The doctor told me, 'You have breast cancer.' I heard the cancer part first - it was only later that I heard the breast part. I couldn't believe it.
There's nobody more opposite from John Shaft than a kid who worships a banana as his god.
As much as possible, I'd like every role to be totally different from the one before.
If you do the same thing too often, it gets to be the only thing you can do.
Simply put, we have to take charge and take responsibility and support what's in the marketplace. Because, quiet as it's kept, the powers that be are cognizant of what our spending dollar means. And it is kept a little quiet, and we have to become aware of what we mean in the marketplace and take advantage of it.
I don't know if it's a racial thing or not, but it's hard for the Roundtrees to talk about health issues. People have to get over all that stuff.
I was in the closet, so to speak, until after the fifth year when I was cancer-free.
I'm not really much of a video game player; my son would be the expert in that department. The only game I would really play is golf, the Tiger Woods video game.
When you go into a film, you read it, and something clicks for you, and you like it, and you sign on for it; you go for it. You know that this is going to be a good film, and that is your best hope. Past that, it's a crap shoot - you roll the dice.
When I did 'Shaft', I was so happy to be working and to have been a star of a major motion picture, I had no idea or concept of where it was going to go, and it turned out to be this huge film. That was the icing on the cake.
I constantly deal with being called Shaft, and I vacillate back and forth with people coming up to me about it. But it never ceases to blow me away with the impact that character had on my life and my fans' lives.
Although it happens more rarely in men, breast cancer is not gender-specific. I was in Costa Rica, and in the shower I felt this lump under my left nipple. It was very small, mind you, but enough to make me call my doctor.
