A SHINING WRIGHT
Veteran actor is finally in the Oscar hunt. He's ready.
LOS ANGELES Held early each year at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif., The American Film Institute's annual AFI Awards luncheon is a glamorously understated seasonal ritual.
Jeffrey Wright finally found himself there this year, after decades of mostly being on the outside. “I'd been to a different AFI event, where I got a thing for Boycott,” he says, referring to the 2001 television movie, and the AFI Award he received for his portrayal of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “That was 20-plus years ago.” This year, he was celebrating with the cast and creators of the movie American Fiction, which was honoured alongside the likes of Oppenheimer, Barbie and The Holdovers.
At one point, Wright had stopped to greet AFI founder George Stevens Jr., who had cast him in one of his first significant roles, in the 1991 miniseries Separate but Equal, about the Brown v. Board of Education case in the U.S.
If Wright is in the mood for taking stock, that's understandable. Since American Fiction premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, he's been on an upward trajectory.
With American Fiction, nearly 30 years after his last leading role and after more than 30 years of being the best thing in just about everything he's in, Wright is in what's euphemistically called “the conversation” — about awards, better movies, bigger parts and the paydays that go with them — but mostly about recognition from an industry that's somehow never fully appreciated his talents.
His performance in American Fiction has been lauded by festivals, critics and industry groups, a flurry of recognition capped by Wright winning the Film Independent Spirit Award for best lead performance; a week and a half after the AFI lunch, he learned he had been nominated for his first Oscar.
Maybe the timing couldn't be better. American Fiction, adapted by Cord Jefferson from Percival Everett's novel Erasure, is a movie literally written for Wright. Thelonious (Monk) Ellison is a college professor and author who rails against the assumptions of the white publishing industry by writing a stereotypical Black novel under an assumed name; when the book becomes an unexpected hit, he grapples with sudden fame and fortune, the pressures of adopting a fake persona and the family stresses of death, dementia and sibling rivalry. Throughout American Fiction, Wright delivers a star turn, deftly navigating comedy, pathos, spiky social commentary and a sly performance-within-a-performance — all with his signature blend of screen-friendly charisma and judicious understatement.
Jefferson, who makes his writing-directing debut with American Fiction, had Wright in mind from the moment he first read Everett's book.
“When I finished the script and sent it out, every agency in town was sending me Jamie Foxx or Denzel Washington, Will Smith. Really huge stars,” recalls Jefferson, whose response was always the same. “No. Jeffrey's the guy. He's the only one that I wanted.”
It took Wright a minute to say yes.
“I was living a pretty close approximation to the circumstances that (Monk) finds himself in, in terms of being the caretaker of my mother,” the actor recalls. A little over a year earlier, his mother had died, after living with him and his two teenage children in Brooklyn. After his mother's death, Wright's 90-year-old aunt Naomi, who had helped raise him, moved up from Washington and began experiencing her own health issues — all in the middle of the COVID pandemic. “I had reached that stage in my life where I was juggling a lot,” Wright says. “The notion, born of blissful youth, that things get easier as you get older was just obliterated. The emotional hook for me was knowing that too well.”
Wright, 58, decided to be an actor while attending Amherst College in Massachusetts. He'd gone with his mother to see touring Broadway shows. “I'd see everything from For Colored Girls ... to Give 'em Hell, Harry! to The Wiz to Annie to 1776,” Wright recalls. And when he told his mom that he was going to pursue acting rather than attend medical or law school, as she expected, he says: “She was surprised. But she had been the catalyst.”
He was invited to enrol in New York University's Tisch School of the Arts but lasted only a couple of months; he had already appeared in the Lorraine Hansberry play Les Blancs, and he wanted to join that production when it travelled to Boston. Upon his return to New York, he auditioned for a play at the prestigious Yale Repertory Theatre and booked the part.
After making his feature and TV debuts respectively in Presumed Innocent and Separate but Equal, he worked steadily both in theatre and on screen, winning a Tony in 1994 for his portrayal of Belize, the nurse tending to a dying Roy Cohn in the play Angels in America (he would win an Emmy and Golden Globe for reprising the role in Mike Nichols's 2003 HBO adaptation).
But the path curved. In many movies, he was relegated to secondary characters, continually drawing the audience's eye in whatever scene he was in. He played Dominican drug lord Peoples Hernandez in John Singleton's 2000 iteration of Shaft, and he showed up in Casino Royale as James Bond's “brother from Langley,” CIA agent Felix Leiter.
In the early 2000s, Wright also focused on a project in Sierra Leone designed to create a new model for sustainable gold mining. “We almost got there,” he says. But when the venture failed, “I had to circle back to my day job.” In 2012, he joined his first Hunger Games movie and the HBO series Boardwalk Empire, and his passions were reignited. “The old feelings began to creep back in,” he says.
Since then, Wright has been more visible, not just in big movies such as The Batman and the Bond and Hunger Games franchises, but also in cult hits like Westworld and the repertory company of Wes Anderson, and then in Suzan-lori Parks's Topdog/underdog and John Guare's A Free Man of Color.
Wright seems to be enjoying the kind of praise that's been his due. His work will be on display at the Oscars ceremony March 10, when he will compete for best actor in a leading role.
The notion, born of blissful youth, that things get easier as you get older was just obliterated. The emotional hook for me was knowing that too well.