Fresh Air - Best Of: Mark Ruffalo / Jeffrey Wright

Episode Date: February 24, 2024

Mark Ruffalo is nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actor for his role in Poor Things. He plays a hilarious debauched lawyer who seduces Emma Stone's character. Ruffalo has also appeared in Marvel movies as the Incredible Hulk. For that role he had to act in a motion capture suit. "It's the man-canceling suit. It makes you look big where you want to look small, and small where want to look big," he says. Also, we hear from Jeffrey Wright. He's up for an Oscar for best actor for his role in American Fiction, where he plays a novelist who's frustrated with the publishing industry's expectations of Black authors. He cynically writes a book under a pseudonym that's full of clichés, like violence and poverty — and it's a hit. Maureen Corrigan reviews an off-beat bestselling Japanese mystery series.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Sam Brigger in for Terry Gross. Today, Mark Ruffalo. He's nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Poor Things. He plays a hilarious, debauched lawyer who seduces Emma Stone's character. Ruffalo has also appeared in Marvel movies as the Incredible Hulk. For that role, he had to act in a motion capture suit. It's the man-canceling suit. You know, it makes you look big everywhere you want to look small,

and small everywhere you want to look big. Also, we hear from Jeffrey Wright. He's up for an Oscar for Best Actor for his role in American Fiction, where he plays a novelist who's frustrated with the publishing industry's expectations of Black authors. He cynically writes a book under a pseudonym that's full of clichés like drugs, violence, and poverty. And it's a hit. Plus, Maureen Corrigan reviews an offbeat, best-selling Japanese mystery series. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. This is Fresh Air Weekend.

I'm Sam Brigger in for Terry Gross. My first guest, Mark Ruffalo, has been nominated for an Oscar in the Best Supporting Actor category for his role in the movie Poor Things, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. In Poor Things, Mark Ruffalo plays a character described in the movie as a cad and a rake. His name is Duncan Wedderburn, and he seduces Emma Stone's character, Bella Baxter, to run away from her home and fiancé and have an adventure with him in Lisbon. Let's hear a scene. You're a prisoner, and I aim to free you.

Something in you, some hungry being, hungry for experience, freedom, touch, to see the unknown and know it. So why am I here, you ask? I'm going to Lisbon on Friday. I'd like you to come. Lisbon of Portugal? That is Lisbon I speak of. God never allow it. That's why I'm not asking him.

I'm asking you. Bella's not safe with you, I think. You are absolutely not. In that scene, Duncan Wedderburn is looking at Bella Baxter like a cartoon cat who's trapped the canary. What he doesn't realize is that Bella Baxter is no ordinary young innocent to corrupt. She is in fact the result of a Frankenstein-like experiment by a scientist, played by Willem Dafoe, who reanimated a dead woman's body by replacing her brain with the brain of her unborn baby. Bella goes through a rapid awakening to the world around her and to her own body,

and like an infant who doesn't yet know society's norms, is uninhibited to a degree that both attracts Wedderburn and undoes him. Mark Ruffalo's performance in Poor Things is hilarious and delicious, and he himself describes it as a big departure from his previous work in movies like Zodiac, Spotlight, Foxcatcher, The Kids Are Alright, You Can Count on Me, and of course, several Marvel movies and TV shows where he plays the Incredible Hulk. Well, Mark Ruffalo, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thanks, Sam. It's really nice to be here. It's nice to have you. You said you had some trepidation about taking on this role.

What were your concerns? Well, you know, I hadn't really played anything like this, and I hadn't done an accent. I hadn't really done any kind of a period piece. And, you know, you sort of, you have a career going and you sort of get a brand and mistakenly you start to believe maybe that's who you are, that's how the world wants to see you. And, you know, I really wanted to be great in a Yergos Lanthimos movie.

And so I said to him, it's ridiculous now, but I said to him, Yergos, I want to work with you. I love you. I don't want to suck in your movie. And I don't know if I'm the right guy for this, you know. So did he have to convince you? It didn't take very much. He just laughed at me. He's just like, you're him. And he just refused to even entertain my trepidation. You've been in like romantic comedies and you've been in in movies that have comedic elements like

like the brothers bloom or and even in the avengers movies but i don't think you've ever had a role that is so broadly comic as this one i mean you even do a pratfall at one point so can you just sort of compare what it's like to act in something that's comedic like this compared to your more like dramatic roles uh yeah it's you know i even in the dramatic roles i feel like i've i've always kind of had one foot on a banana peel and the other in the grave you know it's like i just i see that as like the aesthetic that i i want to um you know that i is my North Star, if I could find a way of doing it. But to just do all-out comedy that's so physical.

And that pratfall is such an interesting thing because, you know, in comedy, I mean, I find, you have to be very open to play. And it's not an inner thing. It's this open thing, and it happens in this kind of special space that's outside yourself. And so you have to be very open and aware and ready to grab whatever's being given to you and then play with it. And that pratfall, I think it's the one you're talking about when I come up the stairs. Yeah.

Yeah. You're almost like skating up the stairs. Like your arms are going back and forth. And then at the landing, you just go flop over. That was an accident. Oh, it was? Yes. And it was like, but that's the thing.

If you're in the flow of comedy, the accidents are the gold. Those are the gifts from God. There's another moment in the movie where Duncan farts when Max McCandless comes in to confront him. And that was like the acting gods just filled my belly with gas. And I was like, here we go. And poor Rami looked at me. He was so outraged and humiliated.

And it was just the perfect, it was like, oh, we're into the scene. And it was literally that one take was the take that Yorgos used. But I guess what I'm telling you that is like, what, you know, great comedy is something that happens spontaneously and is playful. And that's, I mean, the same thing happens with drama.

But, you know, people are so much more well-behaved around drama. So those moments – you know, I can't lift my butt up and, you know, let one rip in Spotlight or Foxcatcher, you know. Maybe Foxcatcher, but nowhere else. So, Mark, I have to ask you about the big green guy. Yeah. else. So Mark, I have to ask you about the big green guy. Since 2012, you've been playing Incredible Hulk and as I said, a bunch of different Marvel movies and TV shows starting with the first Avengers movie. So in 2012, there were just a lot of superhero movies out there and a lot of really good actors were being swept up in

them like particularly Robert Downey Jr. playing Iron Man but like did you ever think you were going to play a superhero movie. But, you know, you mentioned Robert revolutionized the sort of tentpole studio film and really the industry by his performance in Iron Man. And they took a big, you know, swing with him and it really paid off. But what Robert did was he created a space for really complex indie actors to come into these big spectacle films and ground them in really wonderful character work. To play the Hulk, you have to spend a lot of time acting in a motion capture suit. Did you have any apprehensions about doing that?

I hated it. It's the man-canc capture suit. Like, did you have any apprehensions about doing that? I hated it. It's the man-canceling suit. You know, it makes you look big everywhere you want to look small and small everywhere you want to look big, you know? It's just like, it's the most humiliating thing in the world. I had a little loincloth made for it at one point as the years went on, you know, because it's just so not modest. And so, you know, it's the most vulnerable thing in the world. You know, as an actor,

you know, you learn to love a costume. You learn to hide behind props. You learn to, you know, sink into a set and lose yourself in the world. But when you're in green screen and, you know, it's just you and you're naked and it's all your imagination. You have to put things there that aren't there. You have to play off people that aren't there. You have to use props that aren't there. This is in the beginning. It's changed quite a bit now. But you know what I found? That all the theater training that I had, you walk onto a stage and you're or a castle or, you know, a desolate landscape and, you know, Samuel Beckett's mind of nowhere and no place and make that real and

something that you can live off of. So in a lot of ways, this ancient technology that I'd been so versed in actually was the best preparation for this new modern thing that was happening. What about the celebrity from being part of the Marvel Universe? By the time you started being the Incredible Hulk, you were already a very well-known and successful actor. But was the celebrity and the recognition sort of exponentially different? Oh my God. I mean, I wasn't, I mean, I wasn't well-known in comparison. It was a radical change in every way that I live publicly. I do lament the loss of being able to observe the world without it observing me back or being the one observed.

But, you know, it's like everything. It's a blessing and it's a curse at once. Does it take away from simple things like walking down the street or going for a hike or something? It can. You know, I have developed this incredible way. If I'm by myself, I could pretty much disappear, especially in New York. I mean, no one looks at each other in New York. You know, we're so on top of each other that everyone wants to give each other their space and they want their space in an emotional sense.

And so that means not looking people in the face or the eyes. You know, you'd be on the subway and there's 100 people there and not one person's, you know, unless they know each other or they're a tourist, is looking at anybody else. You know, they got their head down there on the phone or in a book, sleeping, whatever. Do you have to do like the cap and sunglasses thing all the time? I'll do that. I'll wear such a ridiculous hat. My glasses are so ridiculous that people are embarrassed to look at me.

It's like a camouflage of unsightliness. If you're just joining us, our guest is actor Mark Ruffalo. He's been nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in the movie Poor Things. We'll be back after a short break. I'm Sam Brigger, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. Let's get back to my interview with Mark Ruffalo. He's been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Poor Things. Some of his other movies include Spotlight, Foxcatcher, The Kids Are Alright, Zodiac, and You Can Count on Me.

He has, of course, also played the Incredible Hulk in many Marvel movies and TV shows. Mark, I wanted to ask you a little bit about your childhood. It sounds like your family moved around a bit, like you were born in Wisconsin, but then you spent some time in Virginia and then California, right? That's right. I think your family was Catholic, but it sounds like there were some active seekers of religion in the household. Is that correct?

Yes, it was a very interesting household, religiously speaking. My family was, you know, Italian Catholics, very Catholic, my grandparents. Then my mom and her mother became evangelicals in the First Assembly of God, Pentecostal, Jimmy Swaggart era. And my dad split off completely in a whole other direction into the Baha'i faith. And so, you know, you're in the family and everyone's participating. And so I was introduced to all three. Well, you actually were saved by the televangelist Jimmy Swagger, right? I was. Was that on TV?

No, no, no. You know, there was a first assembly of God in Kenosha, Wisconsin at the time. And my grandmother was a member of it. And, you know, these different evangelical preachers would, you know, sort of tour. And he was the star of that at that time. He was, you know, he was their, you know, Elvis of evangelicals. And it was music. I mean, it was a pretty lively experience.

And so my grandmother, for her birthday, asked me to be saved. And I was like, saved from what? I was just, I'm like, I'm eight. I, you know, like, what am I? I haven't even gotten to do anything yet, really. And it was like, no, you were born. I mean, the second you come through the birth canal, you've sinned. You know, like, that's, you know, that's the original sin.

And I'm like, oh, yeah, okay. Oh, yeah, makes sense to me. But I was like, yeah, I'll do whatever you want, Grandma, you know? So what was that like? Did everyone sort of line up or get, like? Yeah, so they bring the kids down. Like, it was a special moment. We're like, okay, we're going to bring the children down, you know?

And so I'm walking down there. I was like, I want to be saved. I mean, I don't want to go to hell. I certainly don't, you know, like, that would suck. And it's going to make my grandma happy. But, man, this is so intense down here and he's so sweaty and everyone's like talking in different languages. And it was so I got down there and we're lined up and they're going, you know, each kid's getting preyed on from kid to kid. And they're falling down, or, you know, people are falling over, and it wasn't happening.

And I was like, I'm not feeling it. And then finally I was like, oh, man, I'm not going to be the one who's like, doesn't get Jesus today. I'm like, no, not me. Nuh- me no and i just kind of went with it you know so you fell over too yeah and it was horrible did you feel bad you feel like you were kind of oh god i felt so ashamed yeah are you kidding me i was like i didn't feel anything like i was supposed everyone's here is like feeling so, and I didn't feel anything. And, you know, I went back up there, and she's like, how was it? I was like, oh, it was really good, you know.

She's like, did you feel it? I was like, yeah, yeah, I felt it, yeah. And, man, I mean, what that sets up in you at so early an age is so difficult for your ongoing relationship. It just became this thing that was always there that I didn't understand. Now I do, but I didn't then. And it was just a shameful feeling. How did you get into acting? Is that something you felt good at right away? Did it come easy naturally to you? found myself performing. I found myself, you know, doing skits from the Three Stooges,

you know, doing slapstick, pretending I was Charlie Chaplin. Like, I was doing all that. But there was no culture for that in, you know, in my family. They were paint, house painters. Then they became construction painters. They were business people. They were very serious about making money. And there wasn't a lot of room for this kind of being a dreamer. So it just wasn't anything that was a possibility to me. an avid wrestler um and i dropped out of wrestling to join the drama department because i'd walk by the drama department and they'd all be wrestling on the ground just like us but it was like 10 girls and two guys and you know i was like why am i not doing that wrestling you know and so i um and i went in there and i was just thrilled by it uh how emotionally open it was and diverse and accepting and silly and you know everything you couldn't be as a as a young man you know and uh and one of the kids in the play broke his arm, and my teacher, Nancy Curtis,

who was like this great theater teacher in the middle of Virginia Beach, like really great, came to me and said, I want you to replace Scott. And I said, you do? And she's like, yeah. And I was like, I don't know if I could do it. She's like, I think you you do? And she's like, yeah. And I was like, I don't know. I don't know if I could do it. She's like, I think you could do it.

And so I did it. And I did the first scene. And I was basically just ripping off Peter Falk and Columbo. And I did the first scene. And I got a big laugh and I said, Oh my God, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. This is amazing.

It was like that feedback that you got. Yes. That, that relationship, you know, it was like, it was, it was just magical because not only did I get the laugh, but I knew the laugh was coming.

I felt this communication with the audience. And it was telling me what it was asking for. And then it was responding with the laugh or the silence or whatever and i went to like i went to nancy afterwards i said um mrs curtis yes mark uh do you think it's too late for me to like become an actor i actor? I mean, I'm already 18. She just was like, no, Mark, I don't think it's too late. Yes, I think you can become an actor. That sounds like a very vulnerable moment for you.

Oh, it was horrible. I mean, I was a jock. I was a surfer. I was a skater. I was in a punk band. You know, like, I was as much a dude as you could possibly be. But I also just had this other thing that I wanted to try. Yeah. At some point, you decided to make a go of it, right? You must have been getting some encouragement from her and then from other people to sort of get you to take a chance and to move to LA eventually? Well, my family moved to San Diego the day after I graduated from high school.

And, you know, all my friends had gotten into colleges. I didn't get into any colleges. I was a terrible student. I didn't even really apply to that many. And I ended up in San Diego and I didn't have a plan. And, you know, through a whole fantastical set of circumstances, I heard about the Stella Adler Conservatory in Los Angeles. That was like two hours away. Was Stella Adler teaching there when you were there? Yeah. Yeah, she was there. But, you know, I had the good fortune of walking into the school. And there was a woman there, Joanne Linville, who I recognized immediately as the Romulan commander of Star Trek. And she said, what are you doing here? And I said, I don't have an audition. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't have any real training.

But I want to spend my life being an actor. And she said, well, darling, you've come to the right place. And she really took me under her wing. And I wasn't good in the beginning. And it took me a long time. You know who I was in class with who was amazing was Benicio Del Toro. Like literally the second he walked in, he was amazing. And I looked at him, I was like, oh my God, I'll never be that guy. And yeah, it took me a long time and a lot of auditions before I started to figure out what I was doing. Well, it's been a real pleasure speaking with you. Mark Ruffalo, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks, Sam. It was a great interview. It was really, really a great interview. I appreciate it. Mark Ruffalo has been nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance in Poor Things. The first novel of a best-selling Japanese mystery series has recently been translated into English. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan says

that while the novel, The Kamigawa Food Detectives, shares some similarities with the Netflix show Midnight Diner, the book follows its own unconventional mystery recipe. For me, it's a sip of blackberry brandy, the bargain bin kind that my mother kept in the back of a kitchen cabinet. She would dole out a spoonful to me if I had a cold. The very words blackberry brandy still summon up the sense of being cared for. A day home from school, nestled under a wool blanket on the couch, watching reruns of I Love Lucy. That spoonful of brandy is my Prus Madeleine in fermented form. Clients seek out the Kamigawa Diner, however, because their elusive memories can't be accessed by something as simple as a bottle of rail liquor.

Most find their way to the unmarked restaurant on a narrow backstreet in Kyoto, Japan, because of a tantalizing ad in a food magazine. The ad cryptically states, Kamigawa Diner, Kamigawa Detective Agency, we find your food. Entering through a sliding aluminum door, intrepid clients are greeted by the chef, Nagare, a retired widowed police detective, and Koishi, his sassy 30-something daughter who conducts interviews and helps cook. In traditional mystery stories, food and drink are often agents of destruction. Think, for instance, of Agatha Christie and her voluminous menu of exotic poisons. But at the Kamigawa Diner, carefully researched and reconstructed meals are the solutions, the keys to unlocking mysteries of memory and regret. The Kamigawa Food Detectives

is an offbeat best-selling Japanese mystery series by Hisashi Kashiwai that began appearing in 2013. Now the series is being published in this country, translated into English by Jesse Kirkwood. The first novel, called The Kamigawa Food Detectives, is composed of interrelated stories with plots as ritualistic as the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. In every story, a client enters the restaurant, describes a significant but hazily remembered meal, and after hearing their stories, Nagare, the crack investigator, goes to work. Maybe he'll track down the long-shuttered restaurant that originally served the remembered dish and the sources of its ingredients. Sometimes he'll even identify the water the food was cooked in. One client says he wants to savor the udon cooked by his late wife just one more time before he remarries. Another wants to eat the mackerel sushi that soothed him as a lonely child. But the after effects of these memory meals are never predictable.

As in conventional talk therapy, what we might call here the taste therapy that the Kamigawa food detectives practice sometimes forces clients to swallow bitter truths about the past. In the standout story called Beef Stew, for instance, an older woman comes in hoping to once again taste a particular beef stew she ate only once in 1957 at a restaurant in Kyoto. She dined in the company of a fellow student, a young man whose name she can't quite recall, but she does know that the young man impetuously proposed to her and that she ran out of the restaurant. She tells Koishi that, Of course, it's not like I can give him an answer after all these years, but I do find myself

wondering what my life would have been like if I'd stayed in that restaurant and finished my meal. Nagare eventually manages to recreate that lost beef stew, but some meals, like this one, stir up appetites that can never be sated. As a literary meal, the Kamigawa Food Detectives is offbeat and charming, but it also contains more complexity of flavor than you might expect. Nagare sometimes tinkers with those precious lost recipes, especially when they keep clients trapped in false memories. Nagare's Holmes-like superpowers as an investigator are also a strong draw. Given the faintest of clues, the mention of a long-ago restaurant with an open kitchen, an acidic, almost lemony taste to a mysterious dish of longed-for yellow

rice, some bonito flakes, Nagare recreates and feeds his clients the meals they're starving for, even as he releases others from the thrall of meals past. Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed the Kamigawa food detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai. Coming up, we hear from actor Jeffrey Wright. He's nominated for an Oscar for his role in American fiction. I'm Sam Brigger, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Sam Brigger. Our next guest is award-winning actor Jeffrey Wright. He recently spoke with Fresh Air's Tanya Mosley. I'll let her take it from here.

From blockbuster movies to independent films and television, Wright is often referred to as Asteroid City. He was a series regular in the HBO shows Boardwalk Empire and Westworld. This year, Wright is up for an Oscar for Best Actor for his role as Thelonious Monk Ellison in American Fiction. It's about a frustrated novelist and professor fed up with the literary world profiting from stereotypical stories about Black people. To prove his point, Monk uses a pen name and writes a book that leans into all of the stereotypes. And he's offered a huge advance, making him the very kind of author he's tried to avoid becoming. The film is adapted and directed by Court Jefferson and is based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett. Jeffrey Wright is a Tony, Golden Globe, and Emmy Award-winning actor.

In addition to American fiction, he also stars as Adam Clayton Powell Jr. in the recent film Rustin. Jeffrey Wright, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you, Tanya. So we've talked to several folks from American fiction on Fresh Air, including director and screenwriter Court Jefferson, who said basically your voice was in his head as he was writing the screenplay. And everyone says that they've come to this project because of you. Is that a lot of pressure going into a project?

No. In fact, it's the opposite. It means that people want to be there, that they're as passionate about this work as I was, and that they want to come and play. They want to come and work together. That's what you want. The pressure is when there's someone there who doesn't want to be there. When you bring a group of collaborators together that are as understanding of the timeliness of a piece such as this, understanding that this could be something special, understanding that we can do something special together, that alleviates the pressure. I want to talk about that a little bit more because I've heard you say that the synergy on this set was pretty dynamic and that everyone was bringing their A-game from cast to crew. Well, yes, the crew, you would see copies of Percival Everett's Erasure lying around the set. They were reading the book, wanting to understand more about this story that we were telling.

I think what's exciting about our film and I think what's helped capture audiences' attention is that we're having conversations within this film that are being had all over the country right now. The film opens with a scene in a classroom that's being had in classrooms across the country right now. It's a discussion on race and history and language and context. I'm a professor teaching a class in American Southern literature, and there's a verboten word on the whiteboard behind, and one of the students takes offense. Right, right. description of who this guy is. But again, that is at the forefront of the national discourse right now. So everybody was like, yeah, I want to be a part of this. I want to help tell this story. I want to do it in a way that maybe elevates the conversation, at least for the two hours in which the film happens. And you know what? We can have a laugh while doing this because you know what? We're not afraid of this stuff. And the message, I think, one of the messages is neither should you be.

A lot of people came to the film, of course, because it's a satire, but I want to play a clip. As I mentioned, you play Thelonious Monk Ellison, a frustrated novelist, a professor fed up with the literary world. In this scene I'm about to play, your character Monk is catching up with his sister, Lisa, who is played by Tracy Ellis Ross, who is a doctor for Planned Parenthood. And the two of you are talking about the stresses of your jobs and the purpose behind what you do. Let's listen. How's work? It's not very glamorous. I go through a metal detector every day. All you do is important. Meanwhile, all I do is invent little people in my head and make them have imaginary conversations with each other. Books change people's lives.

Has something I've written ever changed your life? Absolutely. Absolutely. My dining room table was wobbly as hell when your last book came out. It was like perfect. I'm telling you. Take it back to Logan, please. Logan cannot help you, Mung. Oh, my God. That was Jeffrey Wright and Tracee Ellis Ross in the Oscar-nominated film American Fiction. You were drawn to this screenplay for several reasons, one that you just mentioned. It really sits in the moment that we're in now. But you were also especially drawn to the storyline of family and love. You call it the meat and the most subversive part of this story. Can you say more? Sure. I think there is an answer to the tropes, the stereotypes that are being forced upon him and that we explore on that side. And it's this portrait of this family because despite how he's perceived or misperceived, his everyday life is simply the ordinary,

ordinary because it's so common, the ordinary tasks of taking on responsibility to family and particularly to his mother in that he's reached that place in his life where he is tasked with being her now caretaker. And that was, yeah, that was really resonant with me because there were many overlaps to this journey of our protagonist monk for me. So my mom passed away a little over a year before I got this script. I had the great good fortune of being raised by my mother and her eldest sister, my aunt Naomi, who's 94 years old now, who immediately came to live with me after my mom passed. And so my mom passed very quickly, colon cancer, but I, you know, only child. It was all down to me. And then my aunt came to live with me.

I have kids. It was the middle of the pandemic. It was like, wow, you know, the walls were creeping in. And that's where our character finds himself really at the very early on in this film where he is all of a sudden supposed to be the adult in the room of his family. And it's such a universal experience. It's a universal experience, and it applies to people across backgrounds. Many of us have known this experience, and many more of us will know this experience. But I just got it.

I understood that on a really intimate, like kind of like psychological, emotional level, the pressures that that applies to a person's existence, whether it be on the creative side, professional side or personal side particularly. So, you know, the hook really was plopped into my mouth by the, you know, the social commentary, that first scene, but it was set by the portrait of this family. You saw yourself in Monk. There's another person that you play, too, that you also saw yourself in, the late painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, who rose to fame in the 80s with his paintings and drawings that combined graffiti

and street culture and neo-expressionism. This was the first time you appeared as a lead. I want to play a clip from the film. In this scene, Basquiat has achieved great success and is being interviewed by a reporter played by Christopher Walken. Let's listen. Father's my baby. How do you respond to being called a pickaninny of the art world? Who said that? That's from Time magazine. No, no, no, no, no.

He said it was Eddie Murphy of the art world. Oh. My mistake. Let me just open something up here. You come from a middle-class home. Your father's an accountant. Why did you live in a cardboard box in Tompkins Square? Do you feel that you're being exploited? Or are you yourself exploiting the white image

of the black artist from the ghetto, you know? Ghetto? I don't exploit it, no. Other people... It's going to make me put my foot in my mouth. Other people, it's possible. Other people might exploit it. It's possible. Is it true?

That was a scene of Jeffrey Wright playing Jean-Michel Basquiat in the 1996 film Basquiat, being interviewed by a reporter played by Christopher Walken. Jeffrey Walken is making this assertion that Basquiat might be a fraud, essentially, that he's capitalizing on this rags-to-riches story. Of course, I see this connective tissue between what Basquiat experienced and what this fictional character, Monk, is going through. Absolutely. Yeah. There's a direct through line. Yeah.

Say more about that because did you see it immediately once you received the screenplay for American Fiction? I think I did. You know, I kind of see these two films as bookends to my career. Certainly they are because it's the first lead that I played and the last lead that I played. So in that way they are. But there are a lot of overlaps between those two narratives, as you say, one fictional, one non-fictional. But yeah, I guess I'm just kind of circling back to a theme in some ways.

But these are the two characters as well that I've felt most closely related to or felt a closer kinship with than anything else that I've ever done. Bosque out for different reasons because I was a young creative guy showing up in New York and living on the Lower East Side and traveling in spaces that he had traveled in. And I also, I think, draw from some of the same sources that he draws from in his work, you know, the references he'll make to Ali and Miles Davis and undiscovered genius of the Mississippi Delta. I just really, really understood his language, both his visual language and his poetry. He just spoke to me. And the more I took in his work, the more I just came to love him.

So, you know, physically, obviously, he was a very specific guy. And so I had to find that. But on the interior, there was a, you know, there wasn't a lot that I needed to kind of, you know, change to find him likewise with this character monk in fortunate and unfortunate ways. Yeah, there was, it's pretty much's pretty much – my daughter saw the film. She said, you know, there's a lot of your humor in there. Other people who have seen the film says, dude, that's you. And which one?

In Basquiat or in American fiction? In American fiction, yeah. So, yeah, so a lot of parallels there. But, yes, they're both the stories of these two, you know, pretty talented, smart, creative men, creative minds who are trying to be intellectually and lyrically themselves and are, you know, up against a, you know, you could place that scene in our film, in American fiction, as an interview of Stagg-Arlie, this pseudonym that, you know, that he takes on, that my character takes on. And, you know, it could be after he's discovered and it would work just fine. Early in your career, Sidney Poitier gave you some advice about embodying a character that I thought was really interesting. It was something about irony. That was it. That was one word.

Yeah. I had – it was really my first significant role on film was opposite Sidney, which was frightening. I mean, I was, I think, 23, maybe. I was 23, 24, just out of college, you know, a couple of years before. I had started acting my junior year of college, so I didn't really have a lot of experience. And the only reason I got that job was because I had a – I didn't have – it wasn't because I had an MFA in theater and acting. It was because I had a political science degree. And they assumed that I knew a little bit about the subject. It was a miniseries called Separate but Equal about the Brown v. Board of Education case. I was to play the youngest of the lawyers working with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, a man named Bill Coleman. And I had no clue really what I was doing. But, you know, there I was. I said, yeah,

you know, I guess he's reasonably smart. Get him in there. And I remember just my first single shot was opposite Sidney Poitier, who was everything. and he was so wonderful, so gracious, so generous, and just like kind of a naturally elegant man, and he was everything that you would expect he would be. So at the end of the experience, and I brought my mom down, of course. We shot down in Charleston, South Carolina. She got to meet him. She's a lawyer. These were heroes of hers.

Thurgood Marshall, Sidney was playing. And so anyway, at the end of the production, I said, so, you know, Mr. Bronte, any advice for me? And he said, yeah, irony. That was it. And I understood exactly what he was saying. I understood exactly. What was he saying to you about that? Because I was playing everything right down the middle of the road.

And he was saying go between the lines. He was saying, yeah, paint outside the box, you know, come at it sideways. Well, how do you do that, especially when you're playing a real person? Well, you know, a performance is more than just the words on the page. So you have to find a way to make them live and to make them compelling. You're not just reading, though. You're not just reading what you're interpreting. And that's what he was saying. I think it was about interpretation and finding, you know, finding the strange humanness in things when you can and finding even, oh, wow, that was a mistake. Oh yeah. Make, make it again. As a musician friend of mine, he said he was teaching me to play clarinet. I was playing

Sidney Bechet in this, in this TV series. And my friend was a saxophone player. He played everything, really. But he said, you know, you make a mistake, make it twice, you know, things like that. Just like I was, you know, I was kind of a little too literal. And yeah, he saw it and I got it. Jeffrey Wright, thank you so much for this conversation. Thanks for having me, Tanya. Jeffrey Wright speaking with Tanya Mosley. He's nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of frustrated novelist and professor Delonious Monk Ellison in the film American Fiction.

Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Sallet, Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Thea Chaloner, Seth Kelly, and Susan Yakundi. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Sam Brigger.