Jeffrey Wright makes quite an entrance in Shaft. He arrives
with a phalanx of lackeys and junkyard dogs, an ice pick in
his pocket and a trash-talking mouth aimed point-blank at
Samuel L. Jackson. It's the kind of grand, self-important
entrance you haven't seen since Liberace stopped making TV
specials. And for the rest of the movie, Wright lives up to
that moment with his broadly drawn, carefully shaded performance
as Peoples Hernandez, a drug kingpin and the first great movie
villain of this millennium.
"He's representative of something I want to comment on,"
says Wright, 34, "a self-absorption and a nihilism which I
see in our culture now." While members of the Latino community
have complained about the sometimes comical accent he uses
for the Dominican bad guy, Wright insists he "did it that
way to point out that Peoples wasn't assimilated."
Wright specializes in the more subtle points of raging characters.
A native of Washington, he studied political science at university
before turning to acting. "It seemed to make sense that you
could marry the two," he says, and that approach has served
him well as a militant gay nurse in Broadway's Angels in America:
Perestroika (a role for which he won a 1994 Tony); as the
drug-addled subject of the 1996 biopic Basquiat; and as the
ex-slave who fights for the Confederacy in the recent Ride
with the Devil.
It was his stage work that brought him to the attention of
Shaft producer Scott Rudin, who recommended Wright when John
Leguizamo dropped out of the role. "We did a read-through,
and I said, ŚCook up some more scenes for this guy,'" says
Rudin. "It's such a witty performance. Peoples is completely
despicable but never understands why people are mad at him.
He's like a really intelligent little kid."
Case in point: in one memorable scene, Peoples has a meeting
while sitting on the toilet with all the abandon of a two-year-old.
The positioning was Wright's inspired idea, though it was
not his idea to have a rude noise on the soundtrack while
he's sitting there. "When I saw it, it got a big laugh," he
says, "and that's not what the scene's about."
This statement is worrisome. Here, in the age of Adam Sandler,
is an actor opposed to bathroom humor. There's another dilemma.
Asked about the lack of choice roles for black actors, Wright
pauses. "If there's a positive for actors of color, it's that
there are so many undiscovered stories from our perspective,"
he says. Some of those stories will fill a screenplay he's
writing based on inner-city kids he grew up with; this could
mean that Wright will make some noise of his own.
-With additional reporting by David E. Thigpen
