  Don Cheadle plays an ex-Special Operations officer linked to a terrorist group in the thriller Traitor. The film, which opens Friday, was produced by Cheadle's company.
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NEW YORK -- Don Cheadle, whose latest film is the international espionage thriller Traitor, and the Bourne series star Matt Damon currently have a running joke about their respective spy roles.
"When Matt and I text each other, he writes White Mouse and I write Black Bourne," Cheadle, 43, told reporters about his co-star in the Ocean's 11 films.
The Mouse reference is to Cheadle's breakout performance as the ruthless and sadistic Mouse Alexander in 1995's Devil In a Blue Dress opposite Denzel Washington.
"I called (Traitor) the Black Bourne daily (on set)," said Cheadle.
In the new movie, opening Friday, Cheadle plays an American Muslim and former U.S. operative working alongside extreme fundamentalist terrorists while being pursued by an FBI agent played by Guy Pearce.
It was Cheadle's production company that optioned the movie by first-time director and screenwriter Jeffrey Nachmanoff from Disney.
"I didn't believe that Disney was ever going to do it," said Cheadle, who garnered an Oscar nomination for his performance in 2004's Hotel Rwanda. "And if they were, they were going to Disney it up quite a bit and I wasn't interested in doing that. So we got it out of turnaround. At first we had talked to (Hotel Rwanda director) Terry George about doing it and then Jeffrey said he thought he had a way to make it."
Cheadle, whose film credits include Devil In a Blue Dress, Traffic, and Crash, said his production company was created to have "the perceived ability to take my own professional destiny into my own hands. You know, you wait around for somebody to hand you a job and more and more in this business, it's just not happening. Studios that were making 10 movies a year are making three now. Everyone's getting rid of their boutique divisions."
Strangely enough the idea for Traitor began as a story that Steve Martin told to another producer while he was working on the comedy Bringing Down the House.
"I just thought it was very interesting that the questions that I thought we were kind of dealing with as a nation," said Cheadle, "I felt like (my) character Samir Horn was dealing with personally. How far do you go in the interest of safety? What values of yours would you put on the line? How far do you let your fear cause you to do things that are potentially counter to what your beliefs hold? It is a grey area."
Cheadle, who was raised a Christian although isn't a zealous church-goer, didn't sit down with any real-life military operatives because he simply didn't have access to them. But he had plenty of opportunity to study Arabic on the movies' various locations, which encompassed five countries on three continents and included cities like London, Morocco and Toronto.
Making Traitor didn't change his own beliefs in faith and politics, however.
"Most people that I meet everywhere, regardless of their faith, regardless of how they pray, and how they vote, most people are just trying to get through the day," said Cheadle. "Muslims, Christians, Jews, that's mostly what the people want. The biggest thing that I think I learned was how surprisingly close all the monotheistic religions really are -- Christianity, Judiasm, Islam, they're very close -- the same players came from the same place. It's just how those things are manipulated and used largely for the (leaders)' own ends."
Cheadle is currently developing a Miles Davis film but would only say: "It's not a bio-pic."
As for any more Ocean's films, he said that franchise is dead despite still being good friends with co-stars like Damon and Brad Pitt, both of whom texted or phoned him when they had their latest kids.
"There will not be another Ocean's film 'cause at the end of (Ocean's 13), we all looked at each other and went, 'You done?' and we all went, 'Yeah, I'm done. Let's walk off,' " said Cheadle.
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