Leslie Odom, Jr., portrays Sam Cooke
Leslie Odom Jr. is racking his brain for the right words when he clocks the latex-gloved visitor in his yard and realizes that a swab has arrived to tickle it.
“Oh, I have to take a COVID test,” he says over video chat from his Los Angeles home, putting talk about his new film, “One Night in Miami,” on pause. “It’s very, very 2020 of me.”
It’s nearly Christmas, and almost two weeks have passed since the actor and singer-songwriter appeared on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” after which DeGeneres tested positive for the coronavirus. Odom has since been quarantining from his wife, actress Nicolette Robinson, who is pregnant with their second child. After a slew of negative tests, Odom says this should be the last one.
By now, Odom is used to pandemic-induced deviations. This past spring, his month-long concert tour was nixed after two dates. He spent his summer co-starring with Robinson in the Freeform miniseries “Love in the Time of Corona,” which they shot from their house. And “Hamilton” reclaimed the zeitgeist in July, when the coronavirus prompted Disney to send a filmed production of the original Broadway cast — Odom included — to streaming instead of to movie theaters in 2021.
Odom, of course, relishes the shot of joy “Hamilton” brought viewers during a dreary 2020. But from a professional perspective, he acknowledges the early drop was “disconcerting.”
“When ‘Hamilton’ is going to be released, you’re going to try to set up things around that,” says Odom, 39, who won a Tony and Grammy for playing Aaron Burr. “Maybe I’m going to record a record, or maybe I’m going to get some meetings. This is maybe the biggest moment of my career, and I’m locked in the house — we’re all locked in the house.”
If Odom couldn’t capitalize on #Hamifilm mania the way he imagined, you wouldn’t know it from his recent body of work. For one, Odom did eventually record an album — his second collection of Christmas tunes, released in November — and collaborated with Sia on a reimagining of his 2019 track “Cold.” He also earned his first Emmy nom for his voice-over performance in “Central Park.”
Now, Odom is orchestrating double Oscar buzz for “One Night in Miami,” in which he plays soul music savant Sam Cooke and performs the original song “Speak Now,” co-written by him and Sam Ashworth. The movie, directed by Regina King and adapted by Kemp Powers from his 2013 play, imagines the discussions that went down Feb. 25, 1964, when Muhammad Ali (Eli Goree), then known as Cassius Clay, celebrated his heavyweight world championship by convening in a seedy hotel room with fellow Black icons Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) and Cooke.
“(Odom) is such a special talent as far as singing, dancing, acting, theater, TV, film — he really can do it all,” Goree says. “You feel like you’re next to somebody that, 30, 40 years from now, people are going to come up to you and say, ‘Wow, what was he like?’”
After Odom graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003, the Philadelphia product embarked on an inconsistent career on Broadway (in “Rent” and “Leap of Faith”) and the small screen (in the NBC musical “Smash,” most notably). Successes proved fleeting, setbacks proved dispiriting and, before his star-making turn in “Hamilton,” Odom considered quitting show business.
In the wake of “Hamilton,” Odom steered his drive toward new lanes: music and film. November 2019 brought the release of “Mr,” a fusion of classic jazz and contemporary soul that marked Odom’s first album of original material. On the big screen, he booked roles in “Murder on the Orient Express,” “Harriet” and the upcoming “Sopranos” prequel, “The Many Saints of Newark.”
When asked about auditioning for Cooke in “One Night in Miami,” though, Odom concedes he “ran from this project for an amount of time that embarrasses me today.” And Cooke wasn’t the only musical mastermind he resisted; Odom backed off when approached about playing Sammy Davis Jr., too.
“I wanted to do all of the things that no one would have dared let me do before ‘Hamilton,’” Odom explains. “For the very first time, instead of being, you know, a wack Sammy Davis Jr., I had the opportunity to be a really exceptional Leslie Odom Jr. So as you can imagine, that was a valuable thing to me. I didn’t want to rush to put on somebody else’s very large, ill-fitting shoes.”
But Odom’s representatives pleaded with him to reconsider “One Night in Miami.” Powers’s script lends a fly-on-the-wall appeal to the fictionalized banter among Cooke, Clay, Brown and X, as their larger-than-life personas fuel a crackling dialogue on faith and philosophy. At the film’s core is an ideological sparring session between Cooke and X over how to best use one’s platform to advance Black empowerment.
“My hesitation was being in, like, a Sam Cooke biopic, where it’s just essentially a trick, an impersonation,” Odom says. “But with this script, Kemp Powers wanted to use these men and their legacies, these archetypes of what they meant, what they stood for, and have a conversation.”
That conversation, Odom says, echoes the discussions that played out backstage at “Hamilton” in 2015 and 2016, as the original cast and crew grieved the tragedies of Sandra Bland, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile — Black Americans whose deaths became flash points in the nation’s struggle with systemic racism — and considered their own responsibility to speak out.
“We were in a unique position where we can say something and people are listening,” says Odom. “What is our responsibility to say? There were disagreements (backstage), and there were fights. So that’s the conversation that Kemp wanted to have, and that’s daring. That’s what made me get over my fear and jump in with both feet.”