Your life, your circumstances change, and you have to continue to grow as a person, and once you have means and opportunity, you have to make different choices to protect what you have.
I don’t want to say I took myself too seriously, but I put a lot of pressure on myself coming out of school. I saw so many people leave the business behind, certain opportunities disappear for folks who had to go into other professions. That kind of terrified me. As a result, I wanted things to happen really quickly.
Understand that we are all co-creators of our respective destinies.
The more you work and get known for something, sometimes things begin to narrow a bit, and your opportunities get more… specific.
I believe that everything has a shelf life.
To really be conscious of how long the journey is, be patient, push yourself, persevere, and always be working on your craft while waiting for your break. That’s what I’m still working on, having done this for 20 years now.
What I think I learned from working on ‘Moonlight’ is you see what happens when you persecute people. They fold into themselves.
Cottonmouth is the result of having to react to his circumstances. He had to, in some ways, take control of the situation and own his circumstances. But as a result of that, he became a person he didn’t intend to become.
In terms of pace, I think I just have to revisit my relationship with expectations. That has a little bit to do with comparing ourselves to other people and seeing other people’s journey and seeing how they had a certain success at a certain age.
You want entertainment in general, every aspect of it, to be more of a reflection of the diverse world that we live in.
I have had that same experience where there are several people who have come up in my life at the right time and have made critical contributions to how I see the world and how I see myself.
I’d always wanted to do a Marvel project, and I’d always imagined getting to play one of the superheroes because it’s such a hard thing to get. It’s the parts that only go to a few people. The flip side of that is the antagonists are pretty awesome.
Coming off ‘House of Cards,’ playing someone so straight-laced, I was getting offered a lot of F.B.I. agents.
Social media has colonized what was once a sacred space occupied by emptiness: the space reserved for thought and creativity.
I’ve never seen anyone – and I’ve had the opportunity to work with some really terrific actors in my time – but Philip Seymour Hoffman is definitely the best I ever had the opportunity to work with.
There are so many women who contributed in a very real way in pushing for the space program during the time in which there was a lot of competition to get into space first, and to know that there were African-American women who were integral in that success is pretty phenomenal.
To really be conscious of how long the journey is, be patient, push yourself, persevere, and always be working on your craft while waiting for your break. That’s what I’m still working on, having done this for 20 years now.
I don’t really compare any of the characters I play; I try to go into them being very open to what the characters can offer and what I can bring to them and then bring a being to life.
Family are the people that can hurt you the most.
To get to play someone who was in some capacity the King of Harlem, that meant something to me. Deep within my bones. I was inspired by the energy that I knew to be a real thing.
It’s a lot of wonderful things about the Bay area and Oakland that I absolutely love. I wouldn’t change being from there by any stretch.
I haven’t gotten to do the leading man thing, so I would love to do that!
In thinking about it, the villains often have a little bit more range because their morality is different. You can have just a really good time as an actor, and there is just more there that you can explore on that side of the story.
People are really paying attention to the comic-book genre, and there’s a lot of time and attention being invested in these projects with a wonderful sense of quality control.
There are not enough going into production so that we can tout them. Look at ‘Precious’… In order for them to stand out, they have to get made in the first place, and that’s just not happening enough.
We live in diverse communities with all sorts of people from all sorts of different backgrounds. The more our entertainment can be a reflection of the world we live in, the better it is for all of us.
If you convert to Islam after a couple of decades of being a black man in the U.S., the discrimination you receive as a Muslim doesn’t feel like a shock.
Theater will cast in a more open way; Denzel Washington might play Richard III. Television and film don’t really cast openly like that. The theater world has always been a leader in diversity.
At graduate school in 1999, I finally had the chance to examine why I believe what I believe. I realised that I’d had no period in my life where I’d consciously tried to develop my own theology.
I think if you have any desire to be a leading man or to really carry some of these stories, there’s this relationship that has to be cultivated with an audience. People have to be able to say your name.
There’s nothing fun about 30 people standing around watching you, like, pretend to pleasure someone. Nothing enjoyable about it, believe me.
Pages: 1 2
