The more you know about the world, the more resources you have in terms of things that can inform your character or the circumstances that surround your character.
Accolades are there to congratulate you but also to make you understand that it's not over. You now have to continue trying to improve the craft and keep going. It's not something to rest on.
If you have the skill, then you can move as you age.
When I was growing up, all these superheroes were white. On some level, you put that out of your mind... but as you get older, you realize it's a very one-sided affair. So I'm very glad to see that these movies are becoming more diversified.
'Black film,' unless it's lucky enough or creative enough, or timely enough to build a life of its own, hangs subjacent to 'white film' on Hollywood's financial score board... aided and abetted by the supposition that so-called black film has no foreign market.
I actually went to the university as a psychology major, and at orientation, they took us around the campus and took us to the theater for a skit. At the end of the skit, I literally could not get up out of my seat.
We've all grown up with 'Ozzie and Harriet,' 'Father Knows Best,' 'Eight Is Enough.' White families have always represented the universal family.
It's important to know, whether you're pro or anti the current president and what he's doing, that he's doing what he thinks is for the betterment of the country because his interest is to make this country a better place.
Is it racist to prefer country music over the blues? Or is it simply a classic case of tribal antipathy toward the unfamiliar, in favor of gravitating to what you know?
I didn't play basketball because I'd learned how to ice skate.
It's important to me to play men who use their brains, not just brawn.
I suppose I prefer kind of epic dramas like, oh, I don't know... 'Lawrence Of Arabia' or 'Apocalypse Now'; those are the movies that I have a tendency to be most fond of.
I have lots of hopes for black actors in general, whether they be on TV or on stage or in movies, and that is that we move beyond the tokenism of what it means to be black in a particular set of circumstances.
I don't live on the West Coast, so when I come out to work, I rent a house.
I think it talks about the fact that there are black people in the world who have tremendous amount of talents and have no channel through which they can those talents.
When I started, black people were either victims or they were the perpetrators; they were the boogie men who jumped out of the bushes and did terrible things to you.
My father was in the service. His job was to integrate the Armed Forces overseas. So that meant we showed up at military bases in Okinawa or Germany, racially unannounced. That made me, in that particular society if you will, the outsider.
What you find with really good directors is that they kind of leave you alone. They've hired you because they know the kind of work you do and the sense of how you'd approach it. So usually, they'll just stand back and maybe give you a nudge once in a while in terms of something specific they might want in a particular scene.
When we were bringing 'Raisin' onto Broadway, our first stop was at Arena in D.C. Several things struck me about being in D.C.: One was the enormous poverty around the capital at that time - it was 1973, '74 - and I was stunned by people literally living in poverty, with holes in their houses and other things.
With Trump, because of the kind of seemingly violent way that he talks about things and because he's on Twitter almost every single morning, I think it brings down the respect that we have for the White House and for the Oval Office in particular, so the expectation is anything can happen, and that becomes the norm, which is unfortunate.
