Fresh Air - Jeffrey Wright, From 'Basquiat' To 'American Fiction'

Episode Date: February 20, 2024

Wright is up for an Oscar for best actor this year for the film 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 drug abuse, violence, and poverty — and it's a hit. Wright's first starring role was in the 1996 film Basquiat. He talks with us about his big break in the play Angels in America, and the time early in his career when he was acting opposite Sidney Poitier and asked for advice on acting.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org. This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley, and our guest today is award-winning actor Jeffrey Wright. From blockbuster movies to independent films and television, Wright is often referred to as an actor Jeffrey Wright. From blockbuster movies to independent films and television, Wright is often referred to as an actor's actor. He's portrayed important historical American figures, including artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Muddy Waters, Colin Powell, and Martin Luther

King Jr. Wright has also appeared in three Bond films, The Hunger Games series, Batman, and Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch in 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 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 word, a verboten word on the whiteboard behind. And one of the students takes offense and it really kind of drops a you know a small bomb off you know at the middle of the at the beginning rather of the film that kind of provides context for the story that we're going to tell and it also gives us a bit of

a description of who this guy is but again 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 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? 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 never changed your life absolutely absolutely my dining room table was wobbly as hell my god your last book came out it was like perfect i'm telling you 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. Your 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, 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? Ghetto? I don't exploit it, no. Other people... You 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, Is it true? 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. Basquiat 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 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. It's pretty much, you know – 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 up against a battle from the outside to prevent that from happening. And so, yeah, I mean, that scene, in fact, could, you know, you could place that scene in our film, in American fiction, as an interview of Stagg R. Lee, 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. I thought it was really sweet and also a lens into just how families are that I was listening to something that you said about when you were nominated, you received the nomination for Oscar for American Fiction. And you talked to your aunt, who is one of those who raised you. And she was like, OK, that's nice. But I thought you should have gotten it for a boss.

Yeah. Right. Yes, she did. Yes, yes. Yeah, she said, you should have been nominated a long time ago. And I don't know if that was an indictment of me or the system. My mom, pretty tough, pretty tough people would know. She was saying what a lot of people have said.

Do you feel that way? Do you feel that way? Do I feel that way? I mean, I feel I've done some pretty good work over the course of my career. There's some performances that I'm fully proud of. But the thing about this phenomenon, this award stuff, is it's not solely about the quality of the work. There are a lot of elements that come together in order to make this possible. One, you have to have good work. You have to be in a film that's well-crafted.

You have to have great colleagues around you. You find a piece like ours that's timely, that kind of captures the collective imagination in some ways. You also have to have studio support. And we're willing to place resources behind you to put your work in a position to be recognized because, you know, we think it'll do well for us to a relationship with you. So we'll make an investment of time, resources and energy to and to make that happen because we think you're worth it. What do you think was different this time? You think it was all of those things you talked about before, that it was just the moment for it. Yeah, I think that's partly it.

It didn't hurt that we won the People's Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival. But at the same time, even prior to that, the studio, Orion, Amazon, MGM, was excited about the prospects for this film, particularly Orion. When we went into production, we were pretty much independent. Orion came in very early in the process. There's a woman named Alana Mayo who runs Orion Pictures. I think she's the only black woman in her position in this town that can green light projects. She recognized that this was a story that wanted to be told.

She recognized, too, that this was a story that wanted to be heard. Cord Jefferson, who, you know, wrote and directed this, and as I said, was the quarterback behind the team that was trying to get this thing made, said he shopped the project around, the script around to at least a dozen of the powers that be with me attached. And they said, oh, it's the best script we've ever read. I haven't read a script like this. Oh, my God. And, oh, we love Jeffrey.

We love it. We just don't love you guys that much that we're going to finance this. But, you know, good luck to you. And meanwhile, these are, you know, these are groups that finance $150 million movies. Our film was far less than that. You know, we made this film for, you know,

well under $10 million in 26 days. And, you know, yeah, I mean, the budget on our film was the catering budget probably for the Batman movie that I did. But, yeah, no one wanted to touch it except for Ilana Mayo at Orion. And they've been vigorous in supporting us. And that has made the difference. I've done a lot of great work. You know, was, I think, worthy of being recognized. But, you know, it wasn't.

That's okay, though. I'll tell you why. Even though there wasn't necessarily interest and support coming from the executive suites of the studios, there was always support coming from the creative side. There were always directors who took an interest from the very beginning of my acting career, let alone my film career. But my film career, I worked early on with Sidney Lumet, whose film Dog Day Afternoon was the first adult film that I saw in the theater when I was eight years old. Who's one of who's just Sydney. I mean, his that his that work in the 70s around, you know, that that time period of Dog Day Afternoon.

It's one of the great eras in all of American filmmaking. And it's in some ways our film in that it's story driven. It's, you know, it's character driven, harkens back to that that style of filmmaking. But he he said, hey, I want to I want you to come do this, this, this, this film with me. Film called Critical Care that, you know, we shot up in Toronto, but it was it was wonderful. Ang Lee, likewise, did a film with him called Ride with the Devil very early on. He was such a wonderful collaborator and wonderful teacher too, and took an interest. And so now I have this relationship with Wes Anderson, for example, George C. Wolfe, for many, many years and many projects. So there was always

interest from really exciting, smart, ingenious, creative people. And at the end of the day, it's the work that I can control. I can't control the other stuff. Our guest today is Oscar-nominated actor Jeffrey Wright. More of our conversation after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air. Support for NPR and the following message come from Carnegie Corporation of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org. Hi, this is Molly. And I'm Seth. We're two of the producers at Fresh Air. If you like listening to Fresh Air, we think you'll also like reading our newsletter. You'll find the interviews and reviews from the show all in one place. Plus,

staff recommendations you won't hear on the show, behind-the-scenes Q&As, bonus audio. It's also the only place to find out what interviews are coming up. We keep it fun, and it comes straight to your inbox once a week. Subscribe for yourself at whyy.org slash fresh air. Today, my guest is actor Jeffrey Wright. He's nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of a frustrated novelist and professor named Thelonious Monk Ellison in the film American Fiction. Wright has portrayed several important historical figures, including artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Colin Powell, Muddy Waters, Martin Luther King Jr., and Adam Clayton Powell in the recent film Rustin. Wright has also starred in three Bond

films, The Hunger Games series, Batman, and Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch in Asteroid City. He's appeared in the HBO dramas Westworld and Boardwalk Empire. And Wright has received many awards, including an Emmy, a Golden Globe, and a Tony Award for his performance in the 1993 theater production of Angels in America, which was written by Tony Kushner and directed by George C. Wolfe. 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 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 – 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, you know, my first single shot was opposite Sidney Poitier, who was everything. He was the captain of the ship for an actor such as myself. 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, of the, of the experience, and I brought my mom down, of course, we shot down in Charleston, South Carolina. She got to meet him, you know, she, you know, she's a lawyer, you know,

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, you know, 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. Right, right. And that's what he was saying, I think.

It was about interpretation and finding the strange humanness in things when you can and finding even, oh, wow, that was a mistake. Oh, yeah. Make it again. There's a musician friend of mine. He said he was teaching me to play clarinet. I was playing Sidney Bechet 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. Yeah. Angels in America. It was one of your formative experiences playing the role of Belize in the theater, a hospital nurse and a former drag queen, in which you won a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in Play. You later portrayed the same

character in the HBO adaptation in 2003, for which you won an Emmy. I want to play a scene. In this scene I'm about to play, your character Belize is talking to his patient Roy Cohn, the ruthless, homophobic, and closeted attorney who is in the hospital with AIDS. And he's played by Al Pacino. And Cohn, who is at the end of his life or close to it, asks Belize what comes after death. Let's listen. Can I ask you something, sir?

Sir. What's it like after? After? After? This misery ends. Hell or heaven? Heaven. Like San Francisco. A city.

Good. I was worried it'd be a garden. I hate that. Big city. Overgrown with weeds. But flowering weeds. On every corner, a wrecking crew. And something new and crooked going up catacomb to that.

Windows missing in every edifice like broken teeth gritty wind and a gray high sky full of ravens isaiah prophet birds roy piles of trash but lapary, like rubies and obsidian. And diamond-colored cowspit streamers in the wind and voting booths. And everyone in Balenciaga gowns with red corsages. and big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion. And all the deities are Creole, mulatto,

brown as the mouths of rivers, race, taste, and history. Finally overcome. And you ain't there. And heaven? That was heaven, heaven ruined. That was Jeffrey Wright in the 2003 HBO adaptation of Angels in America, in which you won an Emmy and a Golden Globe playing the character of Belize.

You know, Jeffrey, I was struck by, of course, this was an amazing performance. You also wanted this character to be smart. That was something that was intentional for you when you took this on. Oh, well, he is smart. Yes. Yeah. It's on the page. And George Wolfe wanted that to be at the forefront of his character. He is funny, you know, and he's flamboyant, but he wanted him to be smart, witty, sharp, and a type of, you know, warrior. And so there had to be, because what he's confronting is dangerous in Roy Cohn,

the individual and what he's confronting is dangerous in Roy Cohn, the individual and what he represented. And so, yeah, there had to be like kind of equal footing for the two of them. And so, yeah, I mean, that's there on the page. And it was in the intentions when we did that on stage to make him so. Yeah, in that moment there when he essentially describes the right-wing nightmare. I'll tell you something about that. The first time that that bit of writing appeared in the play was when we did it on Broadway. It hadn't existed before.

We were in rehearsal for Perestroika, the second part of the second half of the play. And Tony came in one day and he said, I've written something for you. And he handed me this sheet of paper with those words on it. And I went, wow, because I was I think I was kind of looking for something that could be like kind of confrontational, just a little bit more forceful. And he handed me that and it was like, wow, it just like dropped down like that feather in the play drops down from the sky onto the stage and dropped into my hands. And I was like, oh, my God, this is incredibly beautiful. And so what you heard there, of course, is the film. I was waiting to play that scene on film because it gave me an opportunity to be so intimate and so subtle with the language in a way that you can on stage. When I got the

invitation to come and do it again on film, that was the part that I was just cherishing more than any other to get to. If you're just joining us, we're talking with actor Jeffrey Wright. He's nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor for his performance in American Fiction. We'll be right back. This is Fresh Air. Today we're talking with actor Jeffrey Wright. He's nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of frustrated novelist and professor Thelonious Monk Ellison in the film American Fiction. When we left off, we were talking about his work in Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America. Wright performed in the play for a year and a half starting in 1993. When it was adapted into the 2003 HBO series, he reprised his role as Belize,

the flamboyantly gay nurse in a hospital AIDS ward. In the filmed version, he was in scenes with Al Pacino, who played the homophobic, closeted gay attorney Roy Cohn, who was dying of AIDS. You were the only cast member from the play adaptation to be in the series. Yeah. I think that's just, you know, I was young. I was the youngest, too. So, you know, I think it had more to do with that than anyone else. I did Angels in America for a year and a half. Revisited it every night, knew it so well, that play inside and out,

and had visited and revisited all manner of choices over the course of time and understood what the audience heard, how they responded. So I knew it like the back of my hand by the time we got around to doing the film. I'd had a lot of rehearsal. So when we were filming Angels, I was doing Top Dog Underdog on Broadway.

So I would go in the morning to the studio and film the – and do the film. And then I would go in the evening and do the play. My son was about two years old. I wasn't sleeping so consistently. There were some nights when I was on stage at Top Dog and I was like, man, I'll keep it together. Don't fall over. I was just exhausted. But because of my schedule, I would have to leave filming at around six o'clock in the evening to make it to the theater on time. So we shot that. We shot Al's side of the scene first. And it was about five, Al Pacino. It was about 515. And Mike thought, you know, it would take us a while to turn the cameras around and we really wouldn't

be able to get into it in 45 minutes. So he said, we'll come back tomorrow morning and we'll finish the scene. And I said, nah. I said, we're in it. And we found this wonderful space, Al and I together. And when you get there, you want to stay there. So I said, no, let's just turn it around. It's not going to take me long. He said, you sure? I said, yeah. So they turned around, and I think we had about 20 minutes, and I did it in two takes. I think that's probably the first take, but I was ready. I'd been ready for years. Playing this character, Belize, I've heard you say it changed you as an artist, a human, and a citizen. of need for that story and also watching the way it ultimately connected to legislative change in our country in real time, not that it was the sole catalyst, but it was there.

It was absolutely a driver on the cultural side, pushing the discourse. That was really moving. And that was very early in my career as well. So it kind of spoiled me to the idea that this work could, wow, maybe be important. Also, in terms of what it asked of me, you know, I was a jock in high school. What did you play? I played everything, ultimately, in high school. Football and lacrosse were, you know, my focus. Then I played lacrosse in college. But I spent more time in locker rooms than in dressing rooms. You know, the dynamics within Angels in America are very different than the dynamics in a high school locker room. I wasn't the most evolved cookie in the box.

You know, not to say that I didn't understand something about the fluidity of my sexuality and sexuality generally. But, you know, it was like it was a kind of, man, OK, I've got to go on stage and present this person, this person who, yeah, I have inside of me as well. Sure. This side of myself, you know, and that took that took work. In fact, George Wolfe, you know, said, Jeffrey, it's not working. And George Wolfe, you all have worked together many times. Many times. Yes, including Angels in America is the first time. This was the first time.

He said something incredible to me at one point in rehearsal. He said, I said, you know, George, I'm just not comfortable just yet. You know, everybody else has done the play already. Marcia Gay Harden and myself were the newcomers on Broadway, but the others had done it in Los Angeles and San Francisco. And they were all, you know, very close to the material, you know, and I felt kind of watched. I wasn't a gay man, but, you know, I said to George, I said, you know, I'm not feeling necessarily comfortable just yet.

He said, Jeffrey, I don't want your comfort. I want your talent. And I was like, oh, okay. And so, yeah, there was a real, you know, kind of artistic awakening that was required, taught me how to work as an actor, taught me not to focus on the superficial, but to focus on the central, you know, not, you know, I had to understand that this man was a caretaker and that he was a lover and that he was all of those things and a friend before I put the bow on. So there were, yeah, there on multiple levels. It really, yeah, it's the epicenter of my work. Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, I'm talking with actor Jeffrey Wright. He's nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor in his performance in American Fiction. We'll be right back.

This is Fresh Air. I want to talk about family. You grew up in Washington, D.C. Your mother, as you mentioned, was a lawyer. She exposed you to a lot of things, including the arts. What was your mom like? Oh, my mom was, you know, she's the architect of everything that I do. She put a series of doorways in front of me or an array of doorways and every one of them led to opportunity. And she put those in front of me at a very young age.

But the reason that she was the woman she was and my aunt as well. They came to Washington after graduating from Hampton Institute at the time. But they had been educated in Brooklyn. So my grandfather had an aunt who lived in Bed-Stuy, in Bedford-Stuyvesant. She worked for a family there, a Jewish family. She kept house and maintained the household. I always wondered why my mother and my aunt made matzo ball soup growing up, and it was because they learned from their Aunt Bessie. Yeah. I think the head of the family was a politician.

I don't know if he was a congressman or what. So she said, Bessie, Bessie Williams was her name, said to my grandfather, bring those children up here to go to school because they have better opportunity here than in the segregated schools of the South. And only my mother and my aunt took her up on the offer. And so my aunt went to Girls High in Bed-Stuy and my mother went to middle school in Williamsburg, I think. And I think in some ways that made all the difference in terms of the opportunities that were afforded me because they got an advantage and they, driven by this incredibly tough woman with high expectations. That was their aunt.

And likewise, they had high expectations. But also they provided, like she did for them, they provided pathways to achieving those things that they expected of you. And so, yeah, I mean, it was, she was, my mom was, you know, she was the daughter of her father. She was incredibly hardworking, incredibly committed to family and also to community. She was always trying to lend a hand, whether it to be to young women attorneys in Washington. She started an organization called GWAC to assist young black women. It was an organization that she founded. And I remember she was a big sister.

She would look after young girls who were vulnerable. And that's just who she was. You were on Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, and he revealed some information that you hadn't heard before. What were some of the most surprising or maybe the most surprising revelation about your family that maybe you still think about? The central figure in my family until he passed away was my grandfather. He was an incredible man. He was an oysterman and a crabber and a farmer and a whiskey maker slash seller and a pitcher in the Negro Leagues.

He was 6'1", seemed like he was 6'5", had hands just as long as the day, and he would wrap a ball in his fingers. And he could, you know, he apparently, he said he pitched against Satchel Paige even. Wow, which league did it? He said he played for a team called the Seaford Saints down in Seaford, Virginia. But so he's the central guy. He was manhood to me. My father had passed away when I was very young.

But he was everything, my grandfather, William Henry Whiting Sr. But I always knew that he had left school very early on. When he was around 14, he began to work and maybe even earlier. But I remember that he only had a very limited education, but he was insistent that his kids have a real shot. And he was insistent on education and on citizenship, on voting. But I found out on Skip Gate's show why he had to begin his adult life so early. It's because my great-grandfather, his father, died of influenza in the pandemic of 1917, 1918. And I didn't know that detail. And it was relevant, obviously, to my grandfather's

story, but it was also interesting because I found that out shortly, I think, before this recent pandemic hit. And so there was greater relevance there. It also probably gave you a lens into him, just who he was and just in the way that he related in the legacy for your parents, your mother and you. Oh, yeah, absolutely. He was a man. He was, you know, you could not work him. You just couldn't. He'd get up 4.30 every morning. He was gone. Did you ever go with him out there? Oh, yeah. Oh, well, I didn't go out there to work with him because I was too young.

My older cousin used to go out. He was older. He was about seven years older than me. But I would go out on his boat. We would go out on Saturdays and just take family fishing trips out. You know, he had this big 36-foot Chesapeake Bay dead rise is what the boat is, you know, like a Buick engine in the middle and him at the stick. And we would go out and have these magical, magical days on the Chesapeake, you know, when it was a vibrant body of water. It's coming back now.

But, yeah, he, you know, I think that's part of the reason why saltwater is so special to me now. When I'm out here in Los Angeles, I got to be near the ocean. I heard you surf. I do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I got the salt water in my blood. I come from actually from generations of watermen down there on both sides. On my grandmother's side as well. Yeah. Yeah. Going back way, you know, back in deep into the records down there. Jeffrey Wright, thank you so much for this conversation.

Thanks for having me, Tanya. We talked with actor Jeffrey Wright. He's nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of frustrated novelist and professor Thelonious Muck Ellison in the film American Fiction. On tomorrow's Fresh Air, writer Lucy Sant shares her story of transition from male to female at 67 years old. She describes how she found the courage to come out after seeing her transformation through a gender-swapping feature on FaceApp. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Today's senior producer is Roberta Shorrock. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Produced and edited by Amy Sallet, Phyllis Myers, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Thea Chaloner, Seth Kelly, and Susan Yakundi.

Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Teresa Madden directed today's show. For Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.