‘I think we have inherent biases’: Marchánt Davis on playing a ‘white guy with a beer belly’ in Reality
Should Marchánt Davis ever find himself being interrogated by the FBI, he will be more prepared than most. His first ever leading film role, in Chris Morris’s bleak 2019 absurdist comedy The Day Shall Come, found the 30year-old Brooklynite playing the role of Moses Al Shabazz, a Black power preacher in Miami who finds himself set up by a team of bumbling FBI agents aiming to frame him as a nukedealing terrorist.
In his latest role, in Tina Satter’s gripping Reality, he plays R Wallace Taylor, one of the two FBI agents who interrogated NSA whistleblower Reality Winner (played here by Euphoria and The White Lotus’s Sydney Sweeney) using what many have described as unethical – and, given the fact that the agents didn’t read Winner her Miranda rights, somewhat baffling – techniques. “When Chris Morris found out I was doing Reality, he sent me an email – from like, one of his 12 emails that he uses,” Davis says, laughing. “He was like: ‘You’re on the other side, mate!’”
Speaking from his apartment in Brooklyn, Davis is goofy and affable, occasionally scatterbrained; he has just woken up, and is wolfing down the remains of his breakfast as he logs on to our Zoom call.
Where The Day Shall Come, written by Morris and Succession’s
Jesse Armstrong, was a surreal comedy that nonetheless captured the casual incompetence of high-level law enforcement – “Chris hit the nail on the head with those agents: they’re so often heightened and made to seem really cool in television, but most of these folks are bumbling” – Reality is fully vérité, its script drawn from the actual FBI transcripts of Winner’s 3 June 2017 interrogation. “These are the words they said on the day, from the coughs to the sneezes to them clearing their throats,” says Davis.
It makes for a short, intense pressure cooker of a film, in which casual, naturalistic exchanges – the agents asking Winner about her workout regimen, for example – have a whiteknuckled intensity. It is as far as possible from what Davis calls a “Hollywood-ified” version of these kinds of stories. “I think there are a lot more questions left in the air after this film than answers – hopefully, a piece like this forces people to ask some real questions about what it means to be American.”
Born in Philadelphia, Davis grew up playing saxophone, before a teacher advised that he might be better off trying his hand at acting. He ended up loving it, and doing an undergraduate degree in musical theatre at Berklee College’s Boston Conservatory before going on to do his master’s at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
In the years since, he has taken on increasingly splashy stage roles: a part as civil rights organiser Stokely Carmichael in The Great Society, alongside Brian Cox; a handful of roles in Ain’t
No Mo, a satire in which the US government offers one-way reparations flights to Africa for Black citizens; and currently, alongside Sean Hayes in Good Night Oscar, a biography of the comedian Oscar Levant. Working in the big leagues has clearly been a rush for Davis; on the opening night, he posted a photo of himself, grinning ear-to-ear, at a table with Will Arnett, Matt Damon and Jason Bateman; when I ask about the show’s run, he quickly launches, thrilled, into an anecdote from a few nights before.
“Sean is very beloved in the industry, so a lot of his friends have been coming throughout the run, people I’ve always admired. I was running out the stage door the other night and Henry Winkler runs to shake my hand; I turned, and I was like, ‘Oh! I love your work!’” he says. “And then he goes” – he slips into a pitch-perfect Winkler impersonation – “‘I love your work.’ And I go, ‘No, but you’re awesome!’ He goes, ‘And you’re awesome.’ I’m like, ‘No, I’m serious!’”
With all these projects, Davis is attempting to evoke the multiplicity of Black male identity. (He has also recently published a children’s book: A Boy and His Mirror, about a Black boy who learns to feel comfortable in his own skin after being taunted by classmates about his hairstyle.) He got the opportunity to do the same with Reality; in real life, agent Taylor was white, meaning that Davis felt free to build his own characterisation of him. “I knew when I signed on that the real Wally Taylor was like, ‘a 40-something white guy with a beer belly’, is the way Reality described him. Part of that is a bit liberating in the sense that I could look at this through a different lens,” says Davis.
In his mind, a young Black FBI agent would have more at stake than his older white counterpart – hence the performance Davis gives in Reality, in which he plays the straight man to Josh Hamilton’s character, who trades in geniality and dad jokes. “I think by putting a Black body into that space, you sort of open up a different perspective on the scene; he has a need and desire to do his job well, without failure, without fault. He probably hasn’t spent 15 years with the bureau; his want and desire to press Reality might come across a little differently. He can play the bad cop because he’s just trying to excel, he wants to crack the code before this other guy.”
Davis clearly has a keen interest in Reality beyond just his role in it. He was initially meant to play Agent Taylor in Is This a Room, Satter’s play from which she adapted Reality; when he sat down with Satter to discuss the film, he had “a thousand questions” about Winner’s story.
“Why did they not read her Miranda rights? And at no point did Reality say: ‘I don’t want to have this conversation, I’m done’ – which is also very fascinating, right?” he says. “I grew up in a household, in a world, where I knew not to wilfully give all that information to law enforcement without a lawyer present, but she did – and I just found that very fascinating.”
Unlike most biopics, Reality doesn’t provide much in the way of character or narrative arcs; all you really see is a fragment of an interrogation, a single piece of a much larger puzzle. Sweeney, in a recent interview, has said that the film “is not about left or right, or what’s wrong or correct”, and simply offers a window into that one moment in time. Davis says that creating the film involved a kind of push-pull: “Using the bits and pieces of information that Reality had” and “inferring on our own, given the circumstances of that day, what we knew about what it took to do that job on that day.”
For viewers, it means that Reality is rife with grey areas; Davis stresses that Winner did commit a crime, and the agents at her house were simply doing their jobs. “I think we have inherent biases, based on the last few years, on law enforcement, especially as people of colour. I think depending on the lens from which you watch it, you might think it’s critical. But I think Chris Morris is probably a bit more critical of law enforcement,” he says, cracking up. “This is just the facts!”
Reality is released in UK cinemas on 2 June.