Jeffrey Wright poses for a portrait to promote the film “American Fiction” on Monday, Dec. 11 in New York.
NEW YORK — Jeffrey Wright has played Jean-Michel Basquiat, Martin Luther King Jr. and Muddy Waters. He’s played Colin Powell, a Dominican drug kingpin, Batman’s Commissioner Gordon and a longtime inmate nearing release.
Across an expansive array of roles both small and large for more than two decades, Wright has been among the most malleable of actors, able to transform endlessly while still maintaining a singular, rigorously grounded screen presence. Is there anyone he can’t play?
“Dennis Hopper said in ‘Easy Rider,’ ‘If you name it, I’ll throw rocks at it,’” Wright says.
Shapeshifting has been Wright’s aspiration as a performer since, as a young actor, he was naturally drawn to performers like Gary Oldman, Dustin Hoffman and Peter Sellers. He admired their dexterity going from character to character.
“I thought that was the way to go about it,” says Wright. “It seemed like it required some skill that was worth learning.”
Even just in 2023, a spectrum of Wright’s range is on display. He’s the pastor, politician and Civil Rights activist Adam Clayton Powell Jr. in George C. Wolfe’s “Rustin” and the inspiring military general of Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City.”
But it’s Cord Jefferson’s “American Fiction” in which Wright gives one of the best performances of his career. And ironically, it’s the role that required less metamorphosis than any ever has for Wright.
“There’s a lot that’s pretty close to me in this film. It’s probably the performance that I could squeeze myself into with the least friction,” Wright said in a recent interview. “My daughter saw the film last night and she said, ‘There’s so much of your humor in this.’”
Satire of race
In “American Fiction,” Wright stars as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a frustrated and disillusioned author and college professor resentful of his books being pigeonholed as African American fiction. In a drunken haze he sarcastically pens a book that plays up Black stereotypes (“My Pafology,” under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh), yet it becomes an unironic sensation with white publishing executives.
It’s a deft satire of race and identity, adapted from Percival Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure,” that Jefferson, in his directorial debut, surrounds with a rich, humanistic comedy of midlife crises and family dramas. Monk’s mother (Leslie Uggams) is aging, his sister (Tracee Ellis Ross) dies unexpectedly and his brother (Sterling K. Brown) is coming out.
Wright has won a Tony, an Emmy and a Globe (all for “Angels in America”), among many other accolades. But a best actor Academy Award nomination for “American Fiction” — which many are predicting — would be his first Oscar nod.
“I don’t think it’s totally healthy to think about these things too much but they’re there, so one does. I guess if they’re handing these things out, yeah, sure, we’ll take them,” Wright says. “All in all, it’s pretty cool, I reckon.”
Wright, 58, was raised by his mother and aunt in Washington D.C. (His father died when he was young.) They were, he says, the first college graduates in their family. Just as formative to Wright was his grandfather, a Virginia famer and waterman Wright describes as representing to him “what a man was to me in this world.”
“I’ve done very well but a generation back, it’s a much humbler way of life,” Wright says. “So, I wanted to make sure our overall story was evenhanded, and that Monk might have been in need of some evolution in his perspective.”