He has lived a big life. Tough streets, close calls, a wife of forty-one years, four kids, fifty movies, two Oscars, three Equalizers. For the first time—on the occasion of Gladiator II, and his approaching seventieth birthday—the man himself breaks it all down, in his own words, to the moments that mattered and the experiences that made him.
ACT I_____________________
Iwas with my friend Frank the night his brother murdered a guy.
It was Mount Vernon, New York, where I grew up. We were maybe eleven, twelve. My parents were getting divorced, and me and Frank were out late, just walking around, and we’d stay wherever we ended up for the night. (I’m changing the names; this was a long time ago.)
We ran into his brother Robert. Now, everybody knew Robert was a guy who—bless him—everybody said was crazy after he came back from Vietnam. They said he’s crazy and he’s a killer and be careful. I think he was Green Beret, those guys that would cut throats behind enemy lines. But he didn’t bother me none. We’d smoke weed together and he’d say, “You know, D, everybody’s scared of me, man. But you’re not scared of me.”
And I said, “Well, man, you’re just Frank’s big brother.”
I met Frank because when I was eleven I started working in a barbershop up on Fourth Avenue. To get there, you had to cut—or I would cut—through the projects where the basketball courts were, so I started meeting a whole new group of friends in there.
This article appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of Esquire
Everybody was gone for Frank and Robert—mother, father, nobody around for them. Frank lived with our other friend Mitch. Miss Mitchell took him in. We had a little band, four of us. Mitch was our lead guitar player, Frank played bass, our friend Jake played the drums, and I played keyboards. My mother owned her own business, a beauty salon, so we had a little bit more money and she could buy me an organ, a Farfisa. We used to rehearse over Jake’s mother’s house, maybe ten minutes away from my house, down by Memorial Field, because they had an attic three or four floors up where nobody could hear us.
None of us read music. We’d sit up there and listen to records and just try to peck out your little part of whatever James Brown song we were trying to play, get your little solo. I wasn’t as good with the solos because I didn’t know how to play, but Frank could play good solos. And Jake, man, he could go for twenty minutes.
NORMAN JEAN ROY
We entered a talent show in those same projects one time, and we plugged all our equipment into the outdoor lights. The lights shut off at midnight, so we were the last act—but we won. I was performing back in middle school, too, or trying to. Me and my friend Wayne Bridges—he’s Ludacris’s dad—who I met at the Boys Club, we did a Beatles song in the talent show back then. There were older guys in the neighborhood who we wanted to be like—one guy in particular named Donald Fletcher, and me and Wayne would practice his walk. Elements of that walk are still with me today in the movies. I used to practice moving my shoulders while I walked, trying to look like him, because he was cool, and I wanted to be cool. You didn’t know why, exactly, at the time. All you knew was that you’re six and he’s ten and you want to be like him when you grow up.
So anyway me and Frank coming down the street and we see Robert with this guy Joe, and he tells Joe to go down to the grocery store to get him some Colt 45 malt liquor. Gives him some money. And as Joe takes off down the street, Robert says real quiet to me and Frank, “I’m gonna kill him tonight.”
Just then, Joe turned around from down the street and hollered, Could he get two bottles?
Robert shouted back at him, all nice, “What? Yeah, yeah, get a bottle for yourself, too. And bring me back my change!”
Then he turned back to us and said, “See, he don’t know that I know he stole my motorcycle”—Joe did steal it and either sold it or crashed it and burned it up or something like that—“and I just want him to have a good time on his last night living.”
And Robert walked off down the street, real slow, in and out of the streetlights.
I looked at Frank, and he looked at me, eyes real wide, and I whispered to him, “Man, he wasn’t joking.” They were both dope fiends, Robert and Joe, and you just don’t know. So we ran to my house to get out of there—and then we ran back over there early the next morning, in a hurry to find out what happened. Well, when Joe got back with the Colt 45, Robert had stabbed him in the back of the neck. Then he closed the knife up and sat in the middle of the street in the lotus position, waiting for the police.
Forget my story, you know? I’m some actor. But Frank? His story, man. It was my story that night, but it was the story of his life. That was his life. His brother Robert killed Joe. And his other brother was doing time in Leavenworth, no place you want to be. I forget what the other brother did, because sometimes all those boys and all those crimes run together like water and you can’t remember one from the other. Or maybe I don’t want to. But when you think back to the big moments in your life, what are they? Was it making a movie? Or was it watching Robert walk down that dark street, wondering what was going on in his head?
NORMAN JEAN ROY
Those characters I played in Training Day, in American Gangster—it might look like they were close to me, and I could tell you they were, but I wasn’t no gangster. I ran with them real gangsters down there, but I was not them. So let me not tell that lie to you. I had one foot in the streets, but I ain’t no killer.
I can’t think of a single role where I would say, Man, that’s me. Entirely me? No, no. First of all, they’re lines that you read and you learn, and that’s how that person talks. Sure, there has to be pieces of what you’ve done in who you are, and hopefully there’s pieces of who you are in what you’ve done. My mother used to say, Boy, you got to smile more, because if you don’t, people think you’re angry. So I had something in me.
But I’ve never said, “King Kong ain’t got shit on me” in my life. But Alonzo, that character in Training Day, was bigger than King Kong. It was something I said in the spur of the moment, but that’s how he felt. He was losing, because the whole neighborhood was turning its back on him, so he had to be even bigger than he was. He’s got to be King Kong now. So I just said it.
I created that character out of lines someone else wrote. I changed pretty much everything. In the original script he was more of a straight-ahead cop, but we got into the whole gangster side of it and met some gangster cops. We did the research.
I was in Mount Vernon not long ago and I ran into Frank. No kidding. Somebody yelled over to me, “Yo, D, you know Frank lives right here?” Look, I got a picture of the two of us—we’re the same age but it doesn’t look like it. Look at that broken body of his. So who am I? Compared to that guy? I mean, prison was the only safe place for him. Look at his hands, how they look gnarled. I showed this picture to another guy who did time and he said, D, that’s what forty years of prison food will do to you. Because that’s what Frank did. Probably forty years. Got into armed robbery and all kinds of stuff.
I always take care of Frank. He knows when he sees me, I hit him off. He didn’t have a chance, man.
ACT II_____________________
Prep school in the seventies: acid! Loootta acid. I said, Ho!
My God.
Yeah. Ha!
I was in a little private, semi-military school called Oakland Academy, in New Windsor, New York. Up by Poughkeepsie. My mother sent me up there because I had tested well in school, but I had one foot in the streets. I can’t remember if I was already selling drugs at that point. (Yeahhh, well . . . sometimes you do what you’re around.) I was doing everything Frank and Mitch were doing. Throwing rocks at the penitentiary, as they call it. I was throwing rocks at the penitentiary at thirteen. I stopped going to school much, so they sat down with my mother, said, Look, you need to get him out. Said I showed “potential.”
NORMAN JEAN ROY
There were rich white kids at Oakland, but it was all kinds. There was one famous Mafia kid up there—I don’t know which family. One of the Colombos? I think it was Colombo. I did all four years up there. I was introduced to people from all these other places I’d never been. Fairfield County! All over. I learned about other people’s lives and backgrounds—and acid.
Blotters. Orange Owsley. We did it on Fridays because we had to be back in class Monday. My first trip, the trees are moving. I’m scared to leave. I was by myself, and everyone else was waiting for me back at the little lodges we lived in. (This is probably why I’m screwed up now.) I don’t think I got back until four in the morning, and I’m sneaking around knocking on everyone’s doors, telling them, Man, there was the snake, and the spiders were trying to come through, and—
They started laughing. They said, D, you’re tripping! I said, I know.
It was pretty tame, though. It was psychedelic, but it was tame. There was a little weed around, and the acid when someone could get it. I wasn’t big on alcohol, partly because you had to sneak out and go get somebody to get it for you in Newburgh on the weekends. Newburgh was two miles away, a big town—and it was tough. A depressed place. There was one big, wide street, and you had to stand outside while someone got the beer. Not my thing—until later.
ACT III_____________________
The biggest moment of my life was when I was filled with the Holy Spirit. It happened in the West Angeles Church of God in Christ, Crenshaw Boulevard, Los Angeles.
Let me tell you first that my father was a man of God. And a very gentle man. Big dude. He worked three jobs. He was up at four in the morning, so when I went to school he was already gone. He came home at something in the afternoon, and he had a second job. Then he was a night watchman at S. Klein’s department store up in Yonkers, where he probably slept.
NORMAN JEAN ROY
We didn’t have teaching conversations. He taught me only by example. Plus, most of the time I’m out of the house. I was at Nathan Hale elementary in Mount Vernon when they started building the Boys Club in 1959. I watched the construction every day, wondered what was going on. Then I find out: a club for boys! I think you had to wait till you were six to join, and as soon as I turned six I was just in there. Arts and crafts upstairs—learn how to make something out of Popsicle sticks. Or you learn how to play pool and Ping-Pong. Or you play baseball and basketball and football. That was me.
We never had to worry about eating. Don’t get me started with how soft and easy people got it now. At six, seven, eight years old, you’re trying to get out in the yard. And Dad just worked. That’s what we knew. He worked. His father, my grandfather, was a farmer. Here’s a fact: We’re descendants of George Washington. We’re ex-slaves. My sister did the whole genealogical history of our family. She is truly a genius. She’s good, and she spent forever figuring it all out. We still own land down there—not far from D. C.
Come on. Our last name’s Washington. Do the math.
My father, though. He was a gentleman. Handsome guy, and charismatic. But not educated, no sir. When it was time to read something, he fiddled. I remember once when my mother wanted to show him something, he pretended to try to find his glasses and then said, Oh, never mind, and she said, Here, just give it to me. I didn’t understand it then, but when I look back, I think he was trying to stall. See, I know he didn’t graduate from high school. They were farming. He was born in 1909, and I don’t think he was going to kindergarten in 1914 in Dillwyn, Virginia, town of five hundred people.
After they divorced, my mother was a woman in a man’s world trying to make money. She and her business partner owned the beauty shop—that was a big deal then. Then they opened an ice cream shop so that we kids could work there, to keep us off the street in the summer. I got so sick of ice cream. Oh, just the smell of it.
But really I grew up in the Boys Club. As I got older I started carrying my little switchblade, walking down to the club by myself, all swagger.
I had a mentor there, Billy Thomas. He’s still in my life. He slapped me in the face one time. And I’ll tell you what—that was a lesson. Billy’s not tall, but I was so little. He was on one knee, and I was standing, and he’s telling me something important. And I wasn’t listening. I’m looking around, like, Mm-hmm, okay, yeah, okay. Because I want to get back out and play with the other kids. And then Pow!Pay attention! I never forgot it. And I wasn’t about to tell anybody, ’cause, shoot. I knew what my mother was gonna say: “Well, why’d he hit you? What’d you do?”
But if I grew up in the Boys Club, I also grew up in the church. Always in church. And I would see the altar calls as a child, which to a little boy just looks like people come up and then they take them into the prayer room. I knew what that was—people being saved—but I didn’t really know. So now I’m an adult, 1983, ’84, and Robert Townsend and I used to run pretty good together back in those days. You know him. Great actor, great director. Directed Hollywood Shuffle. Directed Eddie Murphy Raw. Right now he’s on The Bear playing Sydney’s father. He’s so good. And we had done the movie A Soldier’s Story.
Robert turned me on to West Angeles church. And you have the prayers and everything at the end, and you get up and stand, and then they have that call to the altar, if anyone wants to come and be saved or whatever. “Come on up!” And you go up. Now, I had never gone up in my life, but this particular day, I said, I’m going up there.
I went up.
They said what they say.
They took me into a back room somewhere.
They prayed for me.
NORMAN JEAN ROY
Me? I’m thinking, I’m just gonna give it up to God today, whatever that means. And I got back there, and they were praying and telling it to us. I’m hallelujah-ing. I was just feeling. It felt like I was getting lifted up. It felt like my back was arched, and I had my eyes closed. Not that I was going up in the air, but—I can’t exactly describe it. And I was blabbering, and kept blabbering, because I was filled with the Holy Spirit. I could hear the people gathering around me. They had seen this before. I could feel them ministering to me, touching me. Talking to me. Protecting me.
And then—this is going to sound like I was doing acid again—I came down.
I was slobbering, and I was crying. I felt embarrassed because I didn’t know exactly what had happened. I hadn’t experienced it before, or even seen it. Growing up I’d seen members of the church jumping and running up and down the aisles and alla that. But this scared me. It was too powerful. It was too much. It was too much.
It was too much.
It was unbelievable.
It was exhausting.
And then the strange thing is, after this thing happens to you and you’re all shaken: Okay, now what? What do you do with that? You go back to the back of the church, and they give you some literature, and your wife’s waiting for you outside, you get in the car and go have brunch.
Things I said about God when I was a little boy, just reciting them in church along with everybody else, I know now. God is real. God is love. God is the only way. God is the true way. God blesses. It’s my job to lift God up, to give Him praise, to make sure that anyone and everyone I speak to the rest of my life understands that He is responsible for me. When you see me, you see the best I could do with what I’ve been given by my lord and savior. I’m unafraid. I don’t care what anyone thinks. See, talking about the fear part of it—you can’t talk like that and win Oscars. You can’t talk like that and party. You can’t say that in this town.
I’m free now.
It’s not talked about in this town. It’s not talked about.
It’s not talked about.
It’s not fashionable. It’s not sexy. But that doesn’t mean people in Hollywood don’t believe. There’s no such thing called Hollywood anyway. What does that even mean? That to me means a street called Hollywood Boulevard. It’s not like we all meet somewhere and discuss what we believe. So I don’t know how many other actors have faith. I didn’t do no poll. How would I find that out? I mean, there’s no Church Actor Meetings I’ve been to.
I don’t have a lot of actor friends. Family friends, sure, like Sam Jackson. His wife and Pauletta go way back, and he and I go all the way back to A Soldier’s Play, in 1981. But now, when I make a movie, I’m not trying to make friends. We wrap, I’m trying to go home. That’s not to say that if I see, I don’t know, Tom Hanks, it’s not great—it is! I love Tom Hanks. I just don’t see him. I didn’t see him much before Philadelphia, either. We’re in the same business but not necessarily the same town at any moment. Just the way it goes.
But my faith has always informed the roles I choose. Always. I’ve always been led by God, and most of my performances are faith filled. Even if I was playing the devil. I still have my shooting script from Training Day, and I wrote on the cover: “The wages of sin is death.” The wages of sin is death. And now all these years later in Gladiator II, I play another bad guy in another great movie.
Even in the darkest stories, I’m looking for the light.
ACT IV_____________________
Listen, you’re at an awards show with a free tuxedo. You went there in a limousine . . . and they didn’t call your name. Awww.
This was 2000, twenty-something years into me being an actor. I had worked at a camp in Lakeville, Connecticut, through the Boys Club, and we did some theater, and I liked that. When I somehow got into Fordham—got in, flunked out, got in again—that’s when it really started, and then I got the play A Soldier’s Play, which became the movie A Soldier’s Story, then St. Elsewhere and all that and on and on. And Glory. 1989. And then here I am again at the Oscars.
NORMAN JEAN ROY
I think I had won the Golden Globe for Hurricane—see, I barely remember now, ain’t that crazy? But then at the Oscars, they called Kevin Spacey’s name for American Beauty. I have a memory of turning around and looking at him, and nobody was standing but the people around him.
And everyone else was looking at me.
Not that it was this way. Maybe that’s the way I perceived it. Maybe I felt like everybody was looking at me. Because why would everybody be looking at me? Thinking about it now, I don’t think they were.
I’m sure I went home and drank that night. I had to. I don’t want to sound like, Oh, he won my Oscar, or anything like that. It wasn’t like that. And you know, there was talk in the town about what was going on over there on that side of the street, and that’s between him and God. I ain’t got nothing to do with that. I pray for him. That’s between him and his maker.
I went through a time then when Pauletta would watch all the Oscar movies—I told her, I don’t care about that. Hey: They don’t care about me? I don’t care. You vote. You watch them. I ain’t watching that. I gave up. I got bitter. My pity party. So I’ll tell you, for about fifteen years, from 1999 to 2014 when I put the beverage down, I was bitter. I don’t even know offhand what movies I made then—I guess John Q, Manchurian Candidate. But I didn’t know I was bitter.
Wine is very tricky. It’s very slow. It ain’t like, boom, all of a sudden. And part of it was we built this big house in 1999 with a ten-thousand-bottle wine cellar, and I learned to drink the best. So I’m gonna drink my ’61s and my ’82s and whatever we had. Wine was my thing, and now I was popping $4,000 bottles just because that’s what was left. And then later in those years I’d call Gil Turner’s Fine Wines & Spirits on Sunset Boulevard and say, Send me two bottles, the best of this or that. And my wife’s saying, Why do you keep ordering just two? I said, Because if I order more, I’ll drink more. So I kept it to two bottles, and I would drink them both over the course of the day.
I never drank while I was working or preparing. I would clean up, go back to work—I could do both. However many months of shooting, bang, it’s time to go. Then, boom.Three months of wine, then time to go back to work.
I’m sure at first it was easy because I was younger. Two months off and let’s go. But drinking was a fifteen-year pattern. And truth be told, it didn’t start in ’99. It started earlier. In fact it probably has more to do with Frank and those guys. It probably started then—well, to be honest, that is where it started. I never got strung out on heroin. Never got strung out on coke. Never got strung out on hard drugs. I shot dope just like they shot dope, but I never got strung out. And I never got strung out on liquor. I had this ideal idea of wine tastings and all that—which is what it was at first. And that’s a very subtle thing. I mean, I drank the best. I drank the best. And fifteen years into it: Send me two bottles, and make it good stuff, but just two. And I’d drink them both over the course of the day.
I wasn’t drinking when we filmed Flight, I know that, but I’m sure I did as soon as I finished. That was getting toward the end of the drinking, but I knew a lot about waking up and looking around, not knowing what happened. But look: I was put on this planet to do good. I’ve been blessed with this ability to act, and I’ve tried to use it for goodness’ sake. For God-ness’ sake. Even the darkest guys. I know during Flight I was thinking about those who had been through addiction, and I wanted good to come out of that. It wasn’t like it was therapeutic. Actually, maybe it was therapeutic! It had to have been. But look: I’ve had so many journeys, so many different kinds of people to play. And even the heroes—I’m not them. I’m not Stephen Biko. I played Stephen Biko. I’m not Malcolm X. People talk to me like I’m Malcolm X to this day. I’m not Malcolm X. I could not stand up to the pressure that he was under. But I’ve been blessed with the ability to interpret what that does. Be it a leader of the Nation of Islam or a falling-down alcoholic.
I’ve done a lot of damage to the body. We’ll see. I’ve been clean. Be ten years this December. I stopped at sixty and I haven’t had a thimble’s worth since. Things are opening up for me now—like being seventy. It’s real. And it’s okay. This is the last chapter—if I get another thirty, what do I want to do? My mother made it to ninety-seven.
NORMAN JEAN ROY
I’m doing the best I can. And not only alcohol—forget all that. Strength. About two years ago my good friend, my little brother, Lenny Kravitz, said, D, I wanna hook you up with a trainer. And he did, and he’s another man of God. I started with him February of last year. He makes the meals for me and we’re training, and I’m now 190-something pounds on my way to 185. I was looking at pictures of myself and Pauletta at the Academy Awards for Macbeth, and I’m just looking fat, with this dyed hair, and I said, Those days are over, man. I feel like I’m getting strong. Strong is important.
ACT V_____________________
7:00 A.M. September 23, 2023. I was on a yacht in the middle of the Mediterranean, off of Italy somewhere. The boat wasn’t moving.
I was listening to a song alone. Just me. I had my Bible and I had finished reading my prayers and the Daily Word—my morning ritual—and I had music playing through my phone. A song came on called “The Face of God.” It was not a song I have in my rotation, and I don’t know how it ended up on my phone. The woman was singing about the actual face of God. I said out loud, “You know, Lord, everybody says they’ve seen Your face. They sing about it, they say they saw Your face, and I want to see Your face. I’ve never s—”
While I was saying it, I heard, “Look to your left.”
I mean I heard it. Not thought it. Heard the words. There was no one else around.
“Look to your left.”
I looked to my left off the side of the boat.
In the clouds above the ocean, I saw a face. A detailed, proportionate face that took up the whole sky. Eyes, nose—it even had lips and teeth. And a little smirk.
I grabbed my phone and took this photo.
Remember: It was while I was asking. “Lord, everybody gets to see Your face. I never see. I would like to—”
“Look to your left.”
I don’t care how you slice it. You can say, Oh, that’s just coincidence. To which I say: Well, I’m listening to the song. I said, “I want to see Your face.” I heard, “Look to your left.” And that’s what I saw. Whatever makes you feel good, I don’t care. I know what makes me feel good. I know what I saw. I know what I see.
There’s no guarantees that your children will see you tonight. There is so much to be thankful for. Grateful for.
Humbled by.
What bad does God do? I ask, What good does God do? We don’t know. Same God that does earthquakes and hurricanes and cancer brings the sun up in the morning, too. We don’t know. I’m just grateful and thankful for each God-given day, for the sunrise and the sunset. We don’t even know why we wake up in the morning. First thing I do is pray every morning. I read my Bible. I read my Daily Word every day. I get in my half an hour of quiet time. I try to wake up now and sit there first, put my feet on the floor, and sit, and be quiet. It’s hard. It’s easy to get up and do this and that, or you left the idiot box on and that sucks you in. Turn it off.
Sit.
Then you can start listening.
There you go.
Birds.
Be still. Just try to be still. What is that saying? Life’s simple pleasures are the best. Fresh air, some water. Sounds. Being up another morning. Just being.
There’s no guarantees. That’s why we call it faith. Religion is a tricky word. Because that gets into my religion, your religion, and all that. But faith doesn’t sound like it belongs to someone. Anyone can have it.
ACT VI_____________________
The most recent big moment in my life was more than big, and it was more than a moment, and it had nothing to do with me. On one hand this moment was a culmination of all of Pauletta’s work raising our children, and of my work, and of their work becoming these people that they are.
And then on the other hand, this moment I’m talking about was just the beginning.
Backing up a second. If you don’t know who August Wilson was, the playwright, think about Arthur Miller. Think about Tennessee Williams. Edward Albee. Eugene O’Neill. That’s where Wilson’s work lives, in that pantheon. He wrote ten plays, each one set in a different decade of the twentieth century, telling his view of what it was like to be Black in America at that time. All but one are set in Pittsburgh.
August died in 2005, God bless him. Too young. He was sixty. And then a few years ago, his widow, Constanza Romero, and the estate asked if I would produce a movie of each play. I said, You got the right man for the job. I don’t mean because I’m so great; I mean because I see it as a privilege. To be asked to bring one of our greatest playwrights to life in film? I mean, come on. I’ll take that. It’s a privilege. He doesn’t owe me a thing. To be able to shepherd and, in a small way, be a part of it—because I’m really just handing each one over to the next director, and then I don’t go hovering all over them. You have to trust. You can’t ask someone to direct a film and then look over their shoulder every two seconds. And in this case in particular, the material’s the material. August wrote it. It’s like they say: If it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage. And his genius is on the page.
NORMAN JEAN ROY
We’ve done three of them now. Fences, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and now The Piano Lesson. My son Malcolm directed it, my son John David is in it, my daughter Katia produced it. We went to the Toronto International Film Festival with it earlier this year, and . . . that was a moment. Sitting on that stage after the screening for the question-and-answer session with three of my children—Lord. (The fourth, Olivia, was starring in Slave Play in the West End of London.) Their mom was in the audience. It was a gorgeous theater, one of the older ones in Toronto, which was appropriate for this film. Maybe fifteen hundred people there, full house. And they had chairs set up for us—Malcolm; then John David next to him; the incredible other cast members Danielle Deadwyler, Ray Fisher, and Michael Potts; Katia; my producing partner Todd Black; and me way down the end trying not to get noticed.
I’ve done a lot of Q&A sessions at film festivals, but this one—it doesn’t get better than that. When it was time to leave the stage, I waved everyone past me, one by one, waiting for Malcolm so I could give him a hug and walk off together, my hand on his shoulder. I was still producing—everyone march off, then me and him close it out! Still in charge. Still Dad.
Malcolm used to beat everybody in Monopoly. They wouldn’t play him. He walked around with a Monopoly set and John David wouldn’t ever play because Malcolm would always want to be the bank. Nobody could beat him or even wanted to beat him. That’s Malcolm. In high school he recruited a couple of basketball players to make the team better, and they won the state championship on his division level. He was the point guard. That’s Malcolm. He has the ball in his hands and he puts the team together.
I don’t see myself acting in any of the remaining seven Wilson films. I did Fences. For one thing, I don’t see a role, but also I have things lined up for a few years. I told them I would do another Equalizer, and we’re doing four and five. More people are happy about that—people love those daggone Equalizers. It’s about variety for me. I’ll sometimes say to myself, One’s for me, one’s for them. So for example, Othello: We’re doing it on Broadway and then a movie. That’s for me. But I’ve come to realize that the Equalizer films are for me, too, because they’re for the people. They want me to go get the bad guys. “We can’t get them, so you go get them.” And I say, Okay, I’ll get them! Just wait right there. I’ll be right back!
But that’s also what I love about Gladiator II—it ain’t just about me. It’s a great cast and a great story and I get to be a part of it. I loved the first one, with my friend Russell Crowe. When Ridley Scott called asking if I would be in it—are you kidding? It took me about two seconds to say yes. We had done American Gangster, of course, also with Russell. But this film, Gladiator II, continues a great, epic story in such a truthful way, an exciting way—it’s a wonderful script—and I’m happy I’m in it with those fantastic actors.
And Piano Lesson? Shoot. It definitely ain’t about me. That moment up onstage in Toronto wasn’t about me. Our children pulled it off. They did it. Even when we were shooting, I’m supposed to be one of the producers, and I’m also their dad, but about two weeks in, I went home! Nothing really for me to do! You know when you say something to the group and they give you a polite answer, like, “Yeah, thanks, we’re a little busy here. Thanks for the—okay, so where were we?”
Even at the party after the screening and the Q&A, Pauletta and I were in the corner, just hanging out, watching Malcolm and John David and Katia just float around that room. Just soaring.
I was there as best I could be for my children. I’d fly in from whatever movie I was doing and be with them. I remember when Pauletta was pregnant with Katia around 1987, I was filming For Queen and Country in London. I scheduled five days off before the due date and five days after, and I flew home for that. That was my version of commuting.
We were always coming back together, but then that’s it—Daddy’s got to go do his thing, go to Indianapolis for four months or whatever, and you’ve got to go to school. You get the grades, I go do what I gotta do. That’s how it goes around here. There’s no easy way. We taught them the old-fashioned, hard-work way. Pauletta read a chapter from the Bible to them every day at breakfast and they would have discussions about it. She laid the foundation while I was out killing the—whatever it is, killing the animal and bringing home the meat. The bacon!
But that alone: All four of them, healthy and in their right mind. Enough said. Pauletta did a brilliant job with them. She taught them the right way. I came along for the ride. I taught by example—good and bad. Yes sir. Yes sir.
Good and bad.
You think of the million other ways things could have gone. Mitch did twenty, twenty-five years. He died of AIDS. Frank probably did forty years. Jake died. That was our band, the four of us. And by the grace of God, I didn’t do a day.
I love what I do and I’m fortunate that I have this ability to act. And I don’t want to make light of it, but it’s just acting, man. It ain’t rocket science. I don’t mark the big moments of my life by the movies I made. My mother said, Man gives the award, God gives the reward. So one of them Oscars I won—and that’s the trippy part, isn’t it? How easily that rolls off the tongue? I said “one of them Oscars”! Man. But no, when I think of what I’m proudest of, anything I’ve accomplished doesn’t even come to mind. It’s our children: They’re good people. They know right from wrong.
What else can you ask for, you know?
Opening image credits: Overshirt and sweater by Zegna
On the cover: Overshirt and sweater by Zegna
Photographed by Norman Jean Roy
Styled by Linda Medvene
Grooming by Tasha Reiko Brown for CHANEL
Production by 3 Star Productions
Design Director: Rockwell Harwood
Contributing Visual Director: James Morris
Executive Producer, Video: Dorenna Newton
Executive Director, Entertainment: Randi Peck
