AFTERWORD BY DON CHEADLE

THERE WASN’T NECESSARILY A SINGLE MOMENT OR EVENT that happened early in my career that made me feel like I’d arrived, or that I belonged in Hollywood. For a lot of actors, I think it’s the same thing. There’s a bit of impostor syndrome where you feel like you’re going to get caught; somebody’s gonna go, “Hey, man. You don’t belong here.”

Even after you’ve been in a few movies or had some success, that feeling is still there. You feel like it can still happen at any point. Because acting may be meritocratic in some ways, but it’s really difficult to determine what the metrics are that decide that. If you’re talking about an NBA player, you have a line of thirty points, ten rebounds, five assists, two steals; you can look at that and go, “Yeah, he had a good game.” There are legitimate and obvious markers like that in some professions. But I think as an actor, we don’t know. You never really know. We’re in a business that retires you. You don’t really retire from it. At some point, people just stop fucking with you and you’re like, “Oh, I guess it’s a wrap.”

So I never had that feeling early on where I felt like I was standing at the beginning of a decades-long career. If anything, maybe I can say now that I have enough of a toehold, that I have enough ancillary ways to work in this business that they can’t totally shake me out. I can write, I can direct, I can produce, I can act. I can make moves. But, you know, I think actors are always trying to figure out if you’ve “made it” or not.

There’s not one specific character I’ve played in a movie that people always ask me about. It’s a variety. So whenever someone in the street comes up to me to talk about something that I’ve been in, I always try to play “Who Is This Fan?” I’m trying to figure out what movie it was that they saw me in so I do a kind of demographic scan. What race are they? What age are they? Certain people come up to me like, “Oh, I love your work,” and I try to guess what movie I was in that they know. Young people come up to me and I already know it’s going to be the Avengers stuff. If a black dude came up to me and he was a little bit edgy or hood-y, like, “Man, I’m such a huge fan,” I’d be like, “Devil in a Blue Dress,” and he’d be like, “Yeah!” If a British dude walks up and wants to talk shit I know it’s Ocean’s Eleven. It always makes me laugh a little.

If I’ve ever been intimidated on a movie set, it was always because it felt like there were bigger things at work than moviemaking. Devil in a Blue Dress is a good example. When I did Devil in a Blue Dress, which was directed by Carl Franklin and starred Denzel Washington and was what I felt like an important movie, it was a big deal to me. I wanted to make sure that I was on point all the time. I stayed in character the whole time. I was very, very committed to making sure that I was doing everything I thought I needed to do to be as great as I could be.

I felt that way for different reasons when I did Hotel Rwanda. I felt incredibly intimidated by that material. I was very concerned that we did it right and that people who were involved felt we were doing a respectful job and servicing the material. A lot of the reason was because Paul was there. Paul Rusesabagina, who I played in the movie, was on set the whole time. And there were survivors from the genocide that were actually in the film as extras. There was a lot of pressure to do things the right way. So there hasn’t really been a time when I was standing across from another performer or actor that was intimidating to me, it was standing across from what it was we were attempting to do that was unnerving day to day.

And obviously, when I directed my own movie (Miles Ahead), I was wearing all the hats and sitting in all the seats. I was incredibly intimidated then for even different reasons. I was shook up every day about what it was I was doing and how it was going to turn out. There was nobody to point to if it didn’t work. It was all on me.

I think the first time I can remember sitting in a movie theater and feeling like I was a part of something special was Star Wars. I was a kid and I’d gone to see it with my dad. It came out in 1977, so I was about thirteen at the time. If there was a movie that made me feel like that before then, it was Jason and the Argonauts. I went to see that with my dad, too. He loved those movies. He loved special effects. He was as excited to see it as I was, and I was excited to see it with my dad. It was a really special kind of spirit. And then the movie itself, you’re like, “Fuck, this thing is sick.”

And that’s a feeling that’s continued into adulthood. It doesn’t go away. Movies—a great movie—can make you feel that way. When I was a senior, I saw Gallipoli and it hit me hard. I wasn’t an adult then, but I was older and remember having that same feeling. Spike Lee’s X was another one that hit me hard. There have been so many. When I saw Memento I was like, “What?! You can film movies like this? You can film movies backward? And it still works forward?!” There have been a lot of them. Obviously. And lately, a movie like Roma, which was amazing. I could list you as many as you wanted.

Movies can be meaningful to people for whatever reason they need them to be. It’s the director, it’s the subject matter, it’s the production value and the special effects, it’s the characters. Those are the things that pull people in. It can be any one of those. A movie like The Celebration—that movie looks like it was shot on a Fisher-Price camera, and it kind of was, but it didn’t matter. The story was so compelling and what the characters were going through was so compelling that it didn’t matter that the movie looked like it was made for three dollars. You were in. You were just so in.

When you’re on the other side of it, like I am now and have been for something like thirty years, it’s trying to make sure that you’re telling honest stories that are affecting you. You’re not just trying to come up with clever things that could make someone feel something you don’t feel. You’re the first barometer for that when you’re making a movie. If you’re affected and moved, you know, water will find its level; there’s a good chance that others are going to feel something watching a movie if you felt something making that movie. That’s what you have to try to do. And that’s what you have to try to create.