It’s a sad state of affairs when an actor who has starred in and produced a
multiple Oscar-winner (Crash), taken the lead in a pulverising
examination of genocide (Hotel Rwanda) and campaigned for the
displaced and abused of Darfur is still best known here as the bloke with
the rubbish English accent in Ocean’s Eleven. But that, sadly,
is Don Cheadle’s lot.
To his credit, Cheadle accepts with good grace his title as most unconvincing
silver-screen Cockney since Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. His
portrayal of the explosives expert Basher Tarr got a little bit of stick on
this side of the pond, I suggest. “A little?” he laughs. “I went to the
Baftas one year and someone came up and said, ‘Good job on the movie.’ And
then the next person came up and said, ‘You f***ing sucked! Don’t ever do it
again!’ ” The accent, he says, was “required for the role; I did my best and
I hope England forgives me”.
We certainly should, because, gorblimey crimes aside, the 44-year-old from
Colorado is one of the most adventurous stars in Hollywood. The Ocean’s
director Steven Soderbergh may not know his accents, but he knows his
actors, and he has cast Cheadle in five movies, including Out of Sight
and Traffic. Cheadle has also worked with film-makers as respected as
Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights; see lists) and Warren Beatty (Bulworth),
and he stretches his chops to the full in his latest film, Traitor,
as a half Sudanese, half American agent who infiltrates an Islamist terror
organisation.
Cheadle plays several scenes in Arabic, a linguistic feat that has worked
better than his Cockney. It’s an unconventional film, even more so when you
learn that it sprang from the mind of Steve Martin. The script, says
Cheadle, who also co-produced, was “kind of reverse engineered” from its
dark, climactic twist, which was Martin’s idea: “When you think about it, it
sounds like something Steve Martin would think of.”Traitor
joins an increasingly global CV. After visiting the refugee camps in Darfur,
Cheadle has campaigned for awareness of the atrocities in the region, and
might even make a film about them (“I haven’t cracked that nut yet.”) And
his most celebrated film is Hotel Rwanda, although he insists that he
came to it by accident. “It wasn’t supposed to be mine,” he says. “The
director told me right up front that if he could have got Will Smith or Cuba
Gooding Jr, then that’s who it would be. So it wasn’t by design.” He doesn’t
want to get pigeonholed as worthy, a wish that should be granted by his next
film, Iron Man 2: “I don’t think they would say that had a social
message!” His pet project is a biopic of his childhood hero Miles Davis (see
lists), which he plans to both direct and star in.“I didn’t want to do
anything that resembled the biopics I’d seen. I want it to be relevant
today, not a history lesson.”
Just be thankful that Davis wasn’t from East London.
Name your favourite . . .
Musicians and music
Miles Davis I’ve loved him since fifth grade, when I started playing
saxophone and my parents had his Porgy & Bess album. Very young I
was just taken with the music. I was a student of it very early, and that’s
just sort of never waned. A lot of people think they know a lot about Miles
but they only know the name and the image, the iconography. You say: “Miles
Davis” to most people and they go: “Yeah, jazz! He played sax or he played
something, right?” They don’t really know, and that’s fine. I wanted to make
a movie for the people who didn’t know about Miles Davis, so they could just
enjoy the movie and the music.
John Coltrane And all of these jazz giants: Canonball Adderley, Lester
Gordon, Dizzy Gillespie. I could just go down a list of all those old cats.
Hip-hop But the music that I was used to when I was a young teenager
was hip-hop. I started with Public Enemy, Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, all those
cats. Jay-Z, Biggie Smalls was incredible and Tupac, too. But my favourite
hip-hop artists are probably Outkast. They mix it up — I think Miles would
have loved Outkast.
Sport and games
Soccer I directed a couple of commercials for the NFL, but I played
soccer growing up because that’s what the kids in my neighbourhood in
Colorado were into.
Poker I play quite a bit of poker. It’s just a very interesting game —
there are a lot of things to think about, calculations to make, the
psychological aspects. Does being an actor help in concealing my emotions or
reading other people’s? No, I haven’t found it to be helpful, I’ve found it
to be a liability because everyone is gunning for me and nobody believes
things I’m doing on the table because they think I’m just acting. Sometimes
you can use it to your advantage, but more often I’ve really had to have the
cards to win.
Places to visit
New York I love New York as a city to run around in. I couldn’t live
there but I love visiting.
Marrakesh I thought Morocco was pretty hip. We shot some of Traitor
there, in Marrakesh. I love old cities, I love cities that have a lot of
history. In America we have old cities but nothing like the rest of the
world.
Yosemite I love Yosemite, and Big Sur is beautiful, too.
Film directors Paul Thomas Anderson I’m always going to see what he’s
doing. He’s just somebody with an encyclopaedic knowledge of film, a
self-taught director. He didn’t go to film school, he just read American
Cinematographer and learnt how they did everything and watched every
movie he could get his hands on. That’s where he got his game. Which of his
films stand out? Boogie Nights is pretty good [Cheadle co-starred in
the film]. I really like There Will be Blood, too. He’s got a nice
control of his thing.
Elia Kazan I was watching On the Waterfront the other night —
that whole school of cats just amazes me. The focus was different then. The
film industry now, American cinema anyway, is just about revenue, for the
most part. I don’t know how many great American movies have been made in the
past ten years. Not a lot. It’s hard to make great movies when you’re also
trying to make a ton of money.
Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu The
whole rash of Mexican film-makers that came out in the past few years:
Iñnáritu, Cuarón, that whole gang of dudes. You feel like it’s a throwback
to the kind of commitment to storytelling that you’d see in the 1970s in
American cinema, but it’s also really pushing film forward.
Ken Loach Yes, of course. Great.
Traitor is out on DVD and Blu-ray on Aug 31
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