You know, I'm a 6-foot Black man, and I'm built the way I'm built. Driving is a very stress-inducing thing for me to do.
I'm a military brat; my mother's a pastor. There's been a lot of order in my life that I don't have control over, that I just dedicate myself to.
The first thing I do when I start a role is I look to see where we're similar. What do you get for nothing, you know?
I was told by the world for a long time that I was angry, or that I was sad.
As a boy and even now, I am wont to melancholy. I do, probably once a day, experience a sincere heartbreak.
I look for what responsibility the character has in telling the story. If you remove the role from the story, can you still tell the story properly? And if the answer is no, then I'm interested.
I came from a very military, Christian, Southern upbringing.
I was accepted to North Carolina School of the Arts with stitches in my mouth.
I'm a drifter. I go where the wind blows.
As an actor, you need to grow and experience things. What you experience in life is what is going to help you and your art.
I have nine years of scholastic actor training, and what I've learned is that training does not an actor make. You have to have an artful way of looking at things. You have to have a certain point of view. And you get that point of view through experience.
If you're not on set, if you're not on stage, go to class. Find teachers you trust and who push you and who you respect as people. That's what you're getting with a teacher: a point of view. You end up taking those points of view and that turns into your point of view as an actor.
Growth is uncomfortable; you have to embrace the discomfort if you want to expand.
You speak to be understood, right? And you're understood so you can be felt. And you're felt so you can get what you want.
In war, the first thing that goes, when you try to take over culture, is the statues. I think we all can recall statues with their heads cut off in museums.
There's a certain mentality that military brats have, you know? Especially if you're a male, and your father's the one in the forces.
As a father, my job is to protect, and keep things away from interfering with her imagination because that's her voice.
Racism is earthbound - it's something we only do to each other here on earth. Legacy, on the other hand, is otherworldly. It pushes us forward to our future.
When you allow yourself to really think about the future and the legacy you're leaving, you become gentler.
