Profile | Jeffrey Wright, chameleon actor, on seeing something of himself in his American Fiction character
- He’s known as a shape shifter, able to slip into the skin of characters as varied as painter Jean-Michel Basquiat and Batman’s Commissioner Gordon
- Jeffrey Wright’s latest role, as a frustrated black writer in American Fiction, needed little adaptation. ‘There’s a lot that’s pretty close to me,’ he says
Jeffrey Wright has played painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, activist Martin Luther King Jr. and singer and musician Muddy Waters.
He’s played military general Colin Powell, a Dominican drug kingpin, Batman’s Commissioner Gordon and a long-time inmate nearing release.
He’s played a former slave, James Bond’s Felix Leiter, the nurse Belize in Angels in America and an android-human in Westworld.
In an array of roles both small and large over 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.
Shape-shifting 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.
