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The 39th Santa Barbara International Film Festival came to a close on Sunday, but one of its highlights came three days earlier, with the last of the filmmaker tributes that serve as the spine of the fest.
On Thursday evening, inside Santa Barbara’s historic 2000-seat Arlington Theatre, veteran stage and screen actor Jeffrey Wright — who is Oscar-nominated for the first time in his nearly 30-year film career, for his leading performance in Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, a dramedy about race in America — was feted with the fest’s Montecito Award following a deeply engaging career-retrospective conversation with SBIFF executive director and passionate Wright admirer Roger Durling.
Wright, 58, spoke about being raised by his mother and his aunt, and never really even considering acting until he got to Amherst College, where he began to fall in love with the craft (and to abandon the notion of attending law school). He was subsequently offered a full scholarship at NYU Tisch, which led him to move to New York, but after just two months he dropped out of school in order to take a part in a Lorraine Hansberry play, figuring that real-world experience was more important.
After seven years of primarily working in the theater (including in John Houseman’s repertory company), with a few small film parts in-between, Wright landed the game-changing part of Belize, a gay nurse, in George C. Wolfe’s Broadway production of Tony Kushner’s landmark play Angels in America. “That’s where my political science degree came in handy,” Wright reflected, noting that the show “was a perfect marriage of my interests.”
Rather remarkably, it was on the very day that he put in his notice for Angels that Wright heard about Basquiat, which was to become Julian Schnabel’s directorial debut and Wright’s first major film vehicle. After auditoning for the supporting role of Benny, which was ultimately played by Benicio Del Toro, Wright was cast as the eponymous artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and dove head-first into the assignment, including painting for months in Schnabel’s studio. 28 years later, Wright sees Basquiat and American Fiction as “bookends.” (And Schnabel, in a congratulatory video, revealed that Basquiat will soon be released on Blu-Ray by the Criterion Collection — in black and white!)
Other major filmmakers began seeking him out. He was in Ang Lee’s Ride the Devil and John Singleton’s Shaft (replacing John Leguizamo in the role of a Dominican drug dealer, for which he learned his accent by spending considerable time in Washington Heights, he said). And then Mike Nichols came calling, casting Wright in a 2003 HBO limited series adaptation of Angels in America in the same role he had played on stage a decade earlier. (No other actors from the Broadway production were asked to reprise their parts.) Wright says that it was a very different undertaking to play the role on screen — not least because he shot his part during the days and then spent his nights on Broadway in Topdog/Underdog — and relished the opportunity to deliver one particularly great speech while his character was caring for Al Pacino’s Roy Cohn.
Over the 20 years since, Wright has, largely by his own choosing, not worked as much as he previously did. But he has still managed to juggle a lot of smaller parts in big film franchises, including James Bond (three films as CIA agent Felix Leiter, opposite Daniel Craig, with whom he was working on The Invasion when Craig was cast), The Hunger Games and Batman (the script for 2022’s The Batman reminded him of ’70s films); two landmark HBO drama series, Boardwalk Empire and Westworld (which he says “taught me to work efficiently” and “in many ways is a documentary”); and two Wes Anderson films (most recently 2023’s Asteroid City, in which he delivers a towering word-perfect speech that was captured in a single take).
Every once in a while, though, Wright has taken on leading roles that have given him more of an opportunity to remind people of just how talented he is. Those include 2008’s Cadillac Records, in which he played musician Muddy Waters; 2018’s OG, in which he played a prison inmate, and which was filmed at a real prison and featured him alongside real prisoners; and especially American Fiction, Jefferson’s feature directorial debut. “The satire, all that stuff was great,” Wright explained. “But for me, the heart is the family. That’s what drew me in. Because it was the life I was leading when I got the script.” Indeed, like his character in the film, Monk, Wright had recently cared for his declining mother, who had once cared for him — “I kind of was that guy for a while,” he said — and the film helped him to reconcile with what he had gone through: “Making this film was part of the rebuilding for me.”
Durling, who did a masterful job of contextualizing Wright’s career and making Wright comfortable enough to open up, then turned over the proceedings to Wright’s American Fiction costar John Ortiz. Ortiz said that he had been an admirer of Wright’s for years, particularly in New York’s theater community, and had dreamed of working with him for 27 years prior to landing the part of Monk’s literary agent. Calling that gig “the opportunity of a lifetime” and Wright “my artistic brother,” he presented Wright, who was visibly moved, with the festival statuette.
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