![]() All those things I learned to do when I was on the stage. Because I’ve got something interesting happening in my body language or how I present myself. When I hit the screen, a lot of times audience members go, I want to go with him. And whether I talk about it or not, I carry that information around with me I know who that person is or what their history is. Having the theatrical background allows me to imagine what nobody’s ever seen on film. How far in school did he go? Has he been in the military? Has he been in jail?Įven now, with Nick Fury, he had a whole other life that we hadn’t dealt with. I was taught that if my character’s background is not there, give him one. I imagine all that time onstage helped shape the kind of actor you are now. It was a very, very sharing and communal world. If I went to an audition that I knew I wasn’t going to get, I could always call somebody I knew that was better for it. I don’t know how young people are in New York now, but we were a very big family. I remember auditioning for Platoon, but Keith David used to always get all the jobs everybody wanted. And Wesley Snipes and Laurence Fishburne. I was there when Morgan Freeman got plucked out of the theater world. And there was a really, really great group of actors running around there that we either worked together, auditioned together, or went to see each other work all the time. ![]() The Frank Silvera Writers’ Workshop was going on. Billie Holiday Theatre, Henry Street theater. I mean, Joe Papp had the Black-Hispanic Shakespeare Company, and Negro Ensemble Company was bustling. It was a great time to be an actor or be a Black actor in New York. We drove right into the middle of that parade ’cause we were going to stay with some friends down in the Village. My wife and I moved to New York on Halloween Night 1976. That was a pretty long period early in your career when you were doing stage. Photo: Gerry Goodstein (1987) Julieta Cervantes (2022). By the time it got to Broadway, it was very different than the play I did at Yale. August was still writing the play when I did it. Because my Boy Willie would be informed by Lloyd Richards’s directing. She didn’t want me telling him who I thought Boy Willie was so he could form his own character. She gave me one note: DO NOT TALK TO JOHN DAVID ABOUT BOY WILLIE. I just learned to do like I always do: Take a note don’t say anything. She did a huge job teaching him stagecraft. Boy Willie is tough! Especially if you’ve never been onstage before. His son John David wanted to do a play Denzel figured that was a good place for him to start. He had the responsibility of putting all those August Wilson plays on film. She and Denzel Washington are really close. Was this a project she’d been thinking about for a while? She had seen the original production in which you starred. I was more or less a moderator, which was fine. I didn’t have the responsibility of being the engine that runs the play just being a supporting character. First of all, my wife, LaTanya, was directing it. What was it like to return to this play as Boy Willie’s uncle?ĭifferent. ![]() You were in the original Yale Rep production back in 1987, playing Boy Willie. I saw you in The Piano Lesson in October. What comes through from watching him, and talking to him, is his profound love and respect for the craft of acting. In many ways, he hasn’t really stopped, even as the industry has gone all-in on the kinds of blockbusters he regularly stars in. He was raised in segregated Chattanooga, Tennessee, and started in the business alternating between serious work and pure entertainment. The breadth of Jackson’s screen and stage roles remains astonishing. And to hear him talk about Secret Invasion, the new Disney+ Marvel series that follows former Avengers honcho Nick Fury (whom he has been playing since 2008’s Iron Man), it’s clear he has thought long and hard about how to ground the character in something resembling reality, no matter how fantastical the story. The 74-year-old actor, probably the most bankable movie star of our time, is a major part of multiple franchises: the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Star Wars universe, the MonsterVerse, the Shaft-verse, the Kingsman-verse, the Unbreakable-verse, the Tarantino-verse. Jackson’s authoritative, impassioned delivery. But none of these quotes would have become part of our pop-culture lexicon if it weren’t for Samuel L. Think about some of these iconic movie lines: “I’ve had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!” “What the fuck happened to you, man? Shit, your ass used to be beautiful!” “And that’s the truth, Ruth.” “Yes, they deserved to die, and I hope they burn in hell!” “Hold on to your butts.” “And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.” The words are the work of writers.
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