Don Cheadle
Don Cheadle
Donald Frank "Don" Cheadle Jr. is an American actor, writer, producer, and director. He had an early role in Hamburger Hill, before building his career in the 1990s with performances in Devil in a Blue Dress, Rosewoodand Boogie Nights. He started a collaboration with director Steven Soderbergh that resulted in the films Out of Sight, Trafficand Ocean's Eleven. Other films include The Rat Pack, Things Behind the Sun, Swordfish, Crash, Ocean's Twelve, Ocean's Thirteen, Reign Over Me, Talk to Me,...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth29 November 1964
CityKansas City, MO
CountryUnited States of America
Speak up when you're supposed to, as opposed to trying to write prescriptions for the way people should live.
People have always been obsessed by celebrities. There are just more outlets and opportunities to make a living exploiting that obsession nowadays.
If you look up and no one who's around you has been around you for the past 20 years, and they're all new people, I think that's a problem.
It's important to keep the people who know you well around you. It helps center you.
It's great to be in a film that's able to have people really want to become socially conscious, to walk out of the theatre and want to do something.
I've been doing this since I was 10 years old, inhabiting different people and playing different roles.
We're really trying to give people the ability to go into a darkened room and have a couple hours of just pure enjoyment.
It's much easier to cry or be angry, but to really laugh and genuinely be buoyant and laugh. That's hard if you don't really feel that way.
I don't know what would be antithetical to do on the other side, maybe a Tyler Perry movie or something. No, there are very few comedies that live in between that. Or you're doing some kid thing like a Jim Carrey movie with animated something that's like that. Yeah, I've wanted to do them. I like doing them. I did Talk to Me. That was pretty much a comedy.
And it's not just black people. That's the other thing about this issue, it's conflated with just black and white and it's not that at all. It's diversity, it's something that looks more like the landscape of the country. And it's not about then we get the statues we deserve, it's not that. It's that everyone should be able to participate in this silly contest, which is how I feel about it.
If anyone ever said biopic I would say, "It's not a biopic." We're fighting uphill against the weight of history. I was like, why don't we just call it historical fiction?
I'm trying to steal from everybody. So yeah, there's cats that I'm personally affiliated with - Carl Franklin, Paul Thomas Anderson - and others that I don't know personally but their work I'm a big admirer of, like Martin Scorsese. But I'm hoping to come up with a language that is mine, that's specific to my take on this material.
Water is an issue, and, clearly, what's happening with the filth in our environment and the levels of carbon monoxide in our atmosphere are the really scary issues right now, the very troubling ones.
Once the steam engine went away and we started moving into burning fossil fuels - not just burning them, but everything we do with oil - we've been experiencing [these problems] at an accelerated rate. The scary end-game scenario is getting closer and closer, about what we're going to be able to do to sustain life on this planet as we have come to know it. And I think this is a very real possibility, that we could be dealing with conditions we have no idea how to wrestle with.