Jeffrey Wright

Jeffrey Wright (born December 7, 1965, Washington, D.C., U.S.) is an American actor known for his ability to play villains and heroes, supporting characters, and famous historical figures. His versatility and compelling presence in film, theater, and television, including in the original Broadway production (1993) of the Tony Kushner play Angels in America and in the film American Fiction (2023), a dark comedy about racial stereotypes, have brought him much critical acclaim. In 2005 The New Yorker theater critic Hilton Als wrote of Wright, “It scarcely matters what he appears in: whatever play or film he lends his graceful frame and formidable imagination to yields levels of complexity, shades of light and dark, that sometimes go far beyond what is in the text.”

Early life, education, and career beginnings

Wright was raised in Washington, D.C., by his mother, Barbara Whiting-Wright, and his aunt. His father died when Wright was a year old. Whiting-Wright was a lawyer and the first Black woman to work as a customs law specialist at the U.S. Customs Service. She often took Wright to plays when he was a child, and he became entranced by the theater.

Despite this early interest, Wright studied political science at Amherst College, Massachusetts, and intended to become a lawyer. In his junior year he enrolled in an acting class, which changed his career plans. As he told ROUTE Magazine in 2024, “I kind of knew from the first day of the class that I was going to be doing that more and perhaps for quite a while.” After graduating with a B.A. in 1987, Wright returned to Washington and began acting in children’s theater. In 1988 he briefly attended the New York University Tisch School of the Arts on scholarship before leaving to pursue acting full-time.

Angels in America, Basquiat, and Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk

Wright’s big break came in 1993 when he was cast in the original Broadway run of Angels in America, taking on the dual supporting roles of gay nurse Belize and the imaginary Mr. Lies. His portrayals in Kushner’s epic play set during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s garnered Wright the Tony Award for best featured actor in a play (1994). Wright, however, told Backstage magazine in 2024, “It was only when I was doing Angels, around three quarters of the way through the run, that I could comfortably say to myself that I was an actor.” Wright’s Tony also convinced his mother that he had made the right choice to become an actor instead of a lawyer. His work in Angels led to the starring role in Basquiat (1996), Julian Schnabel’s biopic about the brilliant but fast-living American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. That same year Wright originated the role of ’da Voice in the hit tap dance musical Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk on Broadway. Other movies from the 1990s include Woody Allen’s all-star satiric comedy Celebrity (1998), in which Wright played an Off-Off-Broadway director.

Roles from the 2000s

Wright began the 21st century with roles in the 2000 film adaptation of Hamlet, with Ethan Hawke as Hamlet and modern-day New York as the setting, and Shaft (2000), a movie based on the 1970s TV show with Samuel L. Jackson as Shaft. Other notable screen roles from the early 2000s include Martin Luther King, Jr., in the television movie Boycott (2001) and photographer Howard Bingham, who took hundreds of thousands of photos of Muhammad Ali, in the biopic Ali (2001) starring Will Smith. Wright also continued to work in theater, earning a Tony nomination for best actor in 2002 for Suzan Lori-Parks’s play Topdog/Underdog. The following year he reprised his roles as Belize and Mr. Lies in a TV adaptation of Angels in America, picking up an Emmy for outstanding supporting actor.

Wright had roles in the films The Manchurian Candidate (2004), Broken Flowers (2005), and Syriana (2005). In 2006 he joined the cast of the James Bond revamp Casino Royale with Daniel Craig as the famed British spy. Wright played CIA operative Felix Leiter. He then portrayed two real-life figures: blues legend Muddy Waters in Cadillac Records (2008), a film chronicling the rise of the Chicago-based Chess Records and its musicians, and U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in W. (2008), Oliver Stone’s biopic about Pres. George W. Bush. Wright reprised his role as Felix Leiter in the 2008 Bond movie Quantum of Solace.

Roles from the 2010s

In 2010 Wright was back on Broadway in A Free Man of Color, a historical drama by John Guare in which Wright played a Don Juan-style character living in New Orleans during the early 19th century. Wright also landed complex roles in several TV series, including the devious Valentin Narcisse in the fourth and fifth seasons of Boardwalk Empire (2013–14) and robot programmer Bernard Lowe in the sci-fi drama Westworld (2016–22), for which he earned three Emmy nominations. Between episodes, he appeared in three Hunger Games films (2013, 2014, and 2015). Wright then had a significant supporting role as Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree in Confirmation (2016), a TV movie about the 1991 Senate confirmation hearings of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, whom Anita Hill had accused of sexual harassment. In 2018 he gave a moving performance in O.G. as a man incarcerated for more than 20 years and whose attempt to mentor a younger inmate jeopardizes his imminent parole.

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Roles from the 2020s

In the 2020s Wright appeared in a third Bond movie, No Time to Die (2021), and The Batman (2022), playing Lieut. James Gordon. He also had roles in director Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch (2021) and Asteroid City (2023). Wright earned another Emmy nomination in 2022, for narrating the animated series What If…? (2021–24), which explores alternate plotlines from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Wright earned his first Oscar nomination—an accolade many critics said was long overdue—for American Fiction. In the adaptation of Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, Wright played Thelonious (“Monk”) Ellison, an African American novelist of philosophical fiction who earns unexpected success after writing an exploitative novel of the so-called hood under a pen name. Wright told The New York Times in 2024 that he saw the film as a bookend to his first feature film. “Basquiat came from a place that was familiar to me, this young Black creative man who’s making his way around Lower Manhattan and finding and expressing his voice,” he said. “And with Monk I felt a personal intimacy with his journey, too.…They’re both stories about a man who is trying to express his authentic self in the face of external resistance. They just want to be free like any other human.”

After the success of American Fiction, Wright starred in the political series The Agency (2024– ), and he was set to play Lieutenant Gordon again in the sequel to The Batman.