“People don’t very often go out looking for a ‘Jeffrey Wright type,’ you know?” says Jeffrey Wright with a laugh. “There’s not a lot of films that are written for a Jeffrey Wright type, so I have to sometimes do a little morphing.”  

He’s won a Tony and an Emmy, and has starred in everything from Angels in America to Westworld, but Wright had never encountered anything quite like American Fiction—a movie that really did call for a Jeffrey Wright type. The film, written and directed by Cord Jefferson and adapted from Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, centers on Monk, a down-on-his-luck Black novelist who stumbles into commercial success when he glibly writes a novel that trades in what he considers to be the basest of stereotypes about Black people. “When I was still reading Erasure, I started reading Monk’s lines in Jeffrey’s voice,” Jefferson told Vanity Fair earlier this year. “I started thinking of Jeffrey when I started imagining the scenes.”

On this week’s Little Gold Men (listen or read below), Wright drops by to chat about starring in American Fiction and tackling a role that’s perhaps closer to him than any other part he’s encountered in his 30-plus years as an actor. “I think this film and this character is more personal for me than any other role that I’ve done, maybe aside from Basquiat,” he says. “This role is probably more similar to who I am than any other role that I have ever played. It didn’t require a lot of alterations. It really just required more emerging and a kind of synthesis of the internal.”

Wright was more concerned with the external when tackling the titan Adam Clayton Powell Jr. for Netflix’s Rustin. Directed by Wright’s longtime collaborator George C. Wolfe, Rustin stars Colman Domingo as Bayard Rustin, the queer civil rights activist and organizer of the March on Washington, and features Wright in a rather adversarial role as Powell, a pastor and the first African American to represent New York in Congress. Wright was meticulous about capturing Powell Jr., down to the accuracy of his birthmarks. “Powell had these two moles on his cheek,” he said. “So if you want to play Powell, let’s play Powell. Come on.”

On Little Gold Men, Wright expounds on “the sandwich years,” the lengths to which he’s gone to avoid being pigeonholed in Hollywood, and the extremely personal process that was making American Fiction.

Vanity Fair: How did you get involved with the project? Were you familiar with the source material, Erasure by Percival Everett? 

Jeffrey Wright: I hadn’t read the book. I read the book late in the process. I was drawn to the words on the page—that’s usually what kind of catches me first. It was clear that Cord was a sharp thinker and a great writer. He hadn’t directed before, but it was clear from the script that he knew his way around story. What drew me in more so than kind of this sharp satire and social commentary was the story of this man and his relationship to family and to love. 

The social commentary is wonderful, and it provides a lot of insight and dynamics to the film. I tend to think of it as the fat on the steak. The meat is the story of the family—the story of this man under the pressures of family and the sacrifices that he makes relative to his personal life and his professional life on behalf of his responsibilities to family. I think in some ways that it’s the most subversive aspect of the film, because it runs counter to the tropes and stereotypes that we’re kind of having a laugh at. It’s those stories that we don’t see. It’s those lives, those narratives, that we very often don’t have access to. In fact, in my career, I don’t recall another film that I’ve done with such a complex, nuanced portrait of a family. I’ve never been asked to play that. As we were doing it, I said, “Wow, I’ve never gotten to play these notes before.”

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[American Fiction] takes the absurd and satirical concept of what it means to be a Black writer, and what it means to feel pigeonholed in that way, and marries it with a raw and emotionally satisfying family drama with such an amazing ensemble. Can you talk a little bit about working within the ensemble and sort of forging these relationships onscreen? 

I was so pleased, and I have to say somewhat surprised, when I was told who else was being considered for the film and who had accepted. I mean, Cord was like, “Okay, so Tracee Ellis Ross wants to play your sister.” I’m like, “Really? Wow. Okay, cool.” “Sterling K. Brown wants to do this film, tell this story, and play your brother.” I’m like, “Oh, okay!” I respect them so much, and I was pleasantly surprised that they wanted to come in and jump into this and play with me and Leslie Uggams. I’ve been an admirer of [Uggams] for many, many years, and I told her on the last day because it would have been awkward because she’s playing my mother. I told her that I had had an early schoolboy crush on her. [Laughs]

We didn’t rehearse a lot for this. We got together. We read a bit. But from the first beat, from the first moment, as we walk in the door, Myra [Lucretia Taylor] opens her mouth and I immediately felt that we were there. These actors—each of them, not just the family but everyone in this film— John Ortiz and Issa Rae, and the day players here and there, just were so finely tuned to their part of the symphony. And when we got together, it just flowed.

We have to talk about, as you called it, “the fat on the steak” and the delicious part in terms of the satire and the delineation between Monk and Stagg R. Leigh. As a Black male writer, I 100% understood and saw myself in Monk’s frustrations with being like, “Okay. Yeah, I’m a writer, but I’m more than that. I’m not just my identity markers. I’m not just this in this box.” Coming at this as a Black man who’s played many, many roles in Hollywood and onstage, did you identify with [Monk] at all? How did you identify with Monk on a personal level?

I identify with Monk on a personal level in terms of [how] this journey is at this stage in his life that was deeply personal for me. The deeply personal stuff for me was his relationship with his mother—having to be caretaker of the one who was once his caretaker—and the void that emerges in the middle of his family and that he’s tasked with filling. My mom passed away not too long before this script came to me.

 I’m sorry to hear that.

Well, thank you. She was the center, the absolute center of our family. She was the glue. And then all of a sudden, she wasn’t there. And then, you know, all eyes turned to me. I had to look after her and my aunt, her older sister, and at the same time, my kids. I was experiencing those—what they call “the sandwich years,” in my case seemed to be like a six-foot-long Subway sandwich.

That’s what was deeply resonant for me about Monk’s journey and the sacrifices that he’s asked to make as a result of turning his vision toward family and responsibility. As far as his predicament, [it] emerges out of frustration—professional frustration, creative frustration, frustration with the world [and] how the world around him perceives him and perceives other cultural output. But it’s also born of necessity because he has these responsibilities. He has the responsibility of caring for his mother. But in terms of his frustrations at these perceptions? I don’t know. 

I have at times, I guess, been frustrated, but I think I have been fortunate enough at times to figure out ways to circumnavigate [those frustrations]. If there’s anything that I have done during the course of my career, I’ve tried to maintain some flexibility, and I’ve tried to not too often retrace old steps. I’ve stayed very busy over many decades, and I’ve rarely gone back to the same type of work. I’ve found a type of strength, I think, in flexibility, which has served me. It’s also—I like to work. I don’t like to play the same type of character in the same type of story continually. I admired actors like Dustin Hoffman and Peter Sellers, who would kind of shape-shift and enjoyed that aspect of what we do. So it’s kept me busy.