  Don Cheadle (left) and Wesley Snipes talk business in the crime drama, Brooklyn's Finest. |
Some actors are so good they can elevate a project just by showing up.
Don Cheadle is one of those actors.
The movies Cheadle has appeared in are fairly evenly divided between crowd pleasers such as Hotel For Dogs and smarter, chewier movies such as Hotel Rwanda, Crash or Devil in a Blue Dress.
His current project, Brooklyn’s Finest, is a bit of both — he co-stars with Richard Gere and Ethan Hawke, and all three men play police officers in New York.
The film has all the shoot-’em-up action required to make it a big popcorn movie, but at the same time it’s a drama about bad guys and good guys and the grey areas in between.
The director is Antoine Fuqua, the same filmmaker whose film Training Day helped Denzel Washington win an Oscar.
Cheadle, 45, plays an undercover detective in Brooklyn’s Finest, passing himself off as a player in the drug trade. It’s a role within a role for Cheadle, who met with undercover drug agents just to get a sense of their work.
“It’s clearly very dangerous,” Cheadle says, “and it’s very difficult psychologically because those lines start crossing. You’re walking around pretending to be a gangster, and at the same time, you’re dealing with people, who, if at any moment they find out about you, you’re done. You get a bad review for that acting job, and you’re taken out.”
He notes that the role has some similarities to his role in Traitor, the movie he did with Guy Pearce in 2008.
Cheadle also has another “dual” role coming up in Iron Man II, playing the Col. “Rhodey” Rhodes/War Machine part — a role that will get more substantial with each instalment in the franchise. (Terrence Howard played the role in the first Iron Man, but was replaced, allegedly over a salary dispute.)
Can he comment on Iron Man II?
“It opens in May,” deadpans Cheadle.
But yes, he says he’s excited to take on the role. And worried about it, too.
“I’m not necessarily looking forward to it if it changes how I have to walk around on the street from moment to moment,” he frets.
“I don’t want, if I go to my kid’s soccer game, that me being on the side of the soccer field is the show, and not the game. I really enjoy doing things as a husband and a dad, and I wouldn’t want to have to change anything because of one movie.”
Iron Man II is by no means his only blockbuster-type film.
“The Oceans movies were pretty big,” he says, referring to Steven Soderbergh’s Oceans Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen.
“But whenever there was a potential mob scene when we were making Oceans, we’d all just push Brad Pitt out the door. And then we’d walk out behind him, no problem.” He laughs.
Cheadle is one of three children of a clinical psychologist and a teacher. His parents, he says, are both singers and both are what he calls “clowns.”
“Being playful, having a good sense of humour, having a good wit, expressing yourself — all those things were very important in our family. It all led naturally into what I do now as a profession.”
Cheadle has said he got serious about acting when he went to the California Institute of the Arts and received a Bachelor’s degree in fine arts, “But I’ve been told I decided when I was young. I was 10. But I didn’t know that’s what I was going to do, as a living.”
In fact, when Cheadle was graduating from high school, he might just as easily have become a musician as an actor — he had scholarships for both.
“I also had the opportunity to pursue vocal jazz, and they were running neck and neck then,” he says. “I sing all the time, but not professionally. I just sing around the house.”
That would make partner Bridgid Coulter (who played his wife in the film Rosewood) and their two daughters his main audience.
Cheadle has appeared in dozens of films — Boogie Nights, Bulworth, Out of Sight, Traffic, Talk to Me, After the Sunset and The Assassination of Richard Nixon among them — and has had success in television and theatre as well.
He’s a playwright and author, an expert poker player and a talented sax player, and after the experience of making Hotel Rwanda, Cheadle also became a tireless activist, working against African genocide.
In 2007, Cheadle and John Prendergast co-wrote Not On Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond...
Referencing Hotel Rwanda, Cheadle says that cinema in America has the potential to educate, by creating an interest in a viewer to find out more.
“Hotel Rwanda dealt with the genocide, but it was really a story about a guy and his family, with the backdrop of that happening around him,” says the actor. “If you want to know about the genocide, there are books and places to go to learn about it that are better than the movie.”
But, adds Cheadle, the movie could inspire somebody to pick up a book and learn more.
“And in that,” he says cheerfully, “I think movies work very well.”
CHEADLE'S TOP FILMS:
In the opinion of a lot of people, some of whom make movies and some of whom watch them, everything Don Cheadle appears in is made better by his presence.
Here, in one person’s opinion, are the five best movies he has been in:
Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)
Several critics pointed out that as the vicious sidekick, Mouse, Cheadle stole the show from the movie’s star, Denzel Washington. So what else is new? There was a lot of fuss made over the fact that Cheadle was not nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in this film.
Hotel Rwanda (2004)
Paul Rusesabagina was a hotel manager in Kigali who protected thousands of Tutsis during the genocide in Rwanda. Cheadle was nominated for an Oscar for his performance; he played Rusesabagina as an ordinary man, not a hero, and the result is spectacular.
Talk to Me (2007)
This uneven biopic of Washington, D.C., radio DJ Petey Greene Jr. stars Cheadle and Chiwetel Ejiofor; it’s on the list because it’s a film that showcases Cheadle’s formidable ability with comic material.
Traffic (2000)
A thriller about drug-trafficking, with blistering action and a superb cast that includes Michael Douglas, Benicio Del Toro and Catherine Zeta-Jones — not to mention Cheadle and Luis Guzman as agents whose hard work can’t stop them from being more cogs in the drug wheel.
Crash (2004)
Another uneven film in which Cheadle, as a world-weary detective and an angry man, is a standout in an ensemble cast. Crash concerns post 9/11 fears and race consciousness, and it won a Best Picture Oscar.
But wait, you say — what about Boogie Nights? Out of Sight? The Rat Pack?
We’ll fight later.
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