The sky’s the limit
Degrassi alum Stephan James takes career to new heights with starring role in Race
Stephan James is not yet a household name.
Despite prominent supporting roles in the acclaimed civil-rights drama Selma, the CBC historical miniseries The Book of Negroes and the sports drama When the Game Stands Tall, the 22-year-old Toronto native is still best known for his recurring role as highschooler Julian on two seasons of TV series Degrassi: The Next Generation.
With Race, a new biopic about Jesse Owens in which James stars as the celebrated Olympic runner and long-jumper, that may be about to change.
James was named one of four rising stars at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival. In Washington last month to promote Race, the actor, who describes himself as shy by nature, seems to be keeping the modest uptick in attention in perspective. Despite playing a sprinter — a role for which James began training at Georgia Tech during his days off from Selma and where he perfected Owens’ idiosyncratic upright gait — the actor acknowledges that the career he’d like to have is closer to a marathon than a dash.
James says he doesn’t want to become pigeonholed as someone who plays only historical figures. “I want to be a chameleon. I don’t want be seen as a specific type, but as a blank canvas.”
The story of Race centres on Owens’ gold-medal performances in four track-and-field events at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the controversy surrounding the novelty of a black athlete outshining Hitler’s Aryan heroes. James says he knew “very little” about the story before filming.
“I knew (Owens) had won some races,” he says, “but I didn’t know how many he won or when he won them. I didn’t even know what he won them in.” (For the record: Owens took the gold in both the 100- and 200-metre sprints, the 400-metre relay and the long jump, in which he set a world record. In the buildup to the Games, there was an international debate about boycotting the Olympics in response to Hitler’s record of discrimination and the German leader’s efforts to use the athletic competition as a propaganda tool.)
The message of Race, James believes, is a celebration of colourblindness. “Jesse Owens didn’t see anything — or anyone — in colour,” he says. With the encouragement of Ohio State track-and-field coach Larry Snyder (Jason Sudeikis), Owens concentrated on running, leaving the politics to others.
“I actually see a lot of similarities between us,” says James, who met Owens’ three daughters to get a personal sense of their father. “They really just saw him as Daddy, not some superhero. I also never intended to become a celebrity. For me, acting has always been about playing cool characters and telling great stories.”
For James, there’s evidence that Owens’ breaking of racial barriers in 1936 was not the end of one of those great stories, but the beginning. Recent controversy over the lack of diversity in this year’s Oscar race, for example, is a reminder “of why these stories are still important to tell,” James says.
The fact that certain films with black actors or directors — Creed, Straight Outta Compton, Concussion and Beasts of No Nation — seem to have been overlooked in this year’s Academy Awards is less troubling to James than the fact that there are so few of them to begin with.
“We have to have those opportunities to be considered, right? We have to have the opportunity to tell those stories, so that people can even put us in the conversation,” he says.
“This is what a film like Race helps to do. We’ve told a story about a man who did incredible things, at a time when a lot of people didn’t think this was possible. A lot of people thought it was inconceivable for a black man to go over to Nazi Germany and to win like he did, especially in the face of Hitler and his vision of Aryan supremacy. Race shows how far we have come as a society, but also why we can’t afford to go backwards.”
Diversity in Hollywood may still be a problem, but James sees signs of change, especially on TV. “A show like Empire had the biggest first season in years, in terms of numbers. People want to see diversity on their screens, and the numbers don’t lie.”
James demurs when asked to describe his next project. There are hurdles to overcome, but he believes he is living in a world where anything is possible.
“Who knows? Maybe someday I’ll play a Marvel superhero.”
Jesse Owens, the African-American athlete who ran rings around Nazi notions of a master race at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, deserves a film as great as his own feats. Alas, Race isn’t it.
It’s a solid and well-meaning movie, to be sure, spanning the period from Owens’ enrolment at Ohio State University in the fall of 1933, to just after his performance at the Summer Games in August, 1936. Owens took home four gold medals for the United States.
But the broad-brush portrait chooses to leave out the athlete’s controversial post-Games life, including an unsuccessful run at a showbiz career — it worked for Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller, but he was white — and his flip-flopping stance on African-American athletes giving the black-power salute at the ’68 Games in Mexico City.
Perhaps that’s too much plot even for a movie that runs to a little over two hours. But it does leave viewers with a somewhat simplistic picture of the man.
Oddly, Race comes most alive in interstitial scenes that have little to do with Owens directly. We witness a heated debate among members of the U.S. Olympics Committee — Jeremy Irons facing off against William Hurt — as they discuss the possibility of a boycott of the Games. The motion was quashed by only two votes.
Later, Leni Riefenstahl (Carice van Houten), director of the Nazi propaganda film Olympia, finds herself alternately fighting with propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and acting as his linguistic go-between for visiting American officials. At one point she delicately asks if she should “translate or interpret” their remarks.
While on the subject of Germany, it’s worth noting that Race features one of the worst Hitlers in recent memory — honestly, it looks like a guy in a rubber mask — and reuses its one computergenerated aerial shot of the newly built Olympic Stadium, as well as throwing in a flyover by the Hindenburg, just when this viewer was wondering if it would make an appearance.
Meanwhile, Owens’ life follows a similarly as-you-expect-it trajectory. As portrayed by Stephan James (Selma), he’s a decent, hardworking fellow, though not above a touch of well-earned arrogance. (At a track meet in 1935, he broke three world
records and tied a fourth in less than an hour, essentially setting a world record for beating world records.)
Owens’ coach at Ohio State is Larry Snyder, played by funnyman Jason Sudeikis in an odd but ultimately justified casting choice. Tasked with being adamantly colour-blind as he trains Owens, Snyder winds up the target of a weird form of discrimination himself, when the U.S. Olympic team won’t let him join as a coach. He ultimately pays his own way to Berlin, and Owens’ threat of a one-man boycott unless Snyder is recognized plays as one of the more thrilling moments in the film.
The rest you know. Owens gets taunted by Ohio’s all-white football team, who won’t let him use the showers until they’re finished. He is amazed to find that in Berlin there are no coloured dorms; he gets to room alongside his white teammates. Hitler — or whoever that guy in the mustard suit is — manages not to be there to shake his hand. Everyone who matters to him gathers ’round the wireless to hear the results from the Games.
Meanwhile, Owens’ wife Minnie Ruth Solomon (Shanice Banton), and their daughter get about the same time in the movie as it takes Race’s subject to dash the hundred metres. But maybe this is director Stephen Hopkins’ tribute to Owens — he is determined to get us from biopic point A to B in the shortest, swiftest way possible.