GLYNN TURMAN
“Rustin”
When George C. Wolfe was casting his civil rights movie “Rustin,” he got Colman Domingo for the titular Bayard Rustin, and then added Michael Potts and Glynn Turman in smaller, but crucial roles.
“It was wonderful the way he got the band back together,” says Turman, who plays labor leader A. Philip Randolph, who, along with Rustin, is the most important (and overlooked) person in bringing the pivotal 1963 March on Washington to life.
That’s a phrase that’s often used for a reunion, but in this case Turman was referring to the fact Wolfe used him, Domingo and Potts (along with Chadwick Boseman) as the literal band in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”
And Turman takes the analogy even further, calling Wolfe a “a master conductor and a master at the tempos that he sets for each scene” and saying he and Domingo had an easy chemistry as Randolph and Rustin “because we know each other’s notes.”
Even his performance has a musicality to it: When Turman watched videos of Randolph online and went to the National Museum of African American History and Culture to study the history of the March he was struck by Randolph’s commanding baritone. “I wanted to play it in his key, you know what I mean,” says Turman. “He’s a little more resonant and deeper than even my baritone, and he had a very distinct sound.”
Finding the voice helped him find Randolph’s character, the ability to come across as calmly persuasive or intimidating depending on what was needed. “He was a union leader and those were rough boys, so while he was a gentleman and he was a learned man, he was a fellow that could handle himself in different circumstances if tested.”
Turman has handled himself in different acting circumstances for decades: At 12, he was making history on Broadway playing Sidney Poitier’s son Travis Younger in “A Raisin in the Sun”; in the decades that followed, he was a regular on shows as varied as “Peyton Place” and “A Different World” and appeared in movies like “Cooley High.” (He was also married to Aretha Franklin and, as an avid horseman, spent years running a camp for at-risk youths on his ranch.) His resumé has perhaps been even more impressive in this century, most notably on “The Wire,” “House of Lies,” “Fargo,” “Women of the Movement” (he played Emmett Till’s great uncle) and “In Treatment,” for which he won an Emmy Award.
Just as Turman used the word “gravitas” to describe Randolph, Aml Ameen, who plays Martin Luther King Jr., describes Turman’s acting the same way, adding that “Glynn is inspirational but also one of the coolest people I’ve ever met. The scope of his life and career is so vast. During filming his energy and experience ground you and you want to do a great job around him.”
Turman says that when a movement or a country loses someone like King, the hope for progress and compassion “seems to lose its air and we wait for someone else to come along and fill that gap.” He hopes that “Rustin,” in which the organizer’s youthful and devoted horde of “angelic troublemakers” pull off the seemingly impossible logistics of pulling together the March, inspires viewers to see that they can help foment change themselves.
“We don’t need to wait for the next person — you, me, we are that next person,” Turman says. “I want people to feel they are a part of those angelic troublemakers. We need that right now.”