Most of my friends between 21 and 31 are at different stages of figuring out what the hell they are going to do with their lives. It's a big part of our generation. What is the next step?
Belly was not a bad movie. It was visually very interesting.
With 'The Replacements,' it was insane. I'd never done a movie that opened up and made, like, seven million dollars. I'd never been part of, like, a four-day press junket for a movie that was international and domestic.
You give the guy an Image Award three years in a row and then turn on him like that? If that's the role they want to fulfill, they need to send a clearer message.
That was one of the things that interested me about the character. He doesn't want to be a hero, and has no real desire to save the earth or discover aliens. He's sniffing around looking to see what will fall in his lap.
Someone I met years ago explained to me the difference between a personality and an actor, a personality being Eddie Murphy or Roseanne Barr, and an actor being Morgan Freeman and Alfre Woodard or Marlon Brando.
I became acutely aware of how important it is to separate the difference between who you are and who the character you're playing is.
'Sleepy Hollow' was really the first thing I'd done that gave me the opportunity in the modern age to build an authentic relationship with an audience that was a lot more like what happens in theater.
Religion is a tool to stamp out oppression, repression, and tyranny. It's to save the oppressed. That's what religion is for.
People choose whatever projects they've seen that I've done over the years, and whichever one is their favorite is the only one they care about. But I realized that none of those were my voice or representative of what my thoughts and feelings were.
There was a guy that was friends with my father, a very well-known and powerful hustler on the Eastern seaboard. He was a very interesting guy who would literally rent a passenger van and would take the poor kids from the ghettos and black neighborhoods down to the sporting goods store and just spend money. Buy them whatever they want.
I'm tired of cookie-cutter monolithic representation of black folks.
My father marched in Selma. My father was there in Alabama. That's where I was born. My birth certificate says 'colored.' It does not say I'm African-American or black. So for me, those are real realities that are not subject to opinion.
I think it's impossible to be a young black male from the South, born to an era I was born in, and not have a clear sense of what race really means in the country.
Sometimes I'm more inspired by stuff that tells a story and less inspired by stuff that's not a natural extension of what I'm already doing.
I sort of fell in love with the idea that we all love things that we're not supposed to, and that, often, that love is also 'tainted.' I wrapped it in sort of a graphic novel theme, and out of that came 'Tainted Love.'