With his Broadway return postponed because of the pandemic, Laurence Fishburne reflects on his career. A conversation with e_alexjung
Photo: Nigel Parry Before the pandemic, Laurence Fishburne was preparing for his Broadway return in American Buffalo, and weeks into lockdown, he was still rehearsing over video calls with his co-star Sam Rockwell. “We continue to work the craft for its own sake,” Fishburne says over the phone, several weeks after we first spoke.
Yeah, that was the shift. I was Larry as a child. The only people that called me Laurence were my mother and my father, basically. By the time we got to doing Two Trains Running, I was 30. On set, I was always the youngest person, and yet I had children by that time and I had just done Boyz n the Hood. And so I had a shift of consciousness out of being a kid and thinking of myself as a kid and started really thinking of myself as a grown man.
A Laurence Fishburne Pantheon: Apocalypse Now, 1979. Photo: Moviestore Collection Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo And you were older. Yeah. I was certainly frustrated and angry about the fact that there weren’t as many roles available to people who looked like me as there were available to people who looked like Emilio. So was everybody else who looked like me and who looked like you. That shit wasn’t fun, but it was real. It was our reality, and we had to figure out something to do about it. Just being angry about it wasn’t going to get it, so I had to take the anger and transform the anger into something else.
That was attractive to me as a Black person. School Daze was still dealing with apartheid. And my character is correct: Black people are still catching hell all over the world. And here we are in 2020 with COVID-19, and the numbers of people of color who are passing away and dying from this disease are disproportionate.
Maybe it’s that I know too much — I’ve made so many movies, and I know what goes on behind the scenes — but sometimes I can’t have that suspension of disbelief for some things. Certainly, King of New York requires a certain amount of suspension of disbelief. School Daze requires that because suddenly they break into song. I was able to go with those things, but it’s just those three pieces, for whatever reason, I just was like, “No, I don’t get it as an actor.
Oh no. I was already cast in Die Hard 3 and then, at the 11th hour, they were like, “Nah, we got Jackson.”I’m sure that was about money, because I was probably getting more money than Sam then. That was about money then. We sued them. I had a whole lawsuit that went for two years against Cinergi Pictures behind that.There was a settlement. I got compensated for that.
I hope it does. I would hope that her story is relevant because we know this is still going on. As long as we’re living with domestic violence, I think it should hold up. And thank God for the day when it doesn’t, really.I rewrote a lot of it. I was trying to humanize him, because in humanizing him, you deepen her.
I’m still trying to figure out Pharaoh Love, dude. I feel like now is the time. When you think about LGBT rights and issues, and where we are with that right now, it feels like this could be a good moment for that story to be told.Yeah. We still do. You just keep redoing it. In fact, I’m thinking that we’re going to use a model that we just did. We did this thing called Bronzeville, which we’re developing now, with Apple TV. It was a podcast. It’s a radio play, really.
You’ve always been really good at mimicry. Did you always know that you could use your voice to impersonate other people?Yeah. It was just in front of the TV. There were voices coming at me in the TV, and I would just send them back. Mel Blanc, Bugs Bunny. The little black duck. Whoever it was. Then, of course, I had ears for the sounds because I grew up in Park Slope in Brooklyn, which was really, really mixed.
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