Don Cheadle
Don Cheadle
Donald Frank "Don" Cheadle Jr. is an American actor, writer, producer, and director. He had an early role in Hamburger Hill, before building his career in the 1990s with performances in Devil in a Blue Dress, Rosewoodand Boogie Nights. He started a collaboration with director Steven Soderbergh that resulted in the films Out of Sight, Trafficand Ocean's Eleven. Other films include The Rat Pack, Things Behind the Sun, Swordfish, Crash, Ocean's Twelve, Ocean's Thirteen, Reign Over Me, Talk to Me,...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth29 November 1964
CityKansas City, MO
CountryUnited States of America
I'm trying to steal from everybody. So yeah, there's cats that I'm personally affiliated with - Carl Franklin, Paul Thomas Anderson - and others that I don't know personally but their work I'm a big admirer of, like Martin Scorsese. But I'm hoping to come up with a language that is mine, that's specific to my take on this material.
Speak up when you're supposed to, as opposed to trying to write prescriptions for the way people should live.
Living by example - that's always a better teacher than trying to preach.
I don't like movies that are trying to preach and trying to tell you how to feel.
We're trying to do what Miles Davis would have wanted us to do, which is approach it as artists with his life as the canvas.
The process changes slightly from role to role. Obviously, there are different things you're called on to do. You're not digging deep for Basher Tarr like I was for Paul Rusesabagina, but at the end of the day it's still all make-believe and you still are trying as realistically as you can to depict these characters.
It's much easier to cry or be angry, but to really laugh and genuinely be buoyant and laugh. That's hard if you don't really feel that way.
Comedies are very hard to do. They are difficult. Unless there's the Judd Apatow school, where they're like okay, we know that, we're going to do those. Or unless it's something that's far to the other side.
I don't know what would be antithetical to do on the other side, maybe a Tyler Perry movie or something. No, there are very few comedies that live in between that. Or you're doing some kid thing like a Jim Carrey movie with animated something that's like that. Yeah, I've wanted to do them. I like doing them. I did Talk to Me. That was pretty much a comedy.
The best thing that I learned from the best directors that I worked with is that the best answer wins. They are ego-less when it comes to doing the most important thing.
There are things that are happening way earlier than [the Oscars] when it comes to someone deciding whether they're going to spend x amount of millions of dollars on a movie.I want $100 million success. The moviegoer is the person I'm more interested in than the Academy.
We're not talking about you scored more points than me and I know that you won and I lost, those are clear results. This is about people's opinions and their subjective takes on things, people that sometimes haven't seen all of the movies they're voting on.
And it's not just black people. That's the other thing about this issue, it's conflated with just black and white and it's not that at all. It's diversity, it's something that looks more like the landscape of the country. And it's not about then we get the statues we deserve, it's not that. It's that everyone should be able to participate in this silly contest, which is how I feel about it.
If anyone ever said biopic I would say, "It's not a biopic." We're fighting uphill against the weight of history. I was like, why don't we just call it historical fiction?