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Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It. I'm Kousha Navidar in for Alison Stewart, and welcome back to our Oscars preview show featuring conversations we've had here on All Of It with the people behind some of the nominated films. Now, we'll turn to American Fiction, which is up for Best Picture, Best Original Score, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor for Sterling K. Brown's performance. Best Actor nominee Jeffrey Wright spoke with Alison about the film when it first came out. Let's listen.

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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. The new film American Fiction plays with expectations around race, family, media, as well as what we want for ourselves despite what the world tells us are our limitations. Thelonious Ellison, nicknamed Monk, is an erudite crank, a talented misanthrope, a professor who doesn't publish a whole heck of a lot, and when he does, let's say the books do not fly off the shelves.

He is more than a little envious of his peers, especially writers who are having huge success with what Monk believes are kind of junk food novels, ones that feed stereotypes. Specifically, he is tweaked by a runaway bestseller titled We's Lives In Da Ghetto, written by a poised Oberlin graduate played by Issa Rae. Here's a little bit of the trailer as Monk walks in on a book event with that author and ultimately decides, if you can't beat him, join him.

Interviewer: How did you come to write this book?

Sintara: What really struck me was that too few books were about my people. Where are our stories? Where's our representation?

Interviewer: Would you give us the pleasure of reading an excerpt?

Sintara: Yo, Sharonda, girl, you be pregnant again? If I is, Ray Ray is going to be a real father this time around.

[applause]

[MUSIC - Mark Ranson: Feel Right]

Arthur: Monk, your books are good, but they're not popular. Editors, they want a Black book.

Monk: They have a Black book. I'm Black, and it's my book.

Arthur: You know what I mean.

Monk: Look at what they publish. Look at what they expect us to write. I just want to rub their noses in it.

[chuckling]

Arthur: I'd be standing outside in the night.

Monk: Deadbeat dads, rappers, crack. You said you wanted Black stuff, that's Black, right?

Arthur: I see what you're doing.

Alison Stewart: As a goof, Monk writes a book called My Pafology using a pen name Stagg R. Leigh, and it becomes a hit much to his dismay. The publishing industry just laps it up. Meanwhile, his family is in crisis facing death, Alzheimer's, divorce, and long-buried secrets. American Fiction is a hit with a 92% positive critic rating and a 97% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Starring in the role of Monk is my guest Jeffrey Wright.

As The New Republic review mentions, he offers up, "Perhaps the most fully rounded performance of his storied career," and the Chicago Sun-Times said, "Wright is accorded the relatively rare opportunity to take the lead and he delivers a richly layered performance that reminds us he is one of the best actors of his generation. Is a joy to watch." Jeffrey Wright is an Emmy and Tony Award-winning actor and he joins us now. Hi, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey Wright: Hi, Alison. Thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: What does a film script need to have and need to be for you to be interested at this point?

Jeffrey Wright: Good words. Pretty simple. Good words strung together well around interesting things. Cord Jefferson adapted this script from a novel by Percival Everett called Erasure. I hadn't read the novel prior to the script but from the first scene that I'd read of Cord's script, the hook sank into my mouth. It's a conversation around race, and language, and history, and context that he's having in a classroom. He's a professor as well as a writer.

It was a conversation that I had been having with friends of mine and inside my head as we observed the discourse today. It's a conversation that's happening around college campuses, but it's a conversation that we don't necessarily have well in our country. Identity and race and the history of all of that is so much a part of all of us but, in some ways, we lack of fluency in trying to discuss it, and therefore, we have unproductive conversations, or we just fight with one another. This was so well drawn, that's what-- That's the type of stuff that I look for. It's just smart writing around subjects that are interesting to me, and in this case, handled with a good deal of humor as well.

Alison Stewart: I was going to ask. It's very, very funny. It's got snort-out-loud laughs in this movie. Why do you think humor is a good delivery system for discussing difficult topics like race? Specifically race.

Jeffrey Wright: Well, a spoonful of medicine, and there's a lot of-- Rather, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. [chuckles] Sorry. Yes, there's a lot of good sugar in this and some good nutrients too, but I view the comedy in this as kind of tragedy in disguise. There's a good deal of emotion that runs through this. Monk is a guy who is confronting a fair amount of inner turmoil and frustration that relates to his family, to his father. He is, in some ways, a bit shut off.

For me, there's a nice thread of emotional depth that I could play that was in juxtaposition to the absurdity and the humor that we find as he's faced with playing this dual role and playing this caricature in public, this Stagg R. Leigh character that he has created as the author of this book that he writes.

Alison Stewart: I want to play a clip from early on the film when a Monk goes into a bookstore to look for his book which is called The Haas Conundrum. What is that book about just before we play this clip?

Jeffrey Wright: That book, I believe, was one that we made up, [laughter] that Cord made up, so that book can be about anything that you desire.

Alison Stewart: Monk is not happy with where it has been placed in the bookstore. Let's listen. This is from American Fiction.

Monk: Excuse me. Ned, do you have any books by the writer Thelonious Ellison?

Ned: Yes, this way. Here you go.

Monk: All right. Wait a minute, why are these books here?

Ned: I'm not sure. I would imagine that this author, Ellison, is Black.

Monk: That's me, Ellison. He is me, and he and I are Black.

Ned: Oh, bingo.

Monk: No bingo, Ned. These books have nothing to do with African American studies. They're just literature. The blackest thing about this one is the ink.

Ned: I don't decide what sections the books go in and no one here does. That's how chain stores work.

Monk: Right. Ned, you don't make the rules.

Ned: I'm just going to put them back after you leave.

Monk: Don't you dare, Ned. Do not you dare.

Alison Stewart: Monk's running with the books to put them over in another section. The line in there that really sticks out to me, aside from the way you say "Ned", is, "That's the way chain stores work," so it's coming from the corporate level. Right? We just put everybody in one bucket. Everybody goes over to this side. That's where the Black people's books go. It was interesting, and it made me think, and you don't have to answer, or you can just nod at me, is that something you've seen in your career as an actor as well?

Jeffrey Wright: I've managed to be pretty flexible in the way that I work and in the projects that I work on. I range across genres and films in terms of their scale. I go back to the theater. I keep myself pretty busy. I've always admired actors who were able to create character, like Dustin Hoffman, Gary Oldman. Guys like that were influences on me early on. I love the way they were able to be one man in one film and another and in the next film, and so that's allowed me to slot myself into a number of different types of narratives and projects and so I've tried to get-- Work my way around whatever limitations were expected or presented or placed upon me, potentially. There were some, but I've-- A good friend of mine used to say, "If you can't beat them, confuse them." I've kind of used that as a bit of a mantra in the way that I work. There are people who've seen me in one film and didn't even realize that they were looking at the same guy in the next film that they were watching, so I've been reasonably successful in this little field that I'm a part of. I can't complain.

Alison Stewart: It's a good workaround. [laughter] My guest is --

Jeffrey Wright: I don't really like to complain too much. It doesn't really do me any good. My mother in this film is played by Leslie Uggams. She's so beautiful. She's just so giving, she was so generous and so passionate about being a part of this, and I'd been a fan of hers since her variety show in 1969 when I was a little tyke looking up and going, "Wow, who is that?"

Leslie Uggams began her career at the Apollo Theater when she was eight years old winning in the talent show, she says. Her career has spanned that many decades. She is of that generation of performers and artists who came before me and Tracy Ellis Ross and Sterling K. Brown and Issa Rae who made it all possible for us. Our freedom, our agency that we enjoy now, was won by the generations that are represented by Leslie Uggams.

Alison Stewart: Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee and--

Jeffrey Wright: We have Osie Davis, Ruby Dee, Sidney Poitier, of course, Gloria Foster. They did it with such grace and such supreme talent. I've got a lot of momentum behind me that I didn't have to earn myself. Despite the limitations, I was just-- I [unintelligible 00:12:21] after. When I did Basquiat, for example, I couldn't get an agent after I won the Tony with Angel in America, but okay, whatever.

What I can control, back to your question, is the quality of my work. Even though, at many times, the industry tried to place limitations on me or didn't necessarily see potential that they were willing to invest in, there were always artists that did. There were always directors that did. Ang Lee, Sidney Lumet. Of course, George C. Wolfe. I've worked with Mike Nichols, I've worked lately with Wes Anderson and Lisa Joy and Jonah Nolan at Westworld. I've worked with people who took an interest in me, and they took an interest in my work.

Wes Anderson said, "I've seen every play that you did on Broadway and in New York." I had no idea. I said, "You never came backstage to say hello?" Despite these kind of misperceptions of me, I guess, from the executive side, always on the creative side, there's been support. For the most part, I had a pretty good run, and I've enjoyed the stories that I've been able to tell. More particularly, I've increasingly enjoyed the people that I've had the opportunity to work with.

Alison Stewart: In this film, Monk writes this book using the pen name Stagg R. Leigh, which I think is a take on the Stagger Lee, the badass pimp, in that song.

Jeffrey Wright: Yes. 19th-century pimp caricature. Yes.

Alison Stewart: In these first moments when Monk is writing this book, what is he getting out of this exercise of writing this book full of stereotypes?

Jeffrey Wright: He's getting what he thinks is a bit of vengeance. He's expressing his moral outrage through his pen or his laptop. [chuckles] I think there is something else that he's getting out as well. It's interesting. It's a send-up, it's a mockery. He's doing it. He hopes to shine a light on the hypocrisy of the publishing world, but at the same time, something very forceful happens too. He has this conflicted relationship with his father.

What he writes is a conversation between a son and his father, a son who's disappointed, a son who feels abandoned. At the same time that he's being dismissive, there could also be something a bit deeper, a bit more psychological and, maybe, Freudian that kind of slips into it, perhaps without him even being conscious of it. When we shot that scene, Keith, David, and Oak- I'm going to butcher his last name. -who-- The two actors who just performed so beautifully in that scene, when they did that scene on the day, it was so powerful and so intentional despite it being broad in caricature.

There was such a force behind what they did that I immediately, I said, "Wow, that's going to legitimize the entire film," because I think, yes, it's funny, but there's also layers of emotion there, for them but mainly for Monk that lended a kind of contradiction or self-contradiction. It kind of runs in parallel to Issa Rae's character who has written this book, We's Lives in the Ghetto.

Monk has a conversation with her at the end of the film that is, in many ways, a type of thesis argument for our movie, but the thesis exists somewhere on the table between the two of them. Neither one of them is really the most reliable narrator, I think. Those two scenes together, I think, just lend a wonderful credibility to the film. It's owing to the writing, but it's also owing to the performances of the actors.

Alison Stewart: We're not getting away, but what did you think when you realized this film, the end is going to mean different things to individuals?

Jeffrey Wright: I think that's great. I think people have found their ways inside this film, people from across backgrounds, and they found their ways inside it in myriad ways, whether it be through the professional frustration, the creative frustrations. It's not solely about the being misperceived as a Black man, or whether they've just related to Monk as a caretaker, or related to the family dynamics, to family like any other. It puts the fun and dysfunction. It just happens to be populated by us, so they've found theirselves in myriad ways and found themselves inside of it in multiple ways.

They also, as you say, interpret our multiple paths at the end in different ways. I've been reading stuff online that audiences are having a great time experiencing this in a packed theater. There's a curious dynamic where it's like, "Well, what are you laughing at? I'm laughing at this. Do I have permission to laugh at this?" and, "Are you laughing at the right thing or in the right way?" I think it's wonderful. I think it's wonderful that it's open to interpretation and that it's making people comfortable and uncomfortable at the same time. There's a little bit of give the people what they want at the end there.

Kousha Navidar: That was Allison's conversation with Jeffrey Wright about the Oscar-nominated film, American Fiction. Jeffrey Wright is up for best actor for his performance. That is All Of It for this hour. Stay tuned because next hour we'll continue to bring you conversations about some of the films being recognized at this weekend's Oscars. Coming up, we're gonna talk about the Korean-American film, Past Lives and the movie musical adaptation of The Color Purple. That's on the way. This is All of It.

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