Episode 1126 - Jeffrey Wright
Marc:Lock the gates!
Marc:Okay, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck nicks?
Marc:What the fucksters?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:This is my podcast, WTF.
Marc:I am doing it.
Marc:I'm in it.
Marc:I'm here.
Marc:I'm present and accounted for.
Marc:The world is kind of pressing.
Marc:Pressing on all of us, right?
Marc:Like a fucking knee to the back of the neck.
Marc:I mean, it's hard enough, right?
Marc:It's hard enough.
Marc:Dealing with what we're all dealing with pandemic wise.
Marc:And now this horrendous.
Marc:Act of murderous violence.
Marc:which demands a response and a protest and a reaction and justice.
Marc:It's hard for me to fucking wrap my brain around all of it because I am consumed with my personal grief.
Marc:So I have to stay in the present, man.
Marc:I have to stay so in the present.
Marc:Because if I get even 10 minutes ahead of where I'm at right now, the darkness can envelop me.
Marc:So I've been doing what I can.
Marc:And I'm not trying to diminish anything that's going on in the world.
Marc:Can't, can you?
Marc:It seems correct to me.
Marc:There can be power there.
Marc:This reaction in the streets was coming a long time and that is the power of people up against what keeps looking more and more like a fascistic government evolving.
Marc:But like I said, it's very hard for me to sort of see past my selfish pain.
Marc:And even as somebody who doesn't
Marc:Believe in God.
Marc:I have been known to hit my knees occasionally.
Marc:Something I learned early on in my sobriety.
Marc:Doesn't matter if you believe or not.
Marc:Humble yourself before the universe.
Marc:Surrender.
Marc:Engage your humanity.
Marc:Ask for help.
Marc:Ask for guidance.
Marc:Ask for strength.
Marc:Keep walking forward.
Marc:Keep breathing.
Marc:Not beyond me to do that.
Marc:I've done it.
Marc:But God damn it feels like things are breaking down.
Marc:And that's why I have to be careful in some degree for myself in this state of grief.
Marc:My perception is not clear.
Marc:There's part of me that wants to just kind of veer off into the hopelessness, veer off into the nihilism, veer off into the depression, the darkness, the self-pity.
Marc:But instead, I think about Lynn.
Marc:I think about people fighting back.
Marc:I think about love.
Marc:And I think about cake.
Marc:Cake has been helpful.
Marc:Somebody sent me some boxes from Katz's Deli in New York with some babka in there, chicken soup, matzo ball soup, and babka has been very helpful.
Marc:Someone sent me biscottis.
Marc:Great.
Marc:Homemade jam, I'll take it.
Marc:Trying to stay out of the darkness, stay in the strength, stay in the cake.
Marc:My heart goes out to people in the fight.
Marc:It does.
Marc:I'm sorry I'm not out there.
Marc:I'm fighting for my own mind right now.
Marc:On the show today, I talked to Jeffrey Wright.
Marc:This is obviously a talk that happened before the shit went down with George Floyd in the protest.
Marc:But Jeffrey's been very active on Twitter.
Marc:He's a fighter.
Marc:We talk a lot about his relief organization, Brooklyn for Life, which was established to provide food for frontline workers during the pandemic.
Marc:You can check that out at brooklynforlife.org.
Marc:He's on Twitter now, fighting the good fight.
Marc:You might know Jeffrey from Westworld or the James Bond movies or on Broadway.
Marc:He's currently in the movie All Day and a Night, which is now streaming on Netflix.
Marc:I'm a huge fan of his.
Marc:He's always good.
Marc:He's always good.
Marc:And Lynn actually made me watch...
Marc:Because I'd never heard of it, this Ride with the Devil movie.
Marc:It's an Ang Lee movie, a Civil War movie.
Marc:And it's a complicated movie.
Marc:And she loved it.
Marc:And we watched it before I talked to Jeffrey.
Marc:And I thought it was great.
Marc:It's a tricky movie because it's really about...
Marc:The rebels, the bushwhackers, I think they were called.
Marc:It's sort of a pro-Confederacy bunch.
Marc:And Jeffrey plays a black man among a Confederate sympathizing group of guerrillas, really.
Marc:fighters guerrilla fighters basically but uh lynn loved the movie it's an angley movie and she made me watch it and uh i thought it was great and i thought he was great so it was interesting to see that because it's and i talked to him a little bit about it so this is me talking to uh to jeffrey wright
Marc:This is the way we do it.
Marc:My fear is that people will get too comfortable with this.
Guest:I think that's valid, yeah.
Marc:And not want to do anything in person again.
Marc:Right, right.
Guest:As a friend of mine said, man, I've been practicing social distance for decades now.
Guest:This is...
Guest:This is cool with me.
Marc:There is something comfortable about it.
Marc:I started my career as a comic just wandering around doing nothing.
Marc:And I like doing nothing, to be honest with you.
Marc:I always thought that I was working towards doing nothing.
Marc:So this is sort of a dry run of doing nothing.
Guest:Yeah, that was the original plan for me, too.
Guest:And it was cool.
Guest:It was cool for about a week and a half.
Guest:And, you know, I think it was a couple of things.
Guest:Well, primarily the constant, like, grinding drone of those daily press briefings out of the White House.
Guest:But those are terrible.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:You know, that just drove me.
Guest:I realized I had to do something else.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:for the sake of well yeah no and i think that doing something you know active i i mean i just meant in a sense that if there weren't a plague i would be uh i would be fine like like there's something very comforting about the fact outside of the plague that i'm not doing anything and i know for a fact no one else is fucking doing anything either so the race is over we can all relax day 100 then there's the plague
Guest:Then there's the plague and then and then there's also, you know, the economic pressures on on on communities and others.
Guest:But you're absolutely right, man.
Guest:Terrible.
Guest:I mean, it is if it is an opportunity to, you know, for reset, like on a personal level, but also on a collective level.
Guest:You know, the way I look at it, this COVID is a.
Guest:Fucked up dinner guest, but it makes some interesting points, you know, as we look around.
Guest:Yeah, for sure.
Guest:And see the ways in which nature is shifting.
Guest:You know, you've got dolphins in the Bosphorus Fate Straits now, you know, instead of oil tankers.
Guest:You know, it's like, you know, you see, you know, you were looking at the lockdown in the Hubei province in China, and all of a sudden the skies were clear.
Guest:You know, and the CO2 emissions would say, OK.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, I really hope that I wonder how many people collectively will take to that.
Marc:I mean, you know, until it seems that until the bulk of the people everywhere realize that their leaders are trying to kill them, that they won't be able to see this clearly.
Marc:But but it really is sort of astounding and beautiful that nature how quickly that
Marc:It kind of bounces back in Yosemite.
Marc:The bears are back.
Marc:And, you know, as soon as people leave, the animals are like, holy shit, this is fucking great.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The animals are like, oh, the virus is gone.
Guest:You know, their pandemic is, you know, they've come through the other side.
Guest:They're done with their social distancing now.
Guest:You know, they're locked down and they're like, OK, all right, back to normal.
Guest:You know, I mean.
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:Thank God.
Marc:About time.
Marc:It only took a couple of hundred thousand years.
Guest:But we got rid of those motherfuckers, you know.
Guest:But then the question, though, becomes, you know, will this be an opportunity for us to rethink on a number of different levels, you know, individually and collectively when we come out of this?
Guest:I hope so.
Guest:Or will, you know, will the machine take over, you know, and like drive us back to the same level?
Guest:you know, narrowly focused, narrowly interested policies and measures that, you know, in some ways got us here in the first place.
Marc:You mean the death march?
Guest:Well, yeah, yeah, I suppose so.
Guest:I suppose so, you know.
Marc:Well, what is your way?
Marc:I mean, how are you engaging with, you know, obviously I'm trying to do good things, but I don't you know, I don't know.
Marc:It's hard to know where to start.
Marc:But, you know, you said you just got off a call with with Congressman Jeffries.
Marc:You know, how are you engaging with the apparatus there?
Guest:Well, yeah, we just got off a really.
Guest:informative uh and also at times pretty emotional call um with about 200 small business owners here in brooklyn um that the congressman put together we had a conversation a couple of days ago i'll tell you why that was but it was a it was a it was a productive call and in which a lot of these small business owners were expressing their frustration uh at not having access to the ppp
Guest:funds and the various uh you know resources that you know are allegedly being made available to um to uh you know businesses of that scale um and their you know their folk you know one woman in particular in the car call i think she had a guard a garden center uh uh here in brooklyn and you know she's saying hey you know my my uh
Guest:My Internet just got cut off.
Guest:You know, I applied twice.
Guest:I got rejected.
Guest:You know, phones about to get, you know, people are in, you know, in dire straits and reaching out, obviously, to the congressman for assistance.
Guest:But the way it came about was that.
Guest:You know, I, pretty simply, really, I was trying to help a friend over here who's a restaurant owner.
Guest:My friend Michael Thompson, he owns a spot called the Brooklyn Moon here in Fort Greene that has been in the neighborhood for 25 years.
Guest:You know, kind of a local institution.
Guest:And we used to...
Guest:When I first moved here, I first... Well, I first moved here in 1989.
Guest:Then I moved back to Manhattan.
Guest:When my son was born, I moved back here because, you know, it was a little leafier, a little less stressful than Manhattan.
Guest:So we... I've been here for about 20 years now.
Guest:And...
Guest:Yeah, we used to play.
Guest:We used to play chess at Mike's place.
Guest:There used to be a group of us going to play chess and drink whiskey, you know.
Guest:And so we've been friends for, you know, since then.
Guest:So he's not a delivery oriented business.
Guest:He's more of a social gathering space.
Guest:So I said, Mike, you know, we're about to go on lockdown, bro, because I've been kind of tracking this thing, you know, for a while.
Guest:And I said, you need to start thinking about how you're going to convert to delivery, you know, full delivery mode.
Guest:And I'll help you.
Guest:you know, boost awareness of that via social media.
Guest:So he did, you know, we went on lockdown.
Guest:Next day, I was like, how'd you do today?
Guest:You know, he's like, yeah, man, I had five orders.
Guest:You know, that ain't gonna do it, you know, unless you're selling like, you know, meals at $10,000 a plate and it's costing you like 500.
Guest:That ain't gonna work, you know?
Guest:So someone notified me on Twitter
Guest:That ever so useful machine that it is, cesspool, rotten, but sometimes useful thing.
Guest:So someone notified me that another friend who owns a restaurant called Graziella's here, a guy named Vito Randazzo, was asking people to call in, customers to call in and order pizzas on behalf of Brooklyn Hospital over here, which I can see out my window through the trees.
Guest:And so I reached out to Vito and asked him what was up and, you know, asked me if he would connect me to the hospital because I had assumed, you know, that the hospital didn't need food because they had got a cafeteria.
Guest:But he he connected me with a guy over there, senior vice president for external affairs, a guy named Lenny Singletary.
Guest:He's just been amazing.
Guest:And the three of us met the next day.
Guest:And he said, listen, we got people working 15, 16 hour days.
Guest:Many of them are not going home, staying in hotels nearby.
Guest:Restaurants are closed.
Guest:So if you if you can augment our cafeteria with 200 meals per day, it would be most welcome.
Guest:So that's how it started, really.
Guest:It was like, OK, how do I help out my my dudes?
Guest:You know, and, you know, so I'll boost it on social media.
Guest:I'll put a GoFundMe page together.
Guest:You know, maybe we can raise some money for these two restaurants to provide a couple of hundred meals to one hospital.
Guest:OK, so then we're like, well, we got some other friends in the neighborhood.
Guest:You know, there's other food I like.
Guest:You know, that fried chicken, that peaches.
Guest:You know, I want to make sure that that's there when this thing is over.
Guest:You know, that hot Nashville chicken, Brooklyn style.
Guest:I want that.
Guest:So let me reach out to them.
Guest:You guys need any help?
Guest:They reached out to other friends and it just, you know, kind of blossomed from there.
Guest:Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams reached out, you know, when he caught wind of what we were doing, said, hey.
Guest:This is great.
Guest:We'll help you take it borough wide.
Guest:Like, oh, okay.
Guest:All right.
Guest:So now, you know, we're up to a circle of over 40 restaurants.
Guest:We are providing 2,500 meals per day on average to all 11 FDNY EMS stations in Brooklyn.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:And as of yesterday, I think now 11 medical facilities here in Brooklyn.
Guest:One actually of those actually is in lower Manhattan.
Guest:And, you know, we passed the 75,000 meal mark just yesterday.
Guest:And that's all since March 27th.
Marc:It's so amazing that, you know, because food is so important.
Marc:It's so connected, you know, it connects people.
Marc:It makes you feel better.
Marc:And people who prepare beautiful food of any kind, you know, put so much heart into it.
Marc:And there's that human connection and just basic sustenance.
Marc:It's a beautiful thing, really.
Guest:Yeah, it's, you know, basic sustenance.
Guest:You know, you can't make a good dish without a little love in it, you know, no matter how many you make.
Guest:That's right.
Marc:And so how is it all funded?
Marc:It's all funded through donation?
Guest:Yeah, so we set up the GoFundMe page, I think, March 25th.
Guest:And, you know, so we've raised about $275,000 on that, which has been incredible.
Guest:It has, you know, been...
Guest:Largely donations of less than a hundred, you know, a hundred dollars.
Guest:You know, I'm sounding like like Bernie now, you know, but it's been like, you know, folks throwing in five bucks, 10 bucks, 50, 100, a couple of bigger ones.
Guest:Then we set up a 501C3, you know, not for profit.
Guest:You know, got that up and going on the fly.
Guest:And so we've had direct donations now to that, some larger donations.
Guest:So Daniel Craig, for example, was one of the first folks that I reached out to that said, Daniel, hey, we're doing this thing.
Guest:We've got some good traction here.
Guest:Will you help us out?
Guest:So he's thrown in a good chunk.
Guest:Spike Lee, who grew up in this neighborhood and whose headquarters for 40 Acres of a Mule is in Fort Greene, he threw in some money.
Guest:Jay-Z gave us a little money.
Guest:uh a good you know good good amount of money uh and uh and some other folks you know i'm doing you know throwing in a nickel or two here so we've got um we've raised about 450 000 in total evenly split between those big donors and the smaller donors so it's pretty cool pretty democratic in that regard wow yeah that's that's what it is but you know it's really just been a grassroots thing man and it's like these these restaurant owners
Guest:taken you know just jazzed to be vital at this time even more so than than usual uh obviously you know they're supporting the front line and at the same time they're supporting themselves but they really feel that they're on a mission you know and it's it's kind of cool because it's a bit in some ways a kind of circular altruism uh you know uh circularly altruistic kind of model because
Guest:You know, we, the community that are supporting them with our donations are as well looking after our own interests, too, because we want those hospital workers to be as empowered as they possibly can on our behalf.
Guest:You know, and we want our economy to to be as stable as it can be, given the circumstances.
Guest:So whatever we can do to support them supports us, too.
Guest:So, you know, it's been pretty it's been pretty cool the way that things played out.
Marc:And also, like, you know, here I am talking about doing nothing and having a reset or whatever, but you're, you know, you're in it and you're a community activist and you're, you know, you're facilitating an amazing thing.
Marc:You're busy.
Marc:You're adapting and putting yourself out there and helping out.
Guest:yeah i'm busier than i had planned yeah that's you know but it's been it's it's definitely you know definitely true but it's been it's been cool the organization by the way is called brooklyn for life so if you're interested you can go check us out at brooklynforlife.org or you can go to our gofundme page you know gofundme brooklyn for life but if you go to brooklynforlife.org
Guest:you can uh you can you can see the GoFundMe page there also there's a there's a a video that uh that we put together it's kind of a celebration of Brooklyn and kind of a you know rallying cry at the same time so you can check that out too you know everybody from everybody from James Bond to Big Daddy Kane came through but also representatives of the restaurants and the EMS stations and doctors and nurses made sure that their voices were uh
Guest:We're we're as prominent as as ours so that you can check that is pretty cool.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But yeah, man.
Guest:So I've been a little I've been busy, but it's been good because I've kept the television off because I was about to throw wine bottles at that fucking thing if I kept it on too much longer.
Guest:So it's been healthy for me.
Marc:Yeah, I didn't watch any of them.
Marc:I did not watch one of those briefings because after a certain point, you know what's up.
Marc:And then you have to ask yourself, why am I doing this to myself every day?
Marc:Is this hate buzz helping anything?
Marc:Is this anger buzz helping anything?
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And, you know, so what I what I've what I've hopefully been able to do is channel that rage.
Guest:Yeah, it is rage, you know, through this thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In a constructive, creative way, because, you know, at the end of the day, it's like, hey, it's very clear early on.
Guest:And particularly after this call to, you know, that I just got off with off with these 200 business owners.
Guest:you know okay the government is supposed to you know have our best interests we understand what government is ideally for but in this case with this leadership you know you can't rely on on that necessarily and and damn it would take it up and do it on it do it you know do it ourselves and get it done um because uh you know this thing is uh is just a uh you know a clown show you know
Guest:doused in kerosene.
Guest:The one that I watched that was useful to me was, I think it was March 13th, the Rose Garden thing, I guess it was the first of the Rose Garden press conferences when there was that parade of
Guest:CEOs from Walgreens, Walmart, CVS and all these people who were like, you know, like ushered out as somehow health care saviors, you know, the guy from Walmart.
Guest:OK, cool.
Guest:You know, so I was in London, right?
Guest:We were filming Batman over there and I had been coming back and forth.
Guest:We started filming January 5th.
Guest:I'd made about four trips back and I was kind of worn out of coming back and forth to check in on my kids and my aunt.
Guest:My 90-year-old aunt lives with me here now.
Guest:Anyway, I saw that press conference.
Guest:I think it was March 13th after work.
Guest:Got off work, came home, watched that thing.
Guest:And I was like, what the?
Guest:What?
Guest:And I immediately, when it was over, booked my own flight home from London.
Guest:I was like, man, we got to get out of here.
Guest:And I started sending notes to produce them like, bro, we have to get out of here because either we're going to get stuck over here.
Guest:You know, the UK wasn't included in the travel restrictions at that time, but the rest of Europe was, which made no sense whatsoever.
Guest:So that's whatsoever, completely arbitrary.
Guest:So I was like, man, we got to get out of here.
Guest:We're either going to get stuck, we're going to get forced into quarantine or something like that.
Guest:But we need to go now and get back because, you know, it's, you know, the lunatics, you know, have taken over the asylum and it's not going to be pretty.
Guest:So anyway, that was useful to me.
Guest:And you got back.
Guest:I got back, yeah, two days later.
Marc:Well, you got ahead of the curve.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So I noticed that like, you know, switching topics, like I noticed that both of us did that Finding Your Roots show.
Marc:Like I was just on it as well.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And in my experience was I didn't know what to expect really.
Marc:And, you know, I didn't know.
Marc:You know, like, you know, you think you know about your family, or at least, you know, as a, you know, basic, you know, Jew, I kind of know where the Jews come from.
Marc:That's a basic Jew.
Marc:Okay, right.
Marc:You know, it's like, it's going to be Russia or Poland or Germany, where we at.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:But the nuance of it, weren't you sort of amazed at the research that those guys could do?
Guest:Yeah, it was pretty incredible.
Guest:It was pretty incredible.
Guest:What did you learn, man?
Guest:Well, I learned a lot.
Guest:I learned a tremendous amount.
Guest:It was an incredible gift.
Guest:But there were a couple of specific things that I found interesting, obviously, for me personally.
Guest:One was – so he centered on my grandfather to some extent.
Guest:And my grandfather was –
Guest:He was an incredible dude, man.
Guest:He was a waterman, as were, I found out, you know, generations of my family down in Virginia were watermen, oystermen, crabbers on the lower Chesapeake Bay, right?
Guest:He was that.
Guest:He was also a farmer.
Guest:And he was a liquor guy.
Guest:So, you know, back when I was in the 70s,
Guest:You could, you know, there were no bars in, you know, this very rural section of York County, Virginia.
Guest:And you had to get liquor from the ABC store, the state run store.
Guest:I used to go on runs with my grandfather, you know.
Guest:And, you know, along this road, it was essentially one road community.
Guest:Essentially, there were houses that you could stop at on the way to your house for a shot.
Guest:For a 50 cent shot.
Guest:So my grandfather's house was one of those houses.
Guest:You know, there was Morris Combs up on the corner.
Guest:Next one was my Uncle Ivy.
Guest:He always had a little bit of something.
Guest:And then, you know, my grandfather.
Guest:And so people would come out of the water or, you know, off the water or out of their fields or from the shipyard or wherever they were working.
Guest:They were gathering.
Guest:It was just a...
Guest:incredible scene, you know, just like story and drink and madness and, you know, but, but in the best way.
Guest:So I learned that my, so my grandfather prior to my being born had been a moonshiner, which I knew, right.
Guest:He had to still back up in the woods, you know, and he made, you know, he put his daughters through college and his sons, you know, one of his sons vocational school.
Guest:And, you know, he was, you know, he was doing okay.
Guest:But what I learned was how he learned to make whiskey.
Guest:And this actually relates to today in some ways.
Guest:I knew that my grandfather had stopped going to school when he was 14 to work.
Guest:He was born in 1904.
Guest:Stopped going to school at 14.
Guest:What year is that?
Guest:1918.
Guest:World War I. Well, yes.
Guest:And the flu pandemic.
Marc:Oh, the flu epidemic.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Guest:So his father, I found out, died of influenza.
Guest:His mother, my great grandmother, took up whiskey making to augment her income.
Guest:And he learned to make whiskey from his mom.
Guest:After her after her husband died.
Guest:And I was like, whoa.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I thought that was I thought I had never known that.
Guest:I just knew he was skilled at it.
Guest:But now I know why.
Guest:You know.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I found out that some of my great great grandparent Jews actually worked in oil fields in Belarus in the Ukraine.
Marc:One of the first major Soviet oil rigs.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:So there were Jewish wildcatters in my past.
Marc:That's the way I'm going to frame it.
Marc:Jewish wildcatters.
Marc:There you go.
Marc:So you grew up in Virginia?
Guest:I grew up in Washington, D.C., but I spent a lot of time down in York County, Virginia.
Guest:My mom would, you know, the school would end.
Guest:She'd drive me down there, and then she'd turn around and go back to D.C., and I would stay there for, you know, the entire summers.
Guest:That was like, you know, that was my routine.
Guest:And it was, you know, it was amazing down there.
Guest:It was like it was like heaven for a kid.
Guest:You know, it's just like wood.
Guest:Yeah, it's beautiful.
Guest:Woods and creeks.
Guest:It's all now been, you know, overrun with, you know, developments and, you know, the cookie cutter things and, you know, the.
Guest:Yeah, it's really kind of fascinating because.
Guest:All of those fields that I remember being corn fields and the like are now these subdivisions.
Guest:And so the food that was being provided there is no longer there.
Guest:Those subdivisions are now, you know, they're buying their food.
Guest:The people from those places are buying their food at the Applebee's and the whatever else and all these other places.
Guest:It's kind of like cancer on multiple levels.
Guest:You fly over and you see how these subdivisions have taken over this beautiful part of the world and they look kind of cancerous to me on the rivers.
Guest:And then just the ways in which all that organic produce and stuff that was being consumed down there, all that stuff is gone in exchange for...
Guest:you know, the big, you know, the big kind of chains and all that stuff.
Guest:Agribusiness.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, it's definitely, yeah.
Marc:Now it's got, it takes a bunch of, you know, hipsters and sort of post-hippie young people to kind of get back to the organic nature of things.
Marc:And then it's sort of a boutique sort of business where theoretically, if everything was won properly, we'd all be living like that.
Marc:But that is not the corporate way.
Marc:And we were.
Guest:Right.
Guest:We were living like that, you know.
Guest:And it wasn't a thing.
Guest:But you asked me about the research down there, you know, that they did.
Guest:I'll tell you a quick thing that I'd like to kind of explore more.
Guest:So he told me about my grandfather's surname was Whiting.
Guest:And he told me about this, I think my great-great-grandfather, whose name was Beverly Whiting.
Guest:who had been a free man prior to the Civil War because he found him in the census.
Guest:But then as you go further back in the census, he disappears.
Guest:So he became free at some point, and then he disappears into the bondage prior.
Guest:Don't know what happened.
Guest:But this name Beverly Whiting, Beverly, I thought it was an interesting name.
Guest:So I started kind of digging around.
Guest:No, actually, again, back to Twitter.
Guest:Somebody saw the show and DM me and said, hey, did you know that your ancestor, Beverly Whiting, fought in the Civil War with the first colored cavalry of Virginia?
Guest:And I was like, oh, wow.
Wow.
Guest:So I dug in and I looked around and I was like, huh, it was a different Beverly Whiting who lived in the neighboring county, Gloucester County.
Guest:My grandfather was born like on the border, like across the river from Gloucester in York County, but right on the edge there.
Guest:But there was another Beverly Whiting.
Guest:Then I dug around again.
Guest:I found a third Beverly Whiting, who was a young boy who was taken...
Guest:on a ship to New Orleans, a slave ship.
Guest:He's listed among the inventory, right?
Guest:Because even though the international slave trade had been abolished, there was still domestic slave trade allowed in this country.
Guest:I forget exactly when, but it was allowed even after the abolishment of the international slave trade.
Guest:Then I found a fourth Beverly Whiting,
Guest:And I was like, where's this name?
Guest:Beverly?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the fourth Beverly Whiting was White Guy, right?
Guest:Born, I think it was in 1707, if I'm not mistaken.
Guest:I think it was 1707.
Guest:This Beverly Whiting, right, I think...
Guest:might have been the namesake for these others because and i need to understand you know because obviously the name whiting comes from you know some migrating brit you know so uh if you slaves and this guy was a slave owner slave owner you know the name you know doubtless these beverly's were related somehow perhaps somehow um
Guest:Or at least on the same piece of property.
Guest:Exactly, exactly.
Guest:And do you know who this Beverly, this white Virginian Beverly Whiting was?
Guest:No.
Guest:It was the godfather of George Washington.
Marc:What?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's crazy.
Guest:Yeah, wild, man.
Yeah.
Guest:So that's something I need to dig down in a bit more.
Guest:But Skip Gates and those folks led me on that journey.
Marc:It's so wild that so much, I guess, of the African-American stories, you can't get back to Africa that easily.
Marc:So you're going to end up in these colonies.
Marc:There's only a handful of places you're going to end up where the beginning of that story in America happens.
Guest:According of it, you know, is these things just disappear back, you know, as you the farther you go back very often and we become mysteries to ourselves.
Guest:You know, it was another interesting thing he showed me on my father's side, who they were from the Carolinas, South Carolina, North Carolina, that there was a guy named Workman.
Guest:Workman McDowell, which is a hell of a name, you know, antebellum name for a black man in this country, Workman, you know.
Guest:But he too had been free at some point prior and, you know, and then disappears as you go back.
Guest:And in trying to track him...
Guest:They found a McDowell family that was a slave owning family that happened to live, according to these records, right, you know, five miles or a few miles up from where workmen lived.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So the assumption was that, you know, might have been on that that estate or whatever.
Guest:And they showed me a census record from that plantation or whatever it was, you know, state, whatever the heck, whatever the hell you want to call it.
Guest:So.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it has the name of the McDowell, the names of the McDowell family.
Guest:And then it has 54 essentially blank spaces.
Guest:With young man, black, male, 26, girl, black, 13, you know, but no names, just 54 blank spaces.
Guest:One of those blank spaces, it seems by age might have been Workman, my great, great grandfather, whatever.
Guest:But, you know, that's to your point.
Guest:You go back and what do you see there?
Guest:You find the, you know, the attempt to render people invisible and they kind of, you know, just vanish in the back into the mists of history.
Guest:It's pretty fucking crazy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, it is.
Marc:But like Workman, that's like a that's like a title.
Marc:It was probably a title before it was a name, obviously.
Guest:Yeah, it certainly was.
Guest:You know, like that's what the guy did.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Or it certainly it was a directive.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But these are the similarities.
Marc:So how did your folks get to D.C.?
Guest:D.C.
Guest:My mom came up to D.C.
Guest:in 1957 to go to law school.
Guest:She graduated what was then Hampton Institute down in Hampton, Virginia.
Guest:And then she came up.
Guest:And she went to Howard Law School, graduated there in 61.
Guest:And then from there went to work for the U.S.
Guest:Customs Service.
Guest:She was the, I think, third woman customs law specialist, first black woman customs law specialist then.
Guest:And she and my aunt, who came up maybe a few months later, was a nurse at D.C.
Guest:General Hospital.
Guest:For 35 years, my mom was at customs for 32, 34 years, whatever it was, you know, forever.
Guest:And so, yeah, that's so I was raised by my mom and my aunt.
Guest:They, you know, they came up and they lived together in D.C., you know, from 57 until my mom passed last fall.
Guest:yeah oh sorry to hear that yeah thanks man so with the where was your old man where was he at he my my my dad died in 67 uh he and my mom were actually separated pretty early you know when i started to uh when i started acting uh one of his best friends uh from who grew up with him in greensboro north carolina said i told him i said you know ot i'm uh you know i
Guest:I think I'm going to start acting.
Guest:I really dig this thing.
Guest:He said, well, your old man was a bit of a song and dance man.
Guest:He just never made it to the stage.
Guest:So it kind of, as far as he describes, came naturally.
Guest:But when he died, he was here in New York.
Guest:And he actually oversaw sales for Rheingold Beer here in Brooklyn.
Guest:That was his gig.
Guest:Yeah, he was a sales exec for that Rheingold.
Guest:He did some other things, too.
Guest:He used to run a...
Guest:A bar down in the village place called Romero's.
Guest:That's kind of a storied place.
Guest:You know, he was a man about town, you know.
Guest:Sure.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:The man about town guy.
Guest:In fact, this picture here.
Guest:I don't know if you can see it in the background.
Guest:That picture there, I've kind of pushed stuff aside for these interviews and stuff that I've been doing.
Guest:But that picture is to my dad.
Guest:That's one of the few things that I have from it.
Guest:And that's Miles Davis.
Guest:playing guitar shirtless oh yeah it says to jimmy from miles yeah take all the money all that's what that's so he and me and my dad were apparently pretty tight and uh when my uncle who is his brother passed away year about 20 years ago so now i went down to uh his uh his funeral down in greensboro and
Guest:And there was a guy there named Buddy Gist, who was very good friends with my dad and with my uncle and had traveled, was tight with miles.
Guest:Buddy was a bit of a song and dance man himself, from what I understand.
Guest:But he was one of those guys.
Guest:And I told him that I had this picture.
Guest:He said, you got that?
Guest:I said, yeah.
Guest:He said, he said, man, I traveled with my, he said, you got something.
Guest:He said, cause man, I traveled with miles for 35 years.
Guest:I saw him sign three autographs.
Guest:So he said, yeah, you got something there, man.
Guest:But, uh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:So, so your dad was running with a pretty, uh, pretty fun and fast crew there.
Guest:Yeah, he was, you know, as I understand it, he was a pretty, you know, pretty well-liked, you know, well-loved guy.
Guest:Probably a little bit too much, which, you know, might not have been good for him at the end of the day.
Marc:Well, it's interesting that you took it upon yourself to do all this research because, I mean, some people don't do it, you know.
Marc:Some people who have, you know, parents that are absent, they're just like, fuck them.
Marc:But, like, it's nice that you kind of got a full kind of sense of who he is or who he was.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, maybe some of it is mythologized, too, but he kind of had a bit of a mythic thing about him.
Guest:You know, people like, you know, people have, you know, still, when I mentioned that he was my dad, if I've never met him, they like, they brighten, like eyes brighten and they have some kind of crazy story.
Guest:Like, I met this guy at another funeral because this is how you meet me to become.
Guest:recently, who he said that he knew my dad, and he said, man, he said, I had just gotten out of the army.
Guest:He said, I guess it was the Korean War, maybe.
Guest:He said, just gotten out of the army, and I had saved up some money.
Guest:I think he said he had saved up like $4,000 or $5,000 or something like this, maybe, whatever the number was, but it was a significant amount of money.
Guest:He said, yeah, I saved up this money, man.
Guest:He said,
Guest:And your uncle and me, we went up to meet your dad up in New York.
Guest:He said that money was gone by the end of the weekend.
Guest:They were just living it.
Guest:Who knows what they were doing, but he was that kind of guy.
Guest:But again, he was laughing and came to life when he thought about him.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But at the same time, to your point, I kind of missed him in some ways, but at the same time, I never knew him.
Guest:And I think maybe the influence of my mother and my aunt was probably a healthier one for me.
Guest:So it's all good.
Guest:It's all good.
Marc:It's sort of amazing, though, because oddly, one of the performances that I can never get out of my head that you did...
Marc:was, you know, around a father son relationship was it was that moment, those moments in Siriana with with, you know, which is a side story to your character was is this alcoholic father.
Marc:But that, you know, that thing was so loaded up.
Marc:Yeah, it was so much sort of, you know,
Marc:horrific anger but yet at the same time the need to take care of this guy almost out of a lack of you had a choice but but you still did and it was causing that character to eat himself alive a bit yeah you know do you do you remember you know reaching into yourself to find that dude
Guest:Well, you know, sure.
Guest:I mean, that's part of the gig, right?
Guest:You know, you kind of take from those, at least those rooms that you have that are filled up with those, you know, thoughts and emotions and things and experiences.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Try to pluck whatever would fit into whatever story you're trying to tell.
Guest:So, yeah, that was.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But, you know, and that's that's not an unusual story for a lot of folks in our country, a lot of black men, particularly in our country, in terms of.
Guest:complicated relationships with with with with their fathers complicated relationships with you know um males in the family who kind of lose track you know and uh and kind of go off the rails a little bit yeah the new movie is about that too it's heavy man that all day and night is like holy fuck man that's a that's that's hardcore movie dude oh did you see it
Marc:Yeah, I saw it.
Guest:Oh, cool.
Marc:Yeah, it was great.
Marc:Oh, cool, man.
Marc:That was an amazing performance on your part, but also that kid.
Marc:What's his name?
Guest:Oh, Ashton.
Guest:Ashton's... Yeah, he's super bad, man.
Guest:Yeah, he's a great... You know, he was in Moonlight, and I thought his performance in Moonlight was just, like, so stellar.
Guest:And I was like, whoa, this... You know, I was surprised that...
Guest:He didn't get more, you know, not that it matters because it's, you know, it's ridiculous.
Guest:But if they're giving those things out, if they're giving out the accolades, you know, give them out to, you know, give them out right, you know.
Guest:And I thought he was, you know, you know, but that's, you know, it's funny.
Guest:I was just watching, they asked me to do this thing and I was just watching Sid and Nancy, you know, Gary Oldman, Gary Oldman, that guy.
Guest:Chloe Webb and that that movie made 50 percent of the budget.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That and no one got recognized for their performances or directions.
Guest:Like, are you I mean, you know, so, you know, I remember talking to Gary one time when we I think it was when we were doing Basquiat.
Guest:And he was like, you know, I got, you know, talking about awards or something, I don't know how it came up.
Guest:He said, yeah, you know, every performance I've ever given should have been awarded, you know.
Guest:But I really, you know, yeah, Ashton is really a wonderful young actor.
Guest:And there is a slew of those young actors out here now, black actors particularly, who are doing some interesting stuff.
Marc:I don't know anything about that life.
Marc:So anytime that I get something and I look at it and I can see there's an authenticity to it, it really kind of affects me in an eye-opening way.
Guest:Well, this movie for me was really in some ways a kind of companion piece to another film.
Guest:Actually, two other films.
Guest:One hasn't come out yet.
Guest:But the film that really...
Guest:piqued my interest even more in this side of this kind of incarceration cycle of criminality and violence story was OG, which was a film that we shot in a working maximum security prison.
Guest:In Indiana, and largely with co-stars who were incarcerated men, there were only three of us who played incarcerated men who were, you know, had the freedom to walk outside the gate every day.
Guest:Everybody else was in.
Guest:My co-star was serving a sentence of 65 years for attempted murder.
Guest:I think his sentence has been extended now.
Guest:That's another story.
Guest:But...
Guest:All of these guys were, you know, serving long sentences.
Guest:And I went to the prison over the course of a year prior to prior to filming to meet with them and talk with them and understand their stories a bit and, you know, figure out if I could find a way into it.
Guest:And and.
Guest:and in talking with them and then of course we filmed for you know 13 hours a day six weeks on the inside and talking to them they were almost consistently they would almost consistently describe um the influence of their fathers um as being problematic uh you know parental abuse parental drug uh you know neglect you know drug abuse all of these things and so um
Guest:This story in All Day and Night is, you know, I was playing an incarcerated man in OG, but a father in this who ultimately is, you know, winds up, you know, incarcerated with his son, which is another story that I saw in, you know, in the flesh inside that prison.
Guest:But yeah, this story was, you know, just kind of looking at it from a different angle.
Guest:And it was really in some ways driven by my experiences with those guys at Pendleton out in Indiana.
Marc:I performed once in a prison and the shift in the way the culture of prison works in terms of energy, when you enter that building, the sort of electricity of it is completely, was overwhelming and disturbing to me.
Marc:I know there are a lot of people, it's its own organism in terms of how life works.
Guest:Yeah, and the air is super, super heavy and charged.
Guest:I mean, like you can physically feel like that energy you talk about.
Guest:Yeah, it's super, it's super hardcore.
Guest:And but you know what the weird thing was, the thing that was really startling to me.
Guest:was that, you know, we would film on an active cell block, for example, you know, the scenes that took place inside the cell.
Guest:There was, you know, a guy next door to me who was serving time, you know, on either side, right?
Guest:And I'm walking around in the onesie and stuff, and they're like, hey, bro, can you, you know, and this is evenly split, white and black, because in Indiana, the demographics were interesting, you know, you rural poor, urban poor, you know, and there's a guy, this guy, white guy, he's like, hey, hey, hey, hey, brother,
Guest:You got any books?
Guest:I read all my books.
Guest:He saw me come by.
Guest:I'm like, actually, yeah, bro.
Guest:Well, yeah, man, actually, I do.
Guest:So I went back and I found some, what did I found?
Guest:There were some Westerns that I had in there, and I had Moby Dick, and I had something else as set pieces, as props.
Guest:So I kind of, I wasn't supposed to do it, but I kind of backed up to him, like slid on the books.
Guest:He's like, thanks, man.
Guest:Thank you, brother.
Guest:And the guy next door, he goes, he thinks you're one of us, bro.
Guest:I'm like, you know, yeah.
Guest:So anyway, but to your point about the intensity in there, the thing that I found shocking was that when I was inside the cell,
Guest:And if we had a little bit of downtime in between shots, setting it up, I would stay in there because we didn't have any, you know, there's no green room or anything.
Guest:There were no trailers.
Guest:So I would hang in the cell.
Guest:They would close the gate.
Guest:You know, we were still crew and we had one guard who was, you know, there.
Guest:And I would just chill there, rest, read, you know, whatever.
Guest:You know, I had music.
Guest:There was a TV.
Guest:I watched the...
Guest:I think the Democratic convention, you know, wants that.
Guest:And I realized in that space, you know, had, you know, little some snacks.
Guest:I realized you could actually get used to it, you know, and you could kind of settle in.
Guest:And that was really that kind of jacked me up a little bit to see how easily you might adapt to being confined in that way.
Guest:That's why those guys sometimes have a hard time coming out, too, because all of those decision-making processes have atrophied for them.
Guest:Or they never had them.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:And they certainly weren't exercised in there.
Guest:And they come out and it's like, you know, it leads at times to recidivism if they haven't been able to adapt.
Guest:They adapted in there, but adapting on the outside is even more tricky.
Yeah.
Guest:yeah so when you started acting like what did you when did you decide to do it like you just were were you in high school what happened no i was in college i was a junior in college yeah i was a political science major in college and then freaked out one day and started acting you know yeah freaked out what do you mean no no
Guest:Well, I'm still trying to figure out how I got here.
Guest:No, it was something that had been in the back of my head that I was kind of afraid to jump into it, really.
Guest:I always went to plays with my mom as a kid.
Guest:She would take me to all the shows that came through DC, all the big musicals.
Guest:You know, The Wiz and Bubbling Brown Sugar, but also, like, I remember seeing Give Him Hell, Harry with James Whitmore, you know, about Harry Truman in 1776.
Guest:And there was, I think, Avery Brooks did a one-man Paul Robeson show.
Guest:There was, you know, I mean, just a variety of stuff.
Guest:Ntozake Shange.
Guest:She took me, she just took me to, you know, to everything that came to town.
Guest:And I always, those, those experiences were always deeply, deeply like meaningful for me.
Guest:And I was always enthralled by it in a way, probably that was over a little, you know, my, it just, you know, my, you know, even after the curtain dropped, you know, I was always, I was sure, I was sure that that world that had been created on stage was carrying on, you know, even after the, so I was, I was well, well into it, you know, but I never did anything in high school, man.
Guest:I never did it.
Guest:I was always like, you know, I couldn't, I, you know, a little bit, you know,
Guest:yeah until my junior year of college and uh one day um a friend of mine took this acting class and in the i think it was in the if i remember in the uh fall semester and uh at the end of the i went to amherst up in uh amherst college oh yeah oh yeah oh really you're up there yeah
Guest:Yeah, and so at the end of the semester, they put on a production.
Guest:So he asked me to come see him perform.
Guest:I said, yeah, man, I'll come.
Guest:So I went to see him.
Guest:I said, damn, I can do that at least.
Guest:So the next semester, I took that class, and I also did a play.
Guest:That was directed by a student, a guy named Kevin Frazier, who actually passed away of AIDS a few years after I graduated.
Guest:But a beautiful young guy.
Guest:And he adapted a Wallace Terry novel called Bloods that was recollection of recollections of black Vietnam veterans.
Guest:about their experiences in the war he didn't he kind of wove together a night of monologues that was the first thing i did that was my junior year and then you know it was like yeah it's kind of you know kind of this kind of makes sense to me and so i've been doing it ever since did you did you train at all after
Guest:Well, yeah, I went, I left, graduated.
Guest:I went back to D.C.
Guest:And I my first gig down in D.C.
Guest:was Children's Theater.
Guest:Actually, I was on, you know, I was touring here with this B.A.
Guest:in political science running around doing Children's Theater for like, you know, preschoolers and tea and, you know, up to, you know, elementary kids.
Guest:American history through folk tales.
Guest:And I was waiting tables at night.
Guest:And then I got a bit part at an all's well that ends well at the Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger when it was there.
Guest:And then I got a gig in Lorraine Hansberry's last play, a play that she wrote as she died called Les Blanc.
Guest:And that was my first significant role.
Guest:That was at Arena Stage, which is kind of a storied theater, regional theater in D.C.
Guest:And because of that, Zelda Fitchhandler, who founded that theater and at the time ran the drama department at Tisch at NYU, the grad school, invited me to come up to go to school.
Guest:So that's how I came to New York.
Guest:Uh, she gave me a full ride.
Guest:I came up to, uh, to, you know, I think it was July 4th weekend of 1988 to New York.
Guest:And then, you know, was in, you know, enrolled in, enrolled in school that September of 88.
Guest:And I quit after two months and, uh, I left to do that play Les Blanc up in Boston.
Guest:Uh, because I, I just thought I, I, I, I,
Guest:You know, I did better working than I did, you know, kind of, you know, acting in a classroom.
Guest:And so I came back to New York, here to Fort Greene, like January, February of 89.
Guest:And I kept working in the theater.
Guest:I would go back to Arena Stage.
Guest:I would go up to Yale Rep, like every year for three years.
Guest:Lloyd Richards, who was the artistic director at the time at the Rep and headed the drama school.
Guest:They'd give me a job every year.
Guest:So my training took place in that way.
Guest:And the people, the directors that were hiring me were very often teachers themselves, you know, like, you know, guys who taught up at Yale or, you know, a guy who took me under his wing was a kind of mentored me, a guy named Joe Dowling, who was Irish.
Guest:He had run the Abbey Theater.
Guest:in Dublin and then later came over here to run the Guthrie Theatre for many years out in Minnesota.
Guest:But he took me under his wing.
Guest:He gave me my first piece of Shakespeare.
Guest:I had a number of early directors who really took an interest in me and shared a little knowledge with me.
Guest:So that was how I trained.
Marc:That's interesting.
Marc:So it was almost like you had obviously the basic raw talent to do it and you were effective at it.
Marc:But every time you were able to work with a director of a certain ilk, you were kind of molded a bit and given new tools.
Guest:Yeah, 100%.
Guest:So I did theater pretty much essentially for seven, about seven years.
Guest:I did a little bit of film here, a little film there.
Guest:But from the time I was like 21 to like, you know, it was like, boom, it was until Basquiat.
Guest:I was 28, I think, 28 or 29 when I did Basquiat.
Guest:And so it was like pretty much all theater, regional theater.
Guest:And then finally, you know, Broadway with Angels in America was like at the end of that seven year period.
Guest:But that was like, you know, that was that was that was that was a university in and of itself, that experience, you know.
Marc:Like doing like with Shakespeare and stuff.
Marc:What do you do?
Marc:So it's interesting because I'll ask actors about process and, you know, how ultimately everyone's going to put together their own, you know, set of tools or however they're going to do it.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:There's no way to say like, well, you do this, you do this, you do this because everyone's going to do it their way.
Marc:But, you know, from taking from all these different people, you know, and adding it to, you know, your natural ability.
Marc:I mean, what do you remember every time that you go into a role?
Marc:You know, how do you start and, you know, where did you get that information?
Marc:Like, do you do you look back at the people that guided you early on?
Marc:Is there any bit of information that, you know, really stands out as like that?
Marc:That was that was it.
Guest:Well, I mean, I think you put it all in your pocket, you know what I mean?
Guest:And you pull out as needed and it all kind of merges together, you know?
Guest:So many great influences and also other actors that you work with.
Guest:I mean, for example, you talk about Shakespeare.
Guest:One guy who taught me...
Guest:perhaps more than any other one individual about performing Shakespeare is somehow is someone you probably wouldn't expect.
Guest:And that's Chris Walken.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Again, Joe, this guy, Joe Dowling,
Guest:Gave me a gig, you know, bit part Shakespeare in the Park.
Guest:I think I was, I don't know, 23 years old, 20, whatever it was.
Guest:And Chris Walken played Iago to Raul Julia's Othello.
Guest:And I talk about this with with like if I if I talk to, you know, young actors now, you know, sometimes I'll go and.
Guest:You know, talk to a class and I'll talk about Walken, particularly relative to Shakespeare, because, you know, Walken's from Queens, right?
Guest:You know?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Chris.
Guest:A song and dance man.
Guest:It's Chris.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Badass.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But.
Guest:When he does Shakespeare, he's not interested in any affectation.
Guest:You know, it's Chris Walken.
Guest:But you're not hear me.
Guest:I mean, it's you know, it's and he purse.
Guest:He personalizes that language.
Guest:And just kind of destroys any unnecessary reverence for it, which is particularly important, I think, for an American actor to claim it in his own voice and in his own rhythms and his own tones.
Guest:And I mean, he's one of, if not the smartest actor I've ever seen.
Guest:had the the the privilege of working with and yeah you know because you know there's nothing more annoying than seeing an American actor do some kind of faux fake ass British weird half British accent when doing Shakespeare sure I mean it was just so unnatural and weird you know it can go either way you know I'm not a big Shakespeare guy but the few times I've seen Americans do Shakespeare like I think I saw William Hurt
Marc:do one of them.
Marc:I know Richard II or something.
Marc:I was a huge William Hurt fan.
Marc:It was back when I was in high school probably.
Marc:And it was almost impossible to decipher what the fuck he was doing up there.
Marc:But that might have been because it was Shakespeare.
Marc:But I knew he was personalizing it.
Marc:But I've always had a problem with Shakespeare until Ian McKellen sat across from me and did it in my face.
Marc:Like I told him, I said, I have a hard time following the language.
Marc:And he did this monologue right to my face.
Marc:And I'm like, okay, I get it.
Marc:I get it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:If it's done, if it's done right, it's clear.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And so like with the angels in America, I believe I probably saw you in that.
Marc:Cause when did that, when, what year was that, man?
Marc:That was like, that was 1993.
Marc:And that was the first, you were original cast guy.
Guest:I was original Broadway cast.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I didn't do it out in L.A.
Guest:I didn't do it up in San Francisco.
Guest:But when it came to Broadway, yeah, I was in the original Broadway cast.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:For a year and a half.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Seven hours play a year and a half.
Marc:So you were there.
Marc:So you were there.
Marc:Were you part of him sort of workshopping it as well?
Marc:Kushner?
Guest:Well, when they came to Broadway, they'd been another actor who was playing, you know, my, uh, Belize, uh, who, you know, beautiful actor, but, you know, they decided to make a change, you know, and so I, um, got the role and, uh, as George Wolfe said, I, I, I, you know, he says, uh,
Guest:uh in in the casting process he said i saw 8 000 negroes i chose you you know so uh so um yeah so uh so we were so so tony was still working through the script they were still script changes but um you know it was largely as you know as you see it now however when we did perestroika the second half um
Guest:There's one particular scene that he kind of, you know, I guess says he wrote for me, which was pretty incredible, pretty gratifying.
Guest:It's a beautiful piece of writing.
Guest:It's a heaven, a description of heaven that believes the character who's a nurse to dying Roy Cohn, who's dying of AIDS.
Guest:And Roy in his hallucinatory state kind of comes to him and
Guest:And Belize just describes to him his idea of heaven, which is not what Roy Cohn doesn't quite match his expectations.
Guest:It's a beautiful piece of poetry, dramatic poetry.
Guest:And yeah, so that was new.
Guest:Tony wrote that and said, hey, I wrote this here, read it.
Guest:And I'm like, wow.
Guest:Because what we did was we did the first, if I recall, we did the first part for about, we rehearsed for three months, then we performed for three months, then we kind of backtracked a little bit and we performed half the time and we performed during the day.
Guest:Sorry, we performed the first part at night and we rehearsed the second part during the day for another three months and then until we had both parts up and running.
Guest:So it was pretty crazy, crazy, but super fun process.
Marc:And Kushner was just coming into his whole trip.
Marc:Are you guys friends?
Guest:Oh, yeah, of course.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:You know, we reach out from time to time.
Guest:I see him here and there.
Guest:But yeah, yeah.
Guest:I mean, those guys, I mean, Kushner, George Wolfe as well, who directed George is the godfather to my kids now.
Guest:But yeah, I mean, those guys, those guys changed my life and like changed my whole, you know, molecular structure in profound ways, you know, with what they gave me.
Marc:Well, I mean, like molecular structure in the sense, not just career wise, but in terms of what you're capable of as an artist.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:That and just as a as a human being, as a citizen.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, that that that that play is very much about citizenship.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was also it kind of afforded me this gift or curse.
Guest:I don't know how every way you look at it of of.
Guest:of expectation that you can merge politics with, you know, creativity.
Guest:These might, you know, two interests of mine, that they can be merged, or in fact, they should be merged, you know, particularly, you know, in urgent times.
Guest:And so that was a real, you know, license from, you know, that I got from them, from, you know, from Tony's writing, particularly that, you know, this was right, you know, and it was necessary, you know?
Marc:How often does that happen?
Guest:It happens, you know, at the same time, I'm someone who tends to see politics and everything anyway, you know.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:I mean, you know, you know, there's political elements to Westworld, you know.
Guest:Sure, of course.
Guest:The film All Day and Night, obviously there's a political undercurrent to that.
Marc:I watched Ride with the Devil recently.
Guest:Oh yeah, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:That's that's kind of a unique, interesting movie politically and racially and American history wise.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I love that movie.
Guest:I think I have a particular place in my heart for it because it was undermined by the studio.
Guest:Because of some of the kind of peculiarities of it that they didn't know quite how to deal with, you know, you know that you had this black character who was fighting on the side of the Confederacy just kind of blew their fucking minds, you know.
Guest:You know, this kind of, you know, quasi liberal, you know, just all of like the constructs that they, you know, understood history to be and also understood in terms of the alliance, you know, you don't make a movie where the heroes are Confederate rebels.
Guest:Yeah, but in fact, for me, what the story was about, particularly relative to this black character who was actually based on a scout, a historical figure who rode with Quantrill in raiding Kansas.
Guest:God damn, his name escapes me, this guy.
Guest:But was that he was a guy who wasn't waiting to be emancipated by the great white savior.
Guest:but had to go through, you know, do the hard work of emancipating himself, you know, of winning his own freedom.
Guest:And that's for me, that was so much more powerful.
Guest:But for them, they couldn't quite, you know, they couldn't quite pallet it.
Guest:And in fact, you know, they took me like, you know, the weird shit happened.
Guest:They, you know, they took me off the poster.
Guest:It was like me, Tobey, McGuire, Skeet Allrich, Jewel, myself, you know.
Guest:And they just kind of took me off the poster because I don't know, I guess it was for their like kind of market sensibilities.
Guest:They couldn't figure out how to market that to that, you know, young white kid out in Kansas or Minnesota or whomever.
Guest:It was like some weird, really weird, stupid, fucked up racist bullshit, you know.
Guest:And then they decided not to release the movie fully.
Guest:But it's a beautiful film.
Guest:Ang Lee, you know, kind of an outsider looking in an American history in a really nuanced way.
Guest:And it's the last American film about the Civil War of the 20th century, you know.
Guest:But, you know, it's a beautiful film.
Marc:Now, can we just talk about the Muddy Waters role for a second?
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, sure.
Marc:Were you a Muddy Waters fan?
Guest:Oh, yeah, man.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, who isn't?
Guest:Who isn't?
Guest:We all are.
Guest:Yeah, I know.
Guest:I know.
Guest:Of course.
Guest:Even if we don't know it, you know?
Marc:What did you learn about him going into that that you didn't know already?
Guest:Well, a hell of a lot.
Guest:I mean, I didn't realize at the time.
Guest:I don't think that he was illiterate.
Guest:Couldn't read or write.
Guest:This dude could not read or write and ends up
Guest:Essentially rewriting the, you know, the direction of modern American music, you know, and could not read or write.
Guest:I mean, these guys, what I came to appreciate about those guys, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, those guys...
Guest:Though I saw them as almost as like, it's just like, you know, as heroic, as artist, as hero.
Guest:I mean, what they did coming from where they came from, nothing.
Guest:And creating the soundtrack out of that to American freedom.
Guest:This idea, at least, that we aspire toward, you know, so cut to the Berlin Wall.
Guest:And they're playing, you know, rock and roll.
Guest:They're playing Muddy Waters music because that idea of freedom that they were able to articulate musically, right, was based on history, personal history and a collective history in this country born out of slavery.
Guest:I mean, those guys were badass, as bad as it gets.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, just, you know, come on, man.
Guest:And change the whole world, you know, change the way we hear music, you know, globally.
Guest:Badasses.
Guest:I mean, just incredible.
Marc:It's so it's always so bizarre to me that the kind of strange, sometimes tense, but but seemingly symbiotic relationship between Jews and and African-Americans and modern music.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, like the chess guys.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because at some point, like, I don't know if you read about that, like, you know, like Muddy used to paint the fucking walls of chess records.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You know, before like before he made it big, you know, he was just sort of a guy who would sit in with the band and work around the office and shit.
Marc:But it's just sort of this weird kind of relationship that is sometimes exploitive, but seemingly mutually beneficial.
Guest:Yeah, you know, it wasn't always in all circumstances the coolest, you know, the coolest alliance, you know, but it was, you know, a necessary symbiotic one, you know, it was definitely that.
Guest:But then, of course, then there are other instances in which, you know, you look at, you know, you know, records.
Guest:Yeah, but you also look at the Freedom Riders down in the South, you know, Goodman, Schroeder, and Chaney, and you see, you know, that was an alliance of a different type, you know.
Guest:So, yeah, complicated like everything, you know, that relationship.
Guest:But, yeah, with the chess guys, yeah, they took them guys.
Guest:They took some of the guys for a ride, you know, pretty much, you know.
Guest:You know, pretty much all of them.
Marc:No doubt.
Guest:But likewise, you know, you look at Led Zeppelin, look at the stones.
Guest:All of this, all of it is derived from muddy waters, you know?
Marc:But you know what's weird about the stones is that, you know, they brought a lot of people to.
Marc:The stones were always really kind of like, they would, you know, they would, you know, name their sources, bring them on the road with them, celebrate them, make sure people knew what was up.
Guest:Yeah, it's complicated.
Guest:It's complicated.
Guest:But they made a whole hell of a lot more money than those guys did, you know, to have the capacity to be able to give them that gift.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:And I think there were some lawsuits.
Guest:I don't know if it was with the Stones, but I think Muddy and I think maybe Led Zeppelin.
Guest:You know, like all these riffs that I grew up thinking, you know, squeeze my lemon.
Guest:You know, Led Zeppelin was like, wait a minute.
Marc:Yeah, there was definitely, they ripped off that whole riff.
Marc:I think it's a Willie Dixon song.
Guest:is that right but like you know whole lot of love you know that's that's muddy water yeah you know the rolling stones the name the name derives from a uh tune called catfish blues that name that's muddy waters i mean it's incredible like a rolling stone yep yep yep i mean it's just just incredible incredible and and from absolutely nothing digging it out of the mississippi dirt man yeah it's fucking beautiful man it's a beautiful story so you did you guys finish shooting batman or what
Guest:No, we were in, I think, our, I don't know, third month.
Guest:You know, I guess we've been going about two and a half months, and we, you know, hit the brakes, you know.
Guest:So we'll go back, and we've got about another four months to go, you know, once we get back.
Marc:And you're playing Commissioner Gordon?
Guest:I am, yeah, yeah, yeah, having a ball.
Guest:We were having a ball.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:When was the last time you watched Basquiat?
Guest:Actually, it was within the last year, right?
Guest:And you know why?
Guest:Because I hadn't seen it in a while.
Guest:And I was actually out to dinner with Wes Anderson and another filmmaker, friend of his.
Guest:And and they were talking about this and somehow Julian Schnabel came up in the conversation and I was like, yeah, Julian, you know, because we had, you know, we had a tricky relationship during the process of making that film and, you know, kind of since like, you know, gotten past that.
Guest:And one of them said, well, yeah, you made a beautiful film together, though.
Guest:And I was like, huh.
Guest:It's like, oh, really?
Guest:You know, I was like, wow, it was a lovely thing to hear.
Guest:And so I said, well, and I went back and said, let me watch that thing.
Guest:And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:It was pretty good.
Marc:You and Schnabel had problems?
Guest:Yeah, well, I mean, it wasn't, yeah, that was a complicated situation there on a number of levels.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah, it was complicated.
Marc:Because he was a painter?
Yeah.
Guest:Well, Julian is a certain personality, and in some ways that was obviously a personal film for him to make, but it was very personal for me, too, because I felt...
Guest:A certain kinship with Jean-Michel Basquiat and his story, you know, and I felt there were aspects of it that I knew that maybe he did not appreciate, you know, and so interesting, you know, and as his first film, you know, I was, you know, I was, you know, I just the.
Guest:i'd gotten finished angel in america about a year before that i think and you know i'm feeling my oats and stuff too and anyway um at the same time he's incredibly generous you know in terms of allowing me space to kind of research and paint you know and all you know just prepare for that thing and you know at the end of the day yeah it was complicated um but you know
Guest:uh i think their relationship his relationship with joe michelle was complicated too so it kind of made sense in uh you know yeah i gotta watch i'm gonna try to watch that again oh yeah well look i'll let you get to your dogs and get to your life that was great talking to you i hope you enjoyed it well i did man i you know i appreciate your uh your interest and appreciate uh the time amidst uh all the stuff that's going on around us you know
Guest:So thanks.
Guest:Yeah, man.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I think, when do I meet you?
Marc:I met you at a Netflix party or somewhere and I came up.
Marc:Oh, that's right.
Marc:Maybe it was, it was, I think it might've been at the Emmys.
Marc:I can't remember where, but I went out of my way.
Marc:Yes, you did.
Guest:I'm glad you did.
Guest:Cause there was a lot of weird stuff there and you were not, you, you, you were not among that weirdness.
Guest:I appreciated meeting you there.
Marc:I always feel like a tourist at all those things.
Marc:I don't even know why I'm there, but I was happy to meet you.
Marc:Get me back to Brooklyn, baby.
Marc:Get me back.
Marc:back to brooklyn you know yeah great talking to you man thanks man all right keep well take care okay okay that was jeffrey wright and i chatting as i said before the protests but uh you can follow him on twitter he's a very engaged active smart man he's also uh in the movie all day
Marc:And a night, which is now streaming on Netflix.
Marc:And also, as I said earlier, he's behind the relief organization Brooklyn for Life, which was established to provide food for frontline workers during the pandemic.
Marc:You can check that out at Brooklyn for Life.
Marc:And again, thank you everyone for reaching out and keeping me afloat during this time.
Marc:And I hope you guys are taking care of yourselves and doing the big work and fighting the good fight and however you find you are capable of doing it.
Marc:Now I'm going to play a little guitar and I'll talk to you in a couple of days.
Marc:I miss you, Lynn.
guitar solo
Marc:Boomer lives.