American Fiction has been nominated for 5 Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Actor to Jeffrey Wright.
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Theatrical release poster
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“I think American Fiction serves as a type of bookend to that period,” says Wright, referring to the 1990s and the start of his career.
“Basquiat and Monk share similar journeys driven by their own desires to be their own authentic selves and to be creatively and intellectually free while facing underappreciation and undervaluation along the way. I can draw a line from my most recent work to the central piece of work that I did at that time. So, yeah, I think that that guy in that picture would look at his career and say yes, this all makes sense to me.”
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The past few weeks has seen him crisscrossing the Atlantic and the US as part of a promotional push for American Fiction, a process he says is like being on “a hamster wheel inside a circus train”. But he’s not complaining. He knows the alternative – no buzz, zero studio backing, no hectic travel schedule – too well, despite a career that has seen him established as one of the most respected actors working in Hollywood.
He has also sprinkled his magic on major box office fare: turns as Beetee in The Hunger Games, Commissioner Gordon in The Batman, and Felix Leiter in the James Bond franchise took him into the mainstream, while more recently he has developed a partnership with Wes Anderson, first playing a James Baldwinesque writer in The French Dispatch and then a verbose army officer in Asteroid City.
American Fiction is different, and Wright is no longer the critically lauded supporting actor. This time he’s playing the lead as Monk, a frustrated university professor and writer of big, serious books – most of which have nothing to do with Black life. But it’s when he jokingly turns in a book about ghetto violence and domestic dysfunction – written by a convict on the run – that he’s celebrated and becomes a bestseller.
The film is Wright’s vehicle and he’s already driven it to success, after it won the audience award at Toronto film Fest.
How much of Wright is in Monk?
“I understand the resistance that he faces, the misperceptions and the preconceptions but I think that I’ve managed to circumnavigate those in my own experience.”
He has been frustrated at the time it’s taken to get a project like American Fiction in contention? “There have been projects that I felt that I know should have been supported more rigorously. Basquiat is one: that movie was pulled early from the theatres. There were times at which I was frustrated, but I’m not frustrated now.”
In American Fiction his perspectives are very much aligned with the filmmakers’. He heaps praise on Jefferson, who has made the transition from screenwriter (he was part of the Succession team and wrote a particularly impressive episode of Watchmen) to director, but he also feels a connection to Monk. “What I’m most aligned with relative to Monk’s journey, is his relationship to family, which I should probably not delve into too deeply. I also relate to his tendency to be his own worst enemy in relation when it comes to certain personal aspects of the film,” adds Wright.
He married British actor Carmen Ejogo in 2000 and they have two children. The pair have now separated.
There’s another personal aspect to the performance. Wright was brought up in Washington DC by his mother and aunt, after his father died when he was young. Both women were high-achievers: his mom was a lawyer at US customs, while his aunt, who is 94, was head surgical nurse at DC general hospital.
“My mother passed away of cancer a little over a year before I received this script from Cord,” he says. “It was a kind of shockingly quick process … then my aunt immediately came from Washington to live with us here in New York. This was at the start of the pandemic and I have kids as well, so in a flash I was in the thick of things and trying to manage, to the best of my abilities, the numerous cracks in the dyke.”
Amid the familial strife of the film, there is humor. Anyone who works in book publishing and has attempted to buy a work from a Black author might well cringe in horror at some of the scenes. There are toe-curling attempts to appeal to Monk’s alter ego, during which you can almost see the publishers counting the money they think it will generate. “The satire in the social commentary is timely and sharply drawn,” Wright says. “It’s ironic, funny and important but in some ways, it exists as neon advertising for the deeper, more satisfying meal that is the son of a family and the portrait of a man.”
In American Fiction, a supporting cast including Tracee Ellis Ross, Issa Rae and Sterling K Brown try to overcome grief and loss, historical family trauma, substance abuse issues, fraternal resentment and arguments over estate management. These are problems that, in American cinema, are usually reserved for middle-class, white characters. Wright refers to the characters as “free people, these people are as human and flawed and wonderful and beautiful as anyone else,” he says. “And we celebrate that.”
People in the 1970s complained about Chic and other Black disco acts presenting a commercialized form of Blackness. Wright isn’t convinced. “What I’m suggesting is there’s a level of toxicity that exists now that I don’t think existed then … just the nature of the tone: there’s violence, there’s misogyny, there’s self-orientation, there’s a materialism that is so intense now. Maybe that’s reflective of the times but there’s also an absence of originality. It seems so conformist to me. There was a lot of weird backlash when Andre 3000 put out that flute record. Weird commentary, like, ‘What is he doing?’ But you know, how beautiful for him. He got to play and put out what he felt within. That’s what it’s all about.”
With Monk and American Fiction, Wright has achieved something similar, whether or not he can wrestle the Oscar, that he’s back in the conversation. Wright says: “It’s been a long, strange trip in some regards, but it’s been good.
Credits
Directed by Cord Jefferson
Screenplay by Jefferson, based on “Erasure” by Percival Everett
Produced by Ben LeClair, Nikos Karamigios, Jefferson, Jermaine Johnson
Cinematography Cristina Dunlap
Edited by Hilda Rasula
Music by Laura Karpman
Distributed by Amazon MGM Studios
Release dates: Sept 8, 2023 (TIFF); Dec 15, 2023 (US)
Running time: 117 minutes
Box office $8.7 million
