The more you know about the world, the more resources you have in terms of things that can inform your character or the circumstances that surround your character.
Joe Morton
'Black film,' unless it's lucky enough or creative enough, or timely enough to build a life of its own, hangs subjacent to 'white film' on Hollywood's financial score board... aided and abetted by the supposition that so-called black film has no foreign market.
Accolades are there to congratulate you but also to make you understand that it's not over. You now have to continue trying to improve the craft and keep going. It's not something to rest on.
I think it talks about the fact that there are black people in the world who have tremendous amount of talents and have no channel through which they can those talents.
Race prejudice has nothing to do with color. It has to do with being the stranger.
In the 1980s, there was no category to stick me in. 'He sounds too smart' is what I was hearing. I realized that I had to become a member of the school of what I call 'ugly acting.' Which meant I wanted to do what Dustin Hoffman did very successfully: to play character roles, but lead character roles.
My father was in the service. His job was to integrate the Armed Forces overseas. So that meant we showed up at military bases in Okinawa or Germany, racially unannounced. That made me, in that particular society if you will, the outsider.
One, I had never worked with John Woo before and I wanted to see what that was like, and two, Ben Affleck is a friend, so it would be fun to work with him again.
Proof' is going to be, in many ways, a mystery. It's not a procedural in any way. It's not a medical drama. It really is about trying to investigate whether or not there's life after death.
Actors are very often people who are placed in a position where they think they have to be grateful for the job and have no control over what they play and how they play it. I was not taught that way. I completely disagree with that. I think that you have more control than you think.
I suppose I prefer kind of epic dramas like, oh, I don't know... 'Lawrence Of Arabia' or 'Apocalypse Now'; those are the movies that I have a tendency to be most fond of.
If you want someone who is sort of still, has a bit of an edge, is older, you get Morgan Freeman. If you want someone who can carry a gun and still play a father, you get Danny Glover. My category is 'that guy who happens to be black.'
We've all grown up with 'Ozzie and Harriet,' 'Father Knows Best,' 'Eight Is Enough.' White families have always represented the universal family.
By the time I graduated, I was the drum major, the highest-ranking officer, and third in my class.
I always feel like I'm running an hour and a half late.
I came into the industry at a time when there weren't a lot of choices to what you could do.
I think many villains have the burden of not being very human.
With my background, I came out of the theater.
I actually went to the university as a psychology major, and at orientation, they took us around the campus and took us to the theater for a skit. At the end of the skit, I literally could not get up out of my seat.
If you live a good life, that seems to be what really matters. If there is something afterwards, terrific. If not, you haven't lost anything.
If we're still talking about the same thing 40 or 50 years later, then that means we're not doing anything about it.
For all of the diversity in 'Scandal,' no one else would be sitting in a room wearing a T-shirt and chains and call a Southern white Republican president a 'boy.' And it's those kinds of things that Rowan has the freedom to say that nobody else could say within the confines of the show.
What's lovely about 'Eureka' is that it's a sci-fi show, but it's not monsters from outer space; it's not craziness from outer space. It's just about this community of people and what they do. These geniuses have sometimes done wonderful things and sometimes created global warming. It has this wonderful left-of-center sense of humor.
'12 Years A Slave' is a film that is beautifully shot, wonderfully acted, and told in a compelling manner. However, there are some questions, in my opinion, as to its importance. Paramount among those questions is, What does this scenario illustrate that we didn't know or haven't seen before? And why does such a film garner such popularity?
Unfortunately, most actors want to play off their own personal mystique and good looks and whatever, but that will only carry you but so far.
'Breaking Bad' - when I started watching that show, I thought it was terrific. I love the way it was shot. I love the writing. I love the arc of Bryan Cranston's character. I just thought that was just really, really a wonderful, wonderful show.
I don't know of any actor in any television show that I have ever seen who's given monologue after monologue in a television series.
If you have the skill, then you can move as you age.
I don't think you can play a villain with a negative point of view.
My tendency is to be quiet and to stay focused and in character. Not the entire time, but certainly to stay focused while I'm on set.
Most of my career I purposely spent doing good guys.
I make it a habit of never trying to judge what an audience might think, only because all points of view are too close, because we're doing it every day, I think that the actor's point of view is sometimes too close to what the material actually is.
The argument for '12 Years a Slave' was that - yes, it's a beautiful film. Beautifully shot, beautifully acted. It's a real story, and these stories should be told. The problem is, if they're the only stories being told, then it makes Americans of African descent - it puts them into that victim category. And that was my problem with the movie.
When I started off many years ago, I made a determination that there were certain roles I didn't want to play.
I think theater is the strongest place to find what's missing in entertainment. Unfortunately, it pays the least.
Is it racist to prefer country music over the blues? Or is it simply a classic case of tribal antipathy toward the unfamiliar, in favor of gravitating to what you know?
Being back on stage in New York, off-Broadway - I mean, that's an actor's dream.
When I was growing up, all these superheroes were white. On some level, you put that out of your mind... but as you get older, you realize it's a very one-sided affair. So I'm very glad to see that these movies are becoming more diversified.
It's important to know, whether you're pro or anti the current president and what he's doing, that he's doing what he thinks is for the betterment of the country because his interest is to make this country a better place.
I didn't play basketball because I'd learned how to ice skate.
It's important to me to play men who use their brains, not just brawn.
I have lots of hopes for black actors in general, whether they be on TV or on stage or in movies, and that is that we move beyond the tokenism of what it means to be black in a particular set of circumstances.
I don't live on the West Coast, so when I come out to work, I rent a house.
When I started, black people were either victims or they were the perpetrators; they were the boogie men who jumped out of the bushes and did terrible things to you.
What you find with really good directors is that they kind of leave you alone. They've hired you because they know the kind of work you do and the sense of how you'd approach it. So usually, they'll just stand back and maybe give you a nudge once in a while in terms of something specific they might want in a particular scene.
When we were bringing 'Raisin' onto Broadway, our first stop was at Arena in D.C. Several things struck me about being in D.C.: One was the enormous poverty around the capital at that time - it was 1973, '74 - and I was stunned by people literally living in poverty, with holes in their houses and other things.
With Trump, because of the kind of seemingly violent way that he talks about things and because he's on Twitter almost every single morning, I think it brings down the respect that we have for the White House and for the Oval Office in particular, so the expectation is anything can happen, and that becomes the norm, which is unfortunate.
Even if you have something that you can contribute to society, very often society doesn't view you that way. Because when you are The Other, the first response by the mainstream, if you will, is to ostracize.
When it comes to certain portions of our history, we've just forgotten it all.
Republicans in the South... are trying to find ways, not so much to block black and brown people from voting, but to block black and brown people from getting people they want elected, which is a far more subtle thing to do.
