American Fiction star Jeffrey Wright: ‘We are not good at conversations about race’

The opening scene of American Fiction, Cord Jefferson’s incendiary new film adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, sees a white student storm out of her black professor’s literature class when he attempts to teach Flannery O’Connor’s short story The Artificial N***er.

The tutor is Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a frustrated novelist struggling with such voguish concepts as Ebonics and poverty porn. Enraged by the racist stereotypes that populate a bestseller called We’s Lives in da Ghetto – sample line: “Yo, Shardonda, girl, you be pregnant again?” – he writes an absurd hoodsploitation satire called My Pafology.

The trouble is that everybody, from his agent to Hollywood producers, loves his supposedly savage take on “deadbeat dads, rappers, crack ... black stuff”. So, in need of money to look after his elderly mother, Monk – played by an Oscar-tipped Jeffrey Wright – accepts the lucrative offers and poses as the felon turned author Stagg R Leigh. One Hollywood producer suggests alternate endings that playfully bookend the film. A marketing wonk suggests Juneteenth, the US holiday to commemorate the end of slavery, as a publishing date: “White people will be feeling – let’s be honest – a little conscience-stricken.”

We don’t often see it in cinema, a family that’s messy and beautiful and functional and dysfunctional and loving in spite of itself

“There’s an absence of fluency around race and identity in American society,” says the amiable Wright, whose chuckle is as warm and deep as his trademark baritone. “We are not good at conversations about race. Some of us want to avoid the conversation, the history and the dynamics altogether. Some of us have been traumatised to the point where we lack objectivity. If there’s a dialogue at all, it’s a fractured and strange dialogue.

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“When I read this script, there was a fluency to it that was really attractive. The first scene in the script is not in the book. Both Cord and Everett are writers who are keen observers of these things, and sharp communicators. But that first scene was a conversation on race and language and context that I was dying to have in public. I had been having it in my head in response to the national discourse. I was so excited to do that.”

There are welcome shades of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled or Paul Beatty’s The Sellout in almost every scene. Jefferson’s clever script additionally balances politically charged burlesque with affecting family drama. Away from his swaggering – and increasingly self-erasing – alter-ego, Thelonious struggles with the sudden death of his sister, his mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, a partying and formerly closeted brother (played by the This Is Us and Brooklyn Nine-Nine star Sterling K Brown), and the legacy of his father’s suicide.

“In some ways the portrait of the family is the most politically subversive aspect of the film,” says Wright. “We don’t try to answer the questions here. Rather, we try to arrange for more interesting ones, I think. That portrait of a family serves as a kind of response to the social commentary, in that it presents this family that is extraordinary in its humanness, extraordinary in its ordinariness. And I say that it’s extraordinary simply because we don’t often see it in cinema – a family that’s messy and beautiful and functional and dysfunctional and loving in spite of itself. That family happens to be populated by black folks, but it’s a family like you could find in Dublin or anywhere in the world. Pain isn’t monopolised by any particular demographic.”

I am absolutely indebted to Joe Dowling. I love him to pieces. So I am also indebted to the theatre community in Dublin for lending him

Should American Fiction triumph on Oscar night, the star of Casino Royale and The Batman knows exactly whom he’d like to thank.

“Tony Kushner has a line in Angels in America that says everyone who makes it in this world makes it because someone older and more powerful takes an interest,” the actor says. “I was fortunate earlier in my career to have such people take an interest in me. One of the first and most ardent was a man named Joe Dowling, who at one point was the artistic director of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.

“The first play that we worked together on was Juno and the Paycock, in Washington, DC. I played Jerry Devine. Following that he gave me a part in She Stoops to Conquer; he gave me a small part in Othello in Central Park. And then he directed me in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; I played Puck. We worked together over the course of several years. I am absolutely indebted to him. I haven’t seen him in a while, but I love him to pieces. So I am also indebted to the theatre community in Dublin for lending him!”

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Wright, who was born in Washington, DC, read political science at Amherst College. He had then intended to go to law school; instead he corrected course towards New York University Tisch School of the Arts and an early off-Broadway career. In 1993-94 he appeared in Angels in America, Kushner’s seminal play, as a gay nurse forced to take care of the lawyer and political fixer Roy Cohn as he dies of Aids. His performance won him a Tony Award and secured his place in Mike Nichols’s HBO adaptation – for which Wright then won a Golden Globe and an Emmy.

“My grandfather was an oysterman farmer and whiskey maker and seller down in southern Virginia,” Wright says. “He never got to a stage, but everywhere he went he was spinning a tale. He was a wonderful raconteur – and he loved to tell a good lie, as he called it. But, really, for me, the seed was planted by my mother, who took me to the theatre from as early as I can remember. We would see every play that came through Washington, DC, and those nights were magical for me. I didn’t do any acting in high school. I was afraid to get on stage – I avoided it until college. And from the first day of class I knew I’d found my home in this new circus.”

Wright came to international prominence by playing Jean-Michel Basquiat in Julian Schnabel’s 1999 biopic of the artist. It was not, perhaps, the big break that it should have been.

“I never really had any kind of support from the industry,” the actor says. “How can I say this politely? I suppose another actor might have got a little bit more investment in their potential. So Basquiat didn’t change things for me. What it did do is bring my work to the attention of some artists or young actors that took an interest. That movie was very meaningful for them in the way that Sid & Nancy or Midnight Cowboy had been meaningful for me. And it continued a tradition that started with Angels in America in terms of my expectations about how I wanted to work, that it was possible to make things that were meaningful and maybe even beautiful.”

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Wright’s subsequent movie career involves several indie auteurs – including multiple collaborations with Wes Anderson and Jim Jarmusch – as well as various vast franchises, notably playing Felix Leiter in Daniel Craig’s James Bond sequence, three instalments of The Hunger Games, and a recent dalliance with the DC Extended Universe, playing commsioner-to-be James Gordon to Robert Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne in Matt Reeves’ The Batman.

“I didn’t have any interest early on in going for the big commercial thing,” says Wright. “It wasn’t what I was curious about. As you get older, particularly as you have children who insist on eating every day – multiple times a day – there are different considerations. You have to be a bit more pragmatic.

“But what I have found, particularly, for example, with The Batman, is that it doesn’t have to be a compromise. Matt Reeves is a film-maker whose knowledge and interest in cinema is rooted in an era that was meaningful for me. He wanted to reshape The Batman in the style of that golden age of late-1960s, early-1970s cinema, with homages to Taxi Driver and all those gritty, beautiful urban films.

“That’s the stuff that I first experienced in the cinema. Films like Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon. So I found this wonderful organic alignment, even within these major franchises.”

American Fiction opens in cinemas on Friday, February 2nd