‘American Fiction’ Star Jeffrey Wright On Cord Jefferson’s Debut Film – Deadline

Jeffrey Wright, star of Cord Jefferson’s provocative debut feature American Fiction, says he felt a personal affinity with his character Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison in the film, in part because of the challenges Monk experiences with regard to family issues. Monk is an author and a professor of English literature who discovers he may have to lower his standards to attain some kind of glory in the phony world of publishing. We follow him as he takes an enforced leave of absence to care for his ailing mother, a situation that the actor himself is painfully familiar with — Wright’s mother died a year before he received Jefferson’s script.

DEADLINE: You were born and raised in Washington, D.C. and American Fiction is based on a novel set in D.C. Did anything in the script make you think of your own upbringing?

JEFFREY WRIGHT: Yeah. Cord Jefferson, who wrote and adapted this from Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, really made it his own. We shot in Boston. Cord wanted to shoot in New York, so he wanted to take it out of D.C. I don’t think he has had necessarily a familiarity with D.C. I think D.C. probably doesn’t have the tax incentives either to make it feasible, at least now. So that was one adjustment that he made.

He also adjusted a lot of the catalyzing moments in the novel. He reshaped them to suit the cinema in a way that made the novel less informative for this. So I focused on the script. I also read in some ways the book of my life because there are many similarities to some of the challenges, particularly around family that Monk is facing.

DEADLINE: Such as?

WRIGHT: Such as, well, my mother passed away about a little over a year before I got this script. Raised by my mother and my aunt, and my aunt came to live with us. She’s 94 years old now and doing very well, but a pretty challenging time for me, by which I mean the most challenging time of my life, if I’m honest. And so I understood where he was, and I was sensitive to the sacrifices that exist for an individual faced with those responsibilities on the professional side, personal side, and creative side in many respects.

So, that is what pulled me in deep into the emotional center of the story. And it really as well, I think, compelled me to want to play this story. I don’t know why. I don’t know. Sometimes we are drawn, or things come to us, or we are drawn to stories that overlap with the realities that we’re facing. In art [it’s] that art-life, chicken-egg thing. But yeah, this was certainly close to me. There wasn’t a lot of hoop jumping that I needed to do in order to find this character.

DEADLINE: At festival screenings people have talked about that deeply caring side of your character and how they connected to Monk in a visceral way. You’ve heard this, right?

WRIGHT: I’ve never really experienced this level of support for a project that I’ve been a part of, or been so central to, never in my career. And so it’s not unappreciated. But people have said that they connected with his being a caretaker to his mother in a way that was very personal for them. I guess we have the opportunity, and ideally it’s a healthy thing to try to make sense of our experiences. And perhaps if we do, at least for a moment, there’s validation for others who have shared those experiences when watching, and that’s healthy, I guess. I guess it’s a healthy side of this peculiar work that we find ourselves in, yeah.

DEADLINE: The film’s other theme explodes right at the top of the movie, when you write the N-word on a board and that white girl objects to it. And I laugh, because oftentimes the white folk are the first to take offence.

WRIGHT: Without a fluency in the understanding or in the language required. Well, I wanted to play that scene so badly. I wanted to have that conversation, because it’s one that I have at least inside my head all the time. And it’s one that we, particularly of late, are seeing, and there’s just an absence of fluency, particularly in America and elsewhere.

Cord and Percival Everett are fluent in these things. And so I was like, yes, let’s do that. And frankly, it’s not solely a certain demographic that at times lacks fluency. Sometimes there are those among us who we think should be more fluent who are not. There are some Black folks too, who, for whatever reasons, have either been damaged by the trauma or the internalization of the history in ways that have been damaging. But there’s not a universal clarity among Black folks on such matters. Sometimes if you’re too close to it, you can’t see it objectively.

DEADLINE: No, that’s true. The film also dares to raise questions about whether literature by certain acclaimed Black authors is any good, or not. Same goes in the theater.

WRIGHT: Yes.

DEADLINE: And woe betide anyone who says, actually this is sh*t.

WRIGHT: Yes, yes. Well, this is what I think Monk is trying to represent, maybe not actively, but implicitly, freedom, a new level of freedom, a creative freedom, an intellectual freedom, whereby I am not making choices based on the expectation, or I’m not making choices that are reactive to the situation. I’m doing what the hell I want to do, and I’m not at least creatively concerned about what needs to be shown or written. I want to write what I want to write. And so yes, I think at times, and this is one of the criticisms that he makes, is that we’re still shackled in some ways metaphorically, and our choices are hued because of that. I think my perspective on these things does not entirely align with Monk’s but I think there’s truth in that.

DEADLINE: So what is your perspective?

WRIGHT: Oh, I mean, that’s a long conversation.

DEADLINE: We have a bit of time.

WRIGHT: I think the scene between Monk and Issa Rae’s character, Sintara Golden, is the thesis of the film and my perspective, maybe somewhere inside a synthesis of those two perspectives maybe. And what I love about that scene is that we don’t know at the end who is right or if there is a right side. And Monk is challenged certainly, and he’s kind of undone in some ways, and I think that’s proper. He is flawed and he is maybe a bit overly arrogant. And so I love the ambiguity that’s born of that scene. I think that somewhere in between the two of them is a really genuine and useful thesis.

DEADLINE: When you and Cord were discussing playing the character, how did you talk about it, because at times you’re almost portraying three people. There’s the Monk we see teaching the students at university; there’s the Monk with his mother and his family, and then there’s a third character when you create this fictitious author. How did you work all that out?

WRIGHT: You know, Cord’s script was so descriptive and informative that it was in some ways a co-director for him. So when we got on set, there wasn’t a lot of, what do you mean by this? I think that’s true for all of us. We got it. 

 And it was more about, OK, how do you want to tell this? And so I was pretty clear on the various iterations of this man. And we just went after it, and Cord as well. The things that we did talk about a lot were ensuring that the story wasn’t a celebration of the ‘Talented Tenth’, the kind of the Black bourgeois in America — we didn’t want it to be classist in that way. So again, we wanted to make sure that imperfections of Monk were clear. And as well, that’s why I found that scene with Issa Rae so critical. And also, when we’re in this kind of confrontation, which is not in the book. In the book, they never meet. Cord wanted them to meet in this film. And also, we talked as well about the relationship to Lorraine [the family’s Black housekeeper]. There was a really delicate balance that we needed in this caretaker, because it’s like this kind of intra-family class schism or dynamic. This class difference that we wanted to make sure was done with a level of Lorraine being played by a top actor. Those were conversations that we had often throughout the process.

DEADLINE: Because she was calling you sir, wasn’t she?

WRIGHT: Mr. Monk, and all of that. And that’s that moment I said there were things like that they would throw in to say, but yeah, that’s what it is. But at the same time, we wanted to make sure that the equality of humanity was made clear. That was very important.

DEADLINE: Easy on the bowing and scraping?

WRIGHT: Right, right, yes, yes. And Myra Lucretia Taylor who plays Lorraine is such a wonderful actor. And in fact, the first family scene that we filmed was the first scene that we see in the film with family, where we come back home and the first sound out of her mouth — because that’s not an easy role to play necessarily, there’s a history of that role in cinema, in American cinema — but the first sound out of her mouth was so deliciously authentic and loving. And I just said to myself, this is it. She just imbued it with a kind of humanity that made everything from that moment on, for me, make sense and work.

Cord cast her. He went through a bunch of auditions, he saw a bunch of people auditioning and he cast her. And some great directors have said that’s 90% of directing. He assembled a brilliant circle of actors.

DEADLINE: Myra shaped her career on the stage. Do you have plans to ever return to the theater?

WRIGHT: Oh yeah, yeah. Certainly at some point I will get back on the stage. Got to make space for it.

DEADLINE: Are there any classic roles you want to do or new work?

WRIGHT: If there’s a new play that comes my way that is interesting? Yeah, that could be possible. Actually, I think there may be something that is coming down the pipe that’s an American classic, but it could be anything. Could be a bit of Willie Shakespeare. There’s some stuff out there. But I’m in no rush necessarily.

One of the best performances that I’ve ever seen on stage, was by an artist of similar age: Peter O’Toole in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell. I saw that my first trip to London in ’99. And I said, wow. It was just him up there [on the stage].

DEADLINE: Phenomenal performance.

WRIGHT: He just barely moved. His feet barely shuffled from here and there, and the whole story just came from out of his breath. And I said, oh wow.

DEADLINE: I think that had something to do with his classical training.

WRIGHT: Of course.

DEADLINE: And you’re classically trained also?

WRIGHT: Well yeah, for the most part in my own way. I left grad school after two months, but I learned it the old apprentice way, just working on the stage. But [O’Toole’s performance] also came from a history of work on the stage.

He came to see Top Dog/Underdog [the play by Suzan-Lori Parks transferred to Broadway in 2002]. Which was maybe, I guess five or six years after I’d seen that. He didn’t come backstage, but he wrote a letter and that was to Yasiin [Bey], formerly known as Mos [Def]. He wrote to Mos and me, and it said, in essence: wonderful play. I loved it but damn it, I couldn’t see a thing. He said the lighting was too dark. But I have that letter somewhere. I need to frame it, yeah. But oh man, that was the first piece of theater that I saw in London. It was a great start.

DEADLINE: I remember seeing you early on in your career in some stage roles in New York including your breakout in Angels in America, but we actually met at the Cannes Film Festival when you starred in Basquiat and I questioned its director Julian Schnabel, admittedly somewhat provocatively, as to why he, a white man, was directing the movie about a Black man.

WRIGHT: Of course I remember. In fact, I appreciated it, the question…

DEADLINE: It was 1996, was that your first film?

WRIGHT: Well, I started in fits and starts because mainly I was doing theater. The first film I ever did, actually, I can’t find any seeming existence of this film. It was some weird historical quasi-documentary about the history of the White House. And I played a freeman who was a carpet painter, and we filmed it in the White House.

I was just out of school. I was like 21 years old or something like that, because I’d gone back home to Washington, D.C., and I got this little film and it was going to be no speaking role, just this thing. And the next thing I did was a film called Jumpin’ at the Boneyard, an independent film with Tim Roth and Sam Jackson and the late Alexis Arquette. And Sam, at the time, I remember, had finished Jungle Fever and they were editing it, and there was this buzz around what he had done in that.

DEADLINE: Spike Lee took that to Cannes.

WRIGHT: That’s right. But that was when Sam was just the guy we saw in every movie that was shot in New York, and he was doing theater as well. And then after that, or maybe before around the same time, I did a film called Presumed Innocent. The legendary Alan Pakula directed. Sadly, the late Alan Pakula, with Harrison Ford. And if you can find me in that movie, I’ll give you a tuppence. 

DEADLINE: What’s your role in that?

WRIGHT: I play a young district attorney. I got the job because on my resume it said that I had a political science degree from Amherst College, which I do. And so I got that gig, and it was two weeks rehearsing and on set. It was a really wonderful introduction to a film set. And working with Harrison and watching him work with Alan Pakula and the level of respect between the two of them and for the process, it was really so informative.

At one point, Alan Pakula calls out to Harrison. In between takes, he calls out “Harrison” and Harrison answered, “Sir.” And I said, oh, there’s a level of decorum here and there’s a level of respect here that maybe I wasn’t quite aware of, that this wasn’t just fun and games, and this wasn’t bad boys acting out and all of that stuff. But it was something maybe even a bit more honorable about this stuff and it was cool. And again, this was the biggest movie star in the world at that time, and it was informative.

DEADLINE: Before that moment, what had you thought the motion picture industry was then? 

WRIGHT: I just didn’t expect that I would go back to boys school. I didn’t expect that I would go back to where that was, what was expected of us in my prep school. And so I was prepared for it, but I was like, oh, OK. Of course, of course, it made sense to me. But yeah, when I thought of movie making, it’s not the first thing that came to mind. And how would I know? I’d never been on a film set before.

DEADLINE: I know your Felix Leiter died in Bond [No Time to Die], but if they resurrected you, would you ever go back?  

WRIGHT: Oh, I think I’ve had a nice run of it. Yeah. Leave that to someone else. It was a great run. And so many of the crew have worked on all of them or many of them. It’s a family business at the end of the day. It’s massive, but it is a nice feeling on set.

DEADLINE: In your opinion should there, or will there be, a Black Bond?

WRIGHT: I mean, it’s feasible. They’re out there now. Those guys are out there now at the underbelly of all of this, yeah. So why not, if you find the right actor.