Fresh from a Best Lead Actor Oscar nod for American Fiction, Jeffrey Wright will join Denzel Washington and Spike Lee in the film High and Low.
The movie is a modern take on a classic 1963 thriller by Akira Kurosawa, where a businessman and his family are mistakenly targeted and swept up in a kidnapping plot. Spike Lee’s version may or may not contain a plot twist, but Wright recently divulged his own plot twist regarding Washington’s classic 1996 noir mystery flick, Devil in a Blue Dress: the role of Mouse, a breakthrough portrayal by Don Cheadle, could have been his.
“I had parted ways with my agent midway through [starring in the Broadway play] Angels in America over a strange decision that they’d made about a film role that I was up for. It was Devil in a Blue Dress,” Wright recalled in an interview with Route 66.
“Ultimately, Don Cheadle played that role, but I had read with Denzel Washington for it, and I was to have gone out to Los Angeles to read with them one more time,” Wright said. “After my third audition, I was in the midst of doing the play. So, I was waiting for the itinerary to travel out and go and read with Denzel again.
“I called my agent and said, ‘Hey, what’s the flight information?’, they said, ‘Oh, the producers of Angels said they wouldn’t let you out for the two or three weeks to do the role, so we passed.’ And I said, ‘You did what!’ I called the casting director right away and she said, ‘Well, they said that you weren’t available, so the directors found this wonderful actor.’ That was Don,” Wright stated.
Eight years later, Wright and Washington would finally appear together in Jonathan Demme’s The Manchurian Candidate — which coincidentally, like their next film, High Low, is also a remake. From TikTok to Reddit, social feeds lit up about their collaboration, especially after Wright’s performance in American Fiction, which has won him rave reviews, an Independent Spirit Award, and nominations for several major awards. He plays a novelist challenging the literary world’s stereotypes about Black people — a move that backfires.
Back in the 90s, things did backfire for Wright’s agent — he was relieved of his position — but not for Wright. He won the Tony Award in 1994 for Best Featured Actor in a Play — and shortly after that made his feature film debut in the title role in Julian Schnabel’s 1996’s biopic Basquiat.
