogether different story, most historically “important” figures pale on the screen and stage. Usually because those crafting them don’t really care about their contributions as human beings, they care about their popularity, which translates to financial opportunity.
Actors, out of the tradition many of us have been reared in, have a certain obsession with respect to the lives of certain characters in history while equating them with the majesty of Shakespeare’s greatest inventions or the Greek myths. Galvanized by Paul Muni’s stylized performance in 1932, Al Pacino molded his bizarre, yet compelling, Tony Montana character for Scarface as if mounting a production of Macbeth or Richard III, a role he actually studied and workshopped for several years, crystallized in his 1996 documentary. His Serpico, a decade earlier, is based on an actual living person but was granted this same Shakespearean intensity.
Actors from Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffmann to Daniel Day-Lewis and Denzel Washington to Kristen Stewart have painstakingly given us intellectually intriguing, if not always soulful, portraits of individuals they found interesting. I would not compare Streep’s robotic performance as Thatcher (The Iron Lady) to Chadwick Boseman’s poetically subdued Jackie Robinson (42) or Day-Lewis’ Lincoln to Forest Whitaker’s Charlie Parker (Bird), but those films could, in good taste, go head-to-head with one another, ultimately falling on the side of which actor you simply liked best or have more affinity with. We pretend that actors are just linked to movies we like – but that’s not true. We like them in a particular role and sometimes that role is even more interesting than the movie itself. Some believe you can’t separate the performance from the movie, but I disagree. Some directors lose their way with a film, it becomes a runaway train, with a script that never had much power to begin with, and so they focus on the construction of the actor’s performance. You will notice the more popular an actor becomes in Hollywood, for some reason, the worse the script is and the vehicle aspect of the movie is obvious. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. In fact, it is at least more honest than pretending that a movie is “important” when sometimes all a director and editor needs to do is creatively exhibit the behavior and interaction of two actors, which can result in fine entertainment if not powerful art.
Singers, like actors, can be judged on their raw talent – as well as their personas and what their styles mean to you. If they’re not particularly eloquent or remain mysterious, even if it's unintentional (Greta Garbo) – their spirits become meaning itself. James Baldwin in his brilliant and underrated The Devil Finds Work, recalls how a friend of his observed that Henry Fonda’s walk alone meant something to him and likened Fonda’s gait to that of a Black man. It’s an exquisitely strange statement, but carries power. For whatever reason, the walk meant something to the man and was above all else. It has nothing to do with “the story” or plot, etc. Like a grand painting or a dancer, the traditional actor should technically be critiqued on their presentation, physicality, behavioral choices, tenor of the voice, the use of their enunciation, their cadence. Miles Davis wrote in his autobiography that he was heavily inspired to phrase musically the way he heard Orson Welles and Frank Sinatra use their voices.
Actors carry a lot of meanings beyond their characters. My grandmother liked Bette Davis. I didn’t understand why until I was older. Davis’ entire style and power on screen -- as a woman, as a self-possessed creature – said it all, expressed enough for my grandmother to admire, identify with, or simply be moved by. Legions of actors from the 1930s up until the 1970’s—two entire generations - were picked and chosen by the common person to reflect or represent an aspect of their own personality or desires. What was it that led my grandmother, a Black woman from Venezuela and Trinidad – to identify with an American white movie star? Because she could see herself in Davis.
Identification is what moves you in art (or entertainment) and representation goes far beyond the color of our skin. It is about the content of character. (For the skeptics: ask yourself if members of the White oppressor class have the “privilege” to listen and identify with the Blues, as Janis Joplin or Stevie Ray Vaughn have, why is it so bizarre for Blacks to “get something” out of a white artist? Why the need to pretend we are being denied something…when, if it’s Black artists we want – there are a multitude of them waiting for your call.) We are not imaginative, self-loving or bold enough to think beyond race in 2023. We’re being held hostage by the cops in our heads that insist on diversity and representation in purely visual and symbolic avatars or token figureheads at corporations, instead of celebrating the character or personas of our actors. I don’t know about you but there was a huge difference between what Jimmy Walker had to offer and Esther Rolle. Both were Black, but I think I know who I would identify with. And it doesn’t bother me one iota that she was a woman.
“Women,” “Trans,” “Black,” “LatinX” — these are easy categories that we have given to the enemy in order to actually use against us. Art has become usurped, entertainment ghettoized, and identity weaponized against us. Like Marcel Duchamp, we should be leaping to challenge our way of defining ourselves and existence in art – on our own terms. Many of the definitions and categories we enable serve only the interest of the establishment.
We are not asking and confronting the hard questions: “The movie has more Black actors.” What does that really imply? If I hire more women in my office, what does that say? Shouldn’t the question, in the very least, be “What sort of Woman is it?” or “What type of Black person is there? A miserable Marxist? An empathetic Catholic?
What we are avoiding, for fear of offending, is specificity. What sort of Black person is the character? Is he educated and bookish from Newark or artistic and impoverished in New Orleans? What’s his politics? His desires? The actor’s kernel is the society’s boogeyman. Stanislavski himself would be rolling over in his grave, his system of acting has not garnered more empathy in society it has merely engendered sociopaths with incredible entertainment industry prowess. Today, everyone's an actor. And everyone is Black or LGBTQ and all of this generalizing is destroying not only the individual but our understanding of art. Currently our society is afraid of the particular, choosing to believe everyone is the same – all white women are “Karens,” all Black men are deviants, rapists, or…demented creatives like Kanye West - unable to handle financial resources he has at his disposal and therefore a perennially damaged child, escalating and embodying the American psychosis, but all the while doing absolutely nothing to help his own people, while emboldening the media empire’s that have made a fortune demonizing Black people. I only wish there was a talented left-wing Black pop star who was intelligent and had the temerity to destroy the masks, while going insane. Someone who cared about Black people and not existing in the medium of whiteness, on display as many Black celebrities crave. A unique idea or embodiment of who we want. We say “Gays” as if all gay people have the same politics and “Black” in the same sense. These are all generalized ways of dodging a bullet.
It is no longer enough for us to accept “Black.” We now need to be more distinct. Black people are the most diverse people on the planet. But you wouldn’t know that from Hollywood movies or most Western cinema, and I include all standard narrative arthouse movies in this. Because most of the “Black” people who inhabit these films all share either the same ideology or are possibly one of three types. That’s it. If Jews had only Woody Allen or Jonah Hill to perceive themselves in, they would go insane. Black actors - especially well paid ones - have gone along with the white entertainment establishment’s modus operandi to further homogenize and categorize people: we are making it easier now, more than ever, to give white people what they want, present European and Asian immigrants with the stereotypes they have always been fed, and to flatter Black Americans who know about “hood” life. What started in a circus tent has returned. The carnival is slightly different, but it’s still a freak show.
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Audiences project what they want to see and believe and be, at times, onto movie actors. (In theater, you may choose your favorite actor - but it’s more like a sports match, you may like them just based on their presence, on screen there is a fantastical element. Different, but yet the same.) The competent stage actor gives themselves, unfettered, and with passion -- and you appreciate them in a secular way. At times, the admiration borders on the religious; the ritual is singular, never to be repeated and more akin to a church procession as opposed to an amusement or dreamy window into another plane of life. The mysterious “aura” of a work that cannot be reproduced (as Walter Benjamin posited) is so incredible and special that it is one of the only real places art can exist. The more we focus on reaching “masses,” the more a work of art loses its power. Theater is where the flowers flow, the worms grow… cinema is where the birds fly, eyes in the sky.
In an age that posits full solidarity with the world’s oppressed (an oxymoron in an ever increasingly capitalistic world), — the Hollywood Black actor has become something of a representational tool and hollow figure- head of “importance” and “social justice” in a double world that seeks to annihilate or in the very least— castrate the Black actor or performing artist, curtailing any actual positive or revolutionary impact and paying them substantial amounts of money to do…either do nothing, constantly celebrate the past, or glorify the worst parts of life. Because of cinema’s history as a ruling class tool, and certainly Fascist instrument, Hollywood prefers the adorable minstrels or buffoons or shallow folk who are somewhere between God-fearing and mentally warped ingrate; a kind of monster unto themselves and therefore, always, to the motion picture camera.
In 2007, Will Smith was the biggest star in Germany. Smith has been the biggest movie star in Europe since the late 1990s. Less an actor than a kind of robust jester (albeit a gently intelligent one as there’s an actual heart and soul in there when he wants to be human), Smith’s tomfoolery on screen is an extension of his “Fresh Prince” antics of the 1980s and a genuine search to be taken seriously. All sources of amusement in the family are damaged. And when your lovingly “stupid” cousin Hal, who always made funny faces and threw himself down stairs just to make you laugh seeks to graduate, he must prove himself. What this means is that Black Hal must now prove he is serious and worthy of not money — but respect. And while your respect is important, it is the white ruling class’s money that absolves, anoints and hopefully separates him from you forever.
He now no longer willfully stumbles down stairs. He seeks to dive into a set of “stares” that require enormous gravity and maturity. But the stare is not to decimate, disturb or boor into the soul. It’s to posture and preen…on the stairs.
All the buffoon needs is a camera in his face, ridiculous situations and even sillier dialogue will replace all stares and stairs to earn him a rightful place in the white man’s cultural arsenal. Because the Black actor in 2023 is neither artist nor entertainer. He’s a tool. A tool who doesn’t want money. He wants the establishment’s acknowledgement, he wants the white man’s Academy Award. And for this he will give himself up, sell out, buy in, do whatever he needs to.
We claim we’re better or more just, but at the end of the day maybe we are more like Faust than we believe. Giving up your soul isn’t the worst thing (not if it’s to make great music) but to do it for money or status in the eyes of your oppressor, at the risk of the health of your own people, is the worst thing imaginable. Those who don’t readily go along with this program however are kept in line, marginalized, blacklisted or…rendered invisible. Not “unseen,” but tamed one might say. You notice the talent simmering, but it is absolutely not allowed to boil. And because of this, that great miraculous egg is never quite ready for us to eat. And so, we acknowledge its existence, but consider it invisible as it has no impact on our health. We don’t end up getting the protein we need. This is where all the popular arts collide and get drained, as if in a strainer. We are eventually served something that is obviously lacking something and we begin to prefer this instead of the nutrients we may be denied.
Jeffrey Wright
Jeffrey Wright may be Gen X’s greatest unsung screen actor. Along with Phllip Seymour Hoffman, he came to both elevate and continue a tradition in American screen acting. He is certainly the best Black character actor to emanate out of the 1990’s; chomping at the heels of Forest Whitaker and the megastar Larry Fishburne, possessing a brilliance no less underused as the intense Giancarlo Esposito or the offbeat Roger Guenveur-Smith. With the exception of Fishburne and Whitaker, all three have been either poorly written for and used, at times awfully directed, and are usually— intimidating to casting directors, Black and white, and certainly causing great insecurity in film directors. Their self-possession, unbridled behavioral choices - causes consternation to directors and producers who are unsure if they can “tame” such actors on set, so they are often given roles that don’t contribute anything, leaving their artistic potential off-screen. Paul Schrader said in the 1970s he knew it was important to work with the best possible actors and directors and editors and cinematographers as possible, despite how difficult they may be. Somehow mainstream Black filmmakers out of Spike Lee’s shadow have forgotten this and the white ones have other things on their mind.
Excellence, mercurial, offbeat, jagged, neurotic actors have always had a hard time in Hollywood. Especially the Black ones (Ron O’Neal and Christopher St. John are just two that come to mind).
Francis Ford Coppola always believed in Fishburne, Scorsese was wise to cast Forest Whitaker in The Color Of Money (in Pauline Kael’s review she had the right instinct to single out the three minutes he was on screen, foreshadowing what he would become). Whitaker is something of a curiosity. Although he became mainstream and less menacing or puzzling to audiences, his lazy eye always casts a spell on screen, it is as if he acts from an off-centered place. His command in The Crying Game, Diary of a Hitman, and even his comedic turn with Robin Williams in Good Morning, Vietnam kept his talent and screen charm front and center. He makes interesting choices in certain roles, less intriguing “professional” choices, but so what. No one has had a stranger trajectory than Robert De Niro so there is nothing to fear with my tribesmen mentioned in this article. Andre Braugher, Esposito, and Guenveur-Smith kept a fire burning on the margins of Hollywood; Whitaker became an establishment darling only second to Denzel’s persona as a “oscar winning” actor blah blah blah…and with that he soon became, well, uninteresting. As if he became “invisible” to those who originally admired him. He lost his early fans, gained new ones. This happens all the time.
Jeffrey Wright however never did anything to deserve his inconspicuousness. He didn’t fawn, nor offend. He didn’t win an award for playing a Black man who is so ignorant he thinks the gas in his stomach is a heart attack, he didn’t do a soft-shoe for anyone. What he did was impress his fellow actors, he left an indelible mark on his peers and even his idols – Samuel L. Jackson, to his credit, praised his Basquiat performance, Al Pacino once claimed that seeing Topdog/Underdog was like the manifestation of a new kind of acting; a year later they did endless rehearsals together in Mike Nichols’ Angels in America. (In fact, watch his acceptance speech in 2004 when he won a Golden Globe. It is revealing now to know how this would impact the trajectory of his professional work in Hollywood. He certainly was not kissing any behind.)
Wright (right) as Belize in the HBO adaptation of “Angels of America” (HBO Films)
But while Guenveur-Smith had his own solo theater works to use as his main source of expression (it doesn’t matter that no one knows how to use him, I think his last screen presence that had any weight was in Kasi Lemmons’ very good Eve’s Bayou, ironically also the only film where I see Sam Jackson acting with some soul, a humanity reaching out to other Black peoples instead of “cool White producers”) his A Huey P. Newton Story was possibly the greatest single theatrical experience of my life in the 1990’s. Topping Al Pacino in Oscar Wilde’s Salome at Circle in the Square, Eric Bogosian and Spalding Gray’s own solo pieces, Robert Lindsey in Cyrano de Bergerac, and even Jeffrey Wright in his Broadway debut as Belize Angels in America. Belize was a role he himself worked hard to develop and pushed Kushner to fully embrace other, more deeper points-of-view. He made Belize a complex individual, not a cardboard Black homo-stereotype we are all accustomed to. His proud gay man had a bite. He was flamboyant and deadly. His wit was sharp and his smaller parts - cast as fantastical, hallucinatory figures in Harper’s drug-fueled visions, were weird, but charming in that enigmatic way he almost cosmically communicates to us, without giving himself away, leaving us instead with a strange aura. This aura is everything, it is what you respond to with certain performers, especially when you can’t describe it.
Wright’s cast photo for the 1994 Broadway production of “Angels in America: Perestroika”
Belize was a true collaboration in the sense of character development. Guenveur-Smith’s Huey gave me chills, no doubt, but Wright’s Belize, just a few years before, became interstellar because of the zeitgeist and it was a turning point in the culture when a play or single performance could still have a momentous impact before we got swallowed up into the new millennium’s right-wing terrorist hysteria. Works like A Huey P. Newton Story and Angels in America will never ever happen again in commercial theater (Broadway or Off-) and the reason, besides the right wing swing of the Liberal states, is purely because of the technology we are engaged in and how we now regard performing, theater, what is art. The internet changed our very perceptions (and souls). But we’ll get deeper into Wright’s Belize performance in the second installment of this article when we look at Mike Nichols' film adaptation of Angels, which premiered in 2003.
Jeffrey Wright is a kind of riddle; a mysterious energy that expands with time. If Giancarlo Esposito can be fierce and igniting (School Daze, Do the Right Thing, Fresh, etc) and Guenveur-Smith edgy, Wright is…more like twisted clay, than a still life. His volatility may not explode or leap as with Esposito, his strangeness is not as affected as Guenveur -Smith’s. His slow burn gaze and reception to everything around him is seen in his eyes, and often the way he holds himself. There is something magically impenetrable about his face and acting — that what he gets off his chest comes through so delicately like poetry.
Again, Guenveur-Smith’s poetry is on stage for sure, never translated to the screen (to this day I cannot watch his performance in Do the Right Thing, for example, and he was absolutely belittled the way Spike used him in Malcolm X); Wright’s impact in theater was no less powerful: I mentioned Topdog/Underdog but his Fool to Ron Liebman’s King Lear — a strange creation altogether on the heels of their Broadway collaboration in Angels - was thoroughly absorbing and funky but it seems that while he became the “bigger “ Hollywood actor financially than Esposito and Guenveur -Smith, he suffers more artistically.
Wright is the ONLY American actor of my generation who at one moment in time, circa 1992-1999, represented the best of American stage and film acting. Like Phillip Seymour-Hoffman, another actor whose majority of films I did not like but whose talent I deeply admired, although he is overrated where Wright is underrated. Jeffrey represented the last of a certain type of actor who was bound to the stage first and foremost and willing to serve only the author/the role. Although I have personal problems with the theories and constrictions imposed onto actors in the name of “tradition”, I respect any artist’s devotion to their craft or their art as it is representative of their entire existence.
When I first saw Wright in painter Julian Schnabel’s mediocre Basquiat, I was instantly blown away. And other than the trite surfboard imagery Schnabel tried to use as a convention and foreshadowing of Basquiat’s short intense life (several people chortled at this when it was shown in NYC, in those days New Yorkers had no problem defusing corny expressions or silly techniques) - otherwise, however, there was a hush throughout the entire audience. Now, I had never experienced this in a new movie that was in a theater. I had seen it in classics that were re-released, but the only other time I can say I might have experienced the transcendent hush in a movie theater was when I saw The Crying Game. Also, James Foley’s Glengarry Glen Ross. Seeing that cast alone in a claustrophobic environment was thrilling. I still get chills thinking about Jack Lemmon’s plea (“my daughter…?”) to the reptilian Kevin Spacey at the end of the film. Other than that, most of my favorite movie acting experiences were on home video or television, which is why I am not against streaming like so many cinema purists. What I am against is bad directing, writing, and mainly acting. It needs to be reclaimed.
Acting can only exist as an art if we extricate it from the clutches of Hollywood. Performance art is the life-blood of creativity, sans literary or musical ambition. It is the return to childhood, to primitive imagination and the vitality of mind-body-spirit expression.
Acting on stage or film does not need a fiscal sponsor nor permission from any authoritative system. It can be its own thing (Smith, Bogosian, Gray, even Anna Deavere Smith prove this) but…it is rare in any sense, especially cinema, when a performance unfurls and creeps up on you with so much vulnerability, magnetism, and charm.
Wright did me in when, as a heroin-addicted Basquiat, looked at himself in the mirror and proceeded to squeeze out the lesions and acne forming from the drug and could only whimper and leer hatefully at his own reflection. It was classic Actors Studio Private Moment acting, which is often hard to imbue on screen or left out altogether (Schnabel was right to leave this in and he helped give us more time to be affected by Wright). I was so mesmerized by his performance, I went back the following week to see it again. Jeffrey Wright was the Black actor I had been waiting for on screen. His brilliance as the tortured painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, his ability to make us empathize with him, his slightly hesitant and mannered way of speaking, his curious cocked-head, his incredible body language…this was nothing I’d seen before. Not from the generation of actors I grew up with. But it must be noted: it’s this brilliance, this sort of over-electric acting, that terrifies the white Acting establishment and ShowBiz world. When you have a Jeffrey Wright in that sphere, you have to have directors who understand him. Unfortunately, he has not found a real collaborator outside of Wes Anderson, who deeply admires and adores Wright. Wright has done two pictures with Anderson and his feelings towards Anderson are reciprocal.
Wright as General Gibson in Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City”
It dismays me that Anderson is noted as the premier Wright director. He was the centerpiece of The French Dispatch and is a marvel in Asteroid City. But there is so much kitsch around him, it destroys his stretch towards absurdity. Anderson is cheeky and tangy and colorful like a handful of mints. It’s sweet even when it’s sour. But his movies are just ironic advertising campaigns. Usually for nothing. But he attracts some very talented actors who are willing participants in his odes to…irony and culture. And for an actor as tremendous as Wright, it is baffling. I am sure it’s fun working with Anderson and after all if a filmmaker writes and offers you something unique, if not necessarily meaty, it certainly makes sense to jump with both feet. But I find it slightly embarrassing. It’s like taking a five-star home cooked meal into a candy store.
Acting, directing, and filmmaking are the last strangleholds for the white man. We beat him (if you care about that sort of thing) in all the other arts, including visual arts. People may not be rich and famous, but there’s no way a David Hockney can go against a Faith Ringgold. Impossible. If you look at pop music you will see how while it is much more even, in fact, the scale is still titled more in our favor. Righteously. With the legacy of the likes of Michael Jackson, Prince, James Brown, Stevie Wonder, Ike & Tina, Miles Davis, Etta James, Robert Johnson, Aretha, Otis Redding, NWA, Earth, Wind, & Fire, Richie Havens, Taj Mahal, the Motown canon, etc – you’d have no problem stepping aside. But in cinema, in theater – because images and behavior are the vital element here – the white fascistic order must make it clear what they will tolerate and won’t. That’s why you seldom see invigorating performances from Black actors, in interesting roles, in interesting ways. And that’s why the conspiracy to modulate, curate, and contain the impact of Jeffrey Wright has been clear to everyone who knows how brilliant he is. Don’t you ever wonder why it seems as if the most boring and sparkless actors get hired and turned into stars? Yet how does a talent like Jeffrey Wright get paid millions to be invisible in a movie like James Bond? I have seen No Time to Die and Casino Royale and don’t remember him at all. How is that possible?
Easy. Especially when you are being erased. We will explore how this erasure works, why Wes Anderson has kept Jeffrey Wright alive artistically, what the big blockbusters gained from him and what he lost, and prepare for his much anticipated film, based on the Percival Everett novel, Erasure directed by first time director Cord Jefferson. It is a role and theme worthy of Wright, and I will expand on this in the next installment of this article.
And remember if you can’t make films or plays yourself, support those that do.
— END OF PART ONE —