Speaking over the phone from Rome on a Sunday afternoon shooting break, the four-time Academy Award nominee sounds amiable and reflective, looking ahead to an impressive number of releases in the next year or so, including a brief role this summer in Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, his fifth project with the director, as well as key parts in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things and Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu up ahead.

Dafoe has taken on some of the most varied projects imaginable, from Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) and Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini (2014) to the Marvel box office behemoth Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) But for him, the range itself is not the point. “It’s not as a show of versatility,” he says, “so much as you want to learn something, you want to have an adventure, you want to go forward and do something different.”

Impossible to typecast despite having played a number of the sorts of roles that might have gotten stuck in both filmmakers’ and critics’ minds — including the bestial but vulnerable Max Schreck in Shadow of the Vampire (2000), the character actor as monster, and a decidedly fallible Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) — Dafoe attributes his malleability not to any concerted effort on his part to break the mould but to his instinct for choosing projects and characters that excite him. “I’m not a guy who wants to cart out the things that he knows,” he says. “I want on-the-job training.”

Over the course of a more than 40-year career that began in experimental theatre in New York, where he was a founding member of the Wooster Group, Dafoe has had plenty of training in different lines of work, from painting to filmmaking to counselling to armed robbery. He’s become cherished for his ability to maintain his iconicity while confidently slipping into the skin of virtually any kind of person, his unique physicality and striking screen presence always neatly folding into the task at hand.

Early in his career, though, some seemed eager to channel Dafoe’s idiosyncratic presence into volatile, sexually charged, dangerous characters — at a minimum, men you wouldn’t trust to watch your bag, if not outright villains. When we first see him in his debut screen appearance as a moody motorcycle hunk in Kathryn Bigelow and Monty Montgomery’s The Loveless (1982), for instance, the camera tilts up to take in his lithe body, intense grey eyes, and striking cheekbones. His leather-jacket adorned figure was the very picture of the motorcycle greaser bad boy, as he combed back his perfectly slicked hair as if he knew we’re looking at him. The camera loved his smouldering strangeness from the start.

Dafoe is reflective about whether his unique appearance was a help or a hindrance early on. “In the beginning,” he says, “I was much more fearful of typecasting, afraid of being limited in how you could be seen and what you could do.” As for his intimidating presence as sinewy, magnetic antagonists in early films such as Walter Hill’s Streets of Fire (1984) and William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), he insists that he hasn’t become any less physical over the years: “It’s just my nature, and also my background in the theatre, which is and was a very physical kind of theatre,” he laughs.

But he concedes it’s true that he had to fight against people holding his early roles against him. “When you start out,” he tells me, “if you aren’t conventionally handsome or attractive in a very recognizable way, the best roles are character roles. And the best character roles for a young man are usually villains. But after I’d done some films and I saw people seeing me a certain way, I was conscious that I didn’t want to lock that down as a stamp. I have no stake in being versatile. It’s just that personally, I don’t want to be called to do that thing that I do.”

His reputation for being unfailingly original has boosted the profile of any number of small independent films, several of which he’s carried to Oscar nominations. But Dafoe insists that he has always aspired to be an actor qua actor, who can move in and out of different roles, rather than a movie star, from whom audiences expect a certain kind of performance. “I admire movie stars in the respect that sometimes they find a persona and then they work in projects that support that persona,” he says, admitting that a star in the right project “can be a very beautiful thing to watch. But I’ve jumped around. I don’t cling to a certain way that I want to be.”

That bears out in the capaciousness and versatility of his screen work. For all his prowess as a villain, Dafoe is also one of the finest actors we have at portraying a kind of troubled decency. We see it not just in his performance as Scorsese’s Jesus, who dreams of deferring his call to die as the Messiah to live as a man, but also in his doomed Sergeant Elias in Platoon — a doting mother hen to his young infantrymen, teaching them which gear they need to carry to survive, and which they can discard to move lighter on their feet — as well as his basically kind but morally compromised drug dealer in Light Sleeper.

It’s especially pronounced in his Academy Award-nominated turn in The Florida Project (2017). Warm and gregarious — and like Dafoe, quick to laugh — his budget motel manager Bobby in Sean Baker’s film is not just an administrator and a handyman but an unofficial social worker for the precariously housed residents who come through his doors.

“I want to be that person sometimes,” he says of generous characters who make sacrifices for others. “It’s fun to play on evil impulses because you don’t do them in life. But when you think about the function of telling stories, it’s nice when you feel like you’re putting something positive forward that can inspire people to say, ‘I’ve got to be kinder.’ That sounds kind of Pollyanna, but in movies, the thing that gets me always is kindness.”

That doesn’t mean it isn’t pleasurable to play characters bending their morals to get their way. “Nobody’s just one thing,” he says. “We’re all a little bad, we’re all a little good, and the proportions vary in each person. It’s always fun to find the sweetness in a bad guy and find the darkness in a good guy. That almost goes without saying. But sometimes it’s a little hard to practice.”

Practice is important to Dafoe, for whom the basis of all acting is doing things rather than emoting: “It’s about listening, it’s about moving, it’s about rhythm, it’s about music.” That action starts with anchoring himself in the skin and bones of his characters. “It always starts with the physical and it ends with the physical,” he says of the appeal of wire-work and action-heavy projects like his role as Norman Osborn in the Spider-Man films. “When you’re physically engaged, there’s a greater chance of getting in the groove because if you get too much in your head, you start creating certain kinds of expectations and ironically, limitations. You can overthink things.”

Unsurprisingly for an actor who has given some of his best performances as tactile men who create (or steal) things with their hands — including his counterfeit money-maker and painter Eric Masters in Friedkin’s film or Vincent Van Gogh in Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate (2018), for which he received his fourth Oscar nomination and his first as a leading man — Dafoe appreciates concreteness. He lights up when speaking of costumes and makeup as tools for getting out of one’s own head and into the character’s, calling them “triggers for pretend.” Gesturing to his dissipated appearance as the compulsively violent career criminal Bobby Peru in David Lynch’s Wild At Heart (1990), he credits the first time he popped the character’s dentures into his mouth for helping him find the character.

“When I put those rotten teeth in my mouth, I couldn’t close my mouth,” he says. “And if you keep your mouth open all the time, mouth-breathing, it gives you a feeling of sleaziness, a kind of lasciviousness. That was a huge key to the character.” Costumes and makeup choices like the bushy beard and pipe sported by his haggard lighthouse keeper Thomas in The Lighthouse (2019) or his red beanie and baby blue shorts as Klaus in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), he says, “make the world, and you get behind them. Sometimes they trigger something in your imagination or from your childhood. Rather than designing those things emotionally, you’re presented with something that just forces you to be a certain way.”

Where some actors revel in burrowing into the psychology and emotional depths of their characters before shooting, Dafoe speaks often of the pleasure of being forced into his characters’ behaviour by these concrete signifiers of who they are and what they do, which he attributes largely to the imagination and clarity of filmmakers who know what they want. In recent years, Dafoe has worked with a host of emerging auteurs like Eggers and Baker — both of whom he’s said he expressly pursued for projects — and stylists like Yorgos Lanthimos in the upcoming Poor Things, as well as a stable of regular collaborators such as Schnabel, Ferrara, Anderson, and Lars Von Trier.

“I feel like the best directors are the ones that make a world that is so complete,” he says of his penchant for alternating between new colleagues and old favourites, “that you enter it, and it becomes very clear what you need to do. And the pleasure is in doing it and seeing what happens and taking it to some place that you couldn’t imagine.” As frustrating as the business can be, he attests, working with directors with an intelligible vision is a joy, akin to becoming a soldier in their struggle. “The actual doing is such a pleasure and such a gift. It’s a good life.”

Life is best, though, when the roles require a lot of him. Dafoe appreciates small parts where he feels he might have something to contribute, or where it gets him in the door working with a director he admires, but they’re not what sustains him; they can’t compare, he says, to the expansiveness of roles that ask more from him. “You can more deeply pretend when you’ve got a more central role,” he says.

This position is borne out by the specificity and generosity with which, on the eve of his small role in Asteroid City, he remembers his time working on The Life Aquatic, his largest role for Anderson, which he describes as a more improvised working experience than his other collaborations with the famously aesthetically rigorous filmmaker.

“He had that same kind of meticulousness and control and clarity,” he says of their first time working together, “But as far as the actual dialogue and the character, he was a little looser. That was fun because there was room for me to fold into it. There would be a shot where he would say, ‘Willem, go in there.’ I wasn’t written in that scene, but he’d put me in, and then we’d create something. Life Aquatic is dear to me.”

Dafoe also cherishes his collaborations with Ferrara, whose emotionally unvarnished, nakedly autobiographical, devil-may-care approach looks diametrically opposed, at least from the outside to Anderson’s fastidiousness. Their work together has taken on a more personal, intimate tone starting with 2011’s 4:44 Last Day on Earth, a tender chamber piece about domesticity, love, and old habits at the end of the world. “I love that he’s a self-starter,” he says of Ferrara. “I love that he doesn’t wait. I love that he’s passionate. He lives through film. Something like Tommaso (2019) is a totally improvised movie, with maybe an exception of a couple of written scenes. And he just basically whispers into my ear what he sees, and then we try to do it.” A loyal soldier in Ferrara’s creative struggle, per his own war metaphor, Dafoe speaks of doing a kind of service to filmmakers like him, with whom he has a shorthand and a history. “There’s a bond there,” he says, “and when he needs me to do something, I’m happy to be there because I like being part of his story. I think that’s true for all directors that I’ve worked with more than once. I like being part of the texture of their work.”

For all his desire to move forward rather than fall back on old roles or old skill sets, Dafoe admits that leaving behind such memorable tours of duty and returning to the actorly equivalent of civilian life can be melancholy. “I just wrapped Nosferatu,” he tells me, “and I was reflecting on how no matter how many films that I’ve done, finishing one is always bittersweet because you’re like a man without a country. You’ve had a mission, you’ve had this collaboration that you’ve been invited into, and sometimes it’s in a very exotic place, or a place where you aren’t comfortable, and you’ve got to find a way to get comfortable. You get taken away from your life and you have this parallel life for a period of time, and you dedicate yourself to it and something happens. And then you finish your work and you’re like, wow, what was that?”

Yet he sounds awfully well-adjusted and good-tempered for a man with so many parallel lives — tickled by the possibility that he’ll get to live another life soon. “It’s a very strange feeling,” he says of the mournful period immediately after closing shop on a project he’s given his all on for weeks or months. “But after a while, you have it enough that you recognize that it’s not going to kill you.” Not a workaholic but an adventurer, Dafoe is always on the lookout for what’s next, driven by an internal voice that motivates him out of that initial bittersweet lull to think about the next chapter. “Relax for a little bit,” it tells him, “and then find another mission, find another family, find another collaboration, find another thing to make.”

Photography: Charlie Gray (LGA Management)

Styling: Jay Hines (The Only Agency)

Grooming: Brady Lea at Premier Hair & Make-up using Shakeup Cosmetics

Hair: Sam McKnight

Stylist Assistant: Marzia Cipolla

Photo Assistant: Samuele Donnini

Producer: Simona Silvano

Feature Photo Look: Prada

Shot on location at Anantara Palazzo Naiadi Rome.

The post Willem Dafoe Isn’t a Movie Star; He’s a Character Chameleon appeared first on Sharp Magazine.

Speaking by Zoom a few days after Armstrong’s announcement — and soon after the publication of a set of duelling media interviews in which he and co-star Jeremy Strong expressed different perspectives on the merits and demerits of the latter’s method acting — the 76-year-old Cox sounds optimistic and light on his feet, open to the promise of life and work post-Succession as much as Roy is basking in the afterglow of his big deal. “It’s a stop along the way,” he says demurely about the Emmy-nominated and Golden Globe-winning role that has altered his trajectory from theatrical heavyweight and self-identified character actor to one of the biggest stars in prestige television. He’s willing to grant that Logan “slots in perfectly well” next to characters such as Lear, Titus Andronicus, Hannibal Lector, and Winston Churchill already in his portfolio. While he admits he’ll miss him, calling him “one of the great roles,” Cox isn’t all that anxious about saying goodbye, applauding showrunner Armstrong for his rather un-American fortitude in refusing to let the series run past its sell-by date: “There is,” after all, “a world elsewhere.”

That lack of preciousness is a recurring theme with Cox, as he frequently returns to the idea that work is practice, even at his age, and that the best way to build an oeuvre is to forget your ego and do your job. “I love working,” he says of his delight in projects as varied as theatre and documentary voiceover work as he spitballs what he might do next, sounding less like someone at the end of a definitive chapter in their career than like a working actor filling out his dance card. In a moment of supercharged cultural discourse about so-called nepotism babies in the industry coming by their careers through industry connections, Cox holds court as the always-occupied star of stage and screen who came from humble means in Dundee, Scotland. He carries himself with the ease of a self-made success who, like Logan — and unlike the ungrateful scions he calls his children — has made his own pile. “I’ll have a go at anything,” he admits about his eclectic resumé. “I love that aspect of the work that is available to me. I see it in terms of another human being that I have to create, that I have to have respect for. And I don’t want to worry into a kind of morass of sentiment.”

As a social democrat who has spoken out about the importance of social welfare programs and grants for artists like him in his youth, one might assume Cox’s respect for a garrulous, super-rich, right-wing kingmaker like Logan to be minimal. But he speaks reverently of his character’s survival instincts, his ability to weather scandals and shifting political tides and stay firmly himself. “You can’t get around Logan in the sense that he has done it,” he admits, comparing his hard-won victories to the easy, inherited ones of his children. And while Logan has settled into a politically conservative cocoon — his news network ATN generating hard-right discourse and playing kingmaker with presidential hopefuls — Cox feels that has more to do with his opportunism and business acumen than any deep-set convictions, suggesting that Logan’s humble origins might just as easily have pushed him leftward, as they did his brother Ewan (James Cromwell). His rightward swerve, Cox thinks, is not the result of destiny but curdled expectations: “That’s all to do with his disappointment. That’s all to do with his disillusionment, with everything.”

When pressed about whether selling the company isn’t an existential failure for a character who pointedly un-retires in the pilot episode after viewing a fawning magazine cover of his supposed heir, Kendall (Strong), Cox insists that Logan has a clearer endgame in mind than the viewer might appreciate. “He’s realized that in order to move forward, you have to go back,” he says of Logan’s opaque motivations in breaking up the company he’s jealously guarded. “It’s not a straightforward path. You have to rest, go back, and retrench. That’s why he is successful, because he’s retrenched in the past, and he’ll retrench again.” Amidst Logan’s many strategic advances and retreats, Cox is most impressed by the solidity and completeness of the character on the page. “It’s a very economic role, and that’s what the appeal is. He doesn’t dissipate. There’s nothing dissipating about Logan.”

Like the legion of loyal HBO and Crave subscribers who have shared memes about which of the wastrel kids will get the coveted kiss from daddy each week, Cox is forthcoming with his opinions about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Roy children. “I think Logan is disappointed because none of his children have stepped up to the mark,” he says in defense of his decision to blow up their inheritance ahead of the final season. Cox reads lone daughter and ex-political strategist Siobhan (Sarah Snook) as Logan’s favoured successor. She’s smart, he concedes, “but she’s such a flake. She can’t stop talking. She cannot discern and she cannot keep secrets. She lets everything out.” Kendall’s ongoing vulnerability, meanwhile, keeps him from scoring high on the power rankings, which have recently seen the rise of a new player in Logan’s long-suffering son-in-law Tom (Matthew Macfadyen), who Cox sees as, if not a successor, at least “the catalyst for any movement forward.”

Given that Shiv and Kendall have flamed out, who might Cox have favoured in Logan’s Lear-like succession plan if he hadn’t sold the whole thing to Matsson? He slips in and out of Logan’s voice as he admits to his soft spot for Kieran Culkin’s cocky, damaged, satyr-like Roman, the dark horse second son — or third, if you count Alan Ruck’s drippy Connor, though Logan doesn’t seem to — who legal counsel Gerri (J. Smith-Cameron) dryly describes as “bootleg Logan.” Roman, Cox feels, shares his own character’s killer instinct, but is “tragically self-defeating,” undone by his “potty mouth” and penchant for sending ill-advised dick pics at strategy meetings. Most of all, Cox thinks Roman takes himself out of the running by partnering with his siblings in the finale only to then have the audacity to talk of love. “Love has never been on the agenda,” Cox scoffs, as if offended on Logan’s behalf. “Logan would have loved some love. He is shocked. You behave like a bunch of Judases, and you talk about love? They’re very out of order.”

In the end, like the protagonist of a revisionist romantic comedy, Logan chooses the known quantity: himself. “He’s had to deal with these people for such a long time,” Cox sighs, “and none of them have shown any real vision of what Waystar should be. I think it’s a needs-must situation. He’s not getting any younger. He feels that he needs his business to be taken care of. And they have proved wanting in their abilities to take care of it.”

Caretaking is important to Cox, whose aversion to method acting stems partly from the belief that it can gum up the process of an art he insists requires a “lightness of touch,” making a performer rigid and inflexible, and encouraging them to forget their place in the production. If method actors burrow into the emotional lives of their characters, identifying totally with them at great personal cost — as well as passing on residual costs to their cast mates and crew, who are locked out of that process — the matter-of-fact Cox prefers to roam, in service to the cast and writers’ developing vision. “In a show like Succession,” he says, “you don’t just have the responsibility of character. You’ve got a responsibility to what the ensemble is creating. You have to be dexterous.”

Dexterity for Cox means realizing where you are in the moment and responding in kind to what both the cast and the creatives behind the camera are putting out. “You need to have a healthy attitude where you can shift at a moment’s notice,” he says, “especially to working with writers who are going in a certain direction while you might want to take it in another direction.” That tug-of-war, he feels, tends to go against one of the unwritten rules of the actor-writer relationship. “The deal is you go the direction that the writer wants to go, not taking it your way. There are ways of doing that. But the way to do it is to play the role, and to do it rather than worry it.”

Despite their philosophical differences, Cox is politely complimentary, even gentle, toward Strong, noting that most of the method actors he’s worked with have been good at what they do. “I allow other people to be who they are,” he offers obliquely when asked if there’s a benefit to bouncing off the energy of actors who approach the work differently. “If that’s what does them good, fine.” He’s more caustic about one of Strong’s inspirations in the method acting pantheon, Daniel Day-Lewis, with whom he worked in Jim Sheridan’s The Boxer. Cox expresses bemusement at the three-time Academy Award winner’s brief retirement after that experience in 1997 — burned out and prematurely soured by the work on the verge of middle age, which he insists ought to be the outset of the most fruitful years of one’s career. “That’s when the roles start getting better,” he exclaims. “Ibsen, Chekhov, Shakespeare, Lear, Andronicus, The Master Builder, John Gabriel Borkman. Those are the roles you should be working up to. I’m going to be playing James Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night next year, and I just think this is where I’m supposed to be. This is what I’m supposed to do. It’s my job to play these roles and give them the credibility they deserve, not to make these roles a burden I carry.”

As for his own future after Succession — beyond that upcoming West End production, as well as a turn as Johann Sebastian Bach in a production of Oliver Cotton’s play The Score for Theatre Royal Bath — Cox seems loose and modest, eager to follow his beloved mother’s advice to him whenever he’d get too worked up about a role: “Brian, it’s only a play.”

“I’m up for grabs,” he chuckles about his openness to a wide range of projects when reminded of all the credits he’s accrued over the years not just in theatre but also in horror films and action thrillers. Over the coming months and years, he says, he’s planning not just a return to the theatre — “to see if I can remember my lines anymore,” he adds, self-deprecatingly — but to direct a film as well.

Still, nearly sixty years into his career, it’s the opportunity acting affords to practice and play that grabs him. But even as he stresses that acting is not the “religious experience” for him that it is for others who insist on a total identification with their characters, at the expense of looking around from time to time to appreciate “the totality of what we do,” he underscores that it is a profession that requires you to put in the time. Perhaps, he suggests, it’s made all the more rewarding because it requires both lightness and commitment, a strong sense of self as well as a willingness to surrender it in service of the work. “It’s a discipline. It’s a craft. The greatest musicians do it delicately. They play the instrument, and the music comes through, and they allow that to happen. But they don’t get in the way of it. They don’t marshal it to their own id.”

Photography: Lea Winkler

Styling: Mike Adler (Monday Artists)

Grooming: Emma Leon (SW Artists) using Dior Beauty

Photo Assistants: Guy Parsonage, Daniel Roversi

Stylist Assistant: Georgie Lawn

Production: Anastasia Marshall

Shot on location at Spring Studios

The post Brian Cox on the Rules of the Game, and What Comes After Succession appeared first on Sharp Magazine.

Heritage is important to Legend, who burst onto the scene in his twenties as one of the most coveted rising talents in R&B, and who became the second-youngest winner of the coveted EGOT before he turned 40. It’s something to stay true to wherever his career and his politics take him, a thread he comes back to whether we’re talking about his music or his activism, both of which he sees as rooted in his upbringing in Springfield, Ohio. Shortly after the release of Legend, his first double album — which he cheerfully notes was narrowed down from 80 to 24 songs — Legend is as happy to muse about the career retrospective Las Vegas residency he closed this past October as he is eager to promote his new album.

As an artist in his prime, Legend has a quality of the statesman, with an air of seriousness about his public image. Legend is at ease with the possibility that his ballads have won the day in the public’s perception of him, even though his albums have always contained more irreverent tracks like “Used to Love U” or the new album’s sensual “Honey.” He seems secure in the knowledge that the nature of streaming and his residency keep his back catalogue, in all its contradictions and variety, alive. A fresh-faced old soul, Legend is the picture of mid-career contentment: aware of his plum position in the industry, energized by the chance to revisit his songbook, and secure in the knowledge that he has plenty of tracks left to record.

Though the playful eponymous name drop of his eighth album suggests an artist intent on legacy-building, Legend doesn’t seem all that concerned about how the new work might go over beyond the things he can control, like sequencing. He slickly breaks down Legend’s 24 tracks into two acts like a maitre d’ previewing a menu, offering tasting notes as he describes the first side’s upbeat “Saturday night” jams versus the second side’s more relaxed and intimate “Sunday morning” vibes. He’s unbothered by my suggestion that with the album’s length, he’s placing himself in the pantheon of artists such as Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and OutKast, pointing out that the double album as a form is more fluid in the age of streaming, where fans make their own playlists and listen at their own pace. Once the prized young collaborator of artists such as Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige, and Alicia Keys, the now-seasoned Legend sounds most excited about the prospects of hosting the work of other musicians himself, citing the tracks with Muni Long, Saweetie, and Rick Ross as some of the album’s highlights.

Although Legend is energized by bouncing ideas off other artists — “I never felt like I left it,” he says about collaboration during the socially distanced phase of the pandemic — the material on Legend often feels personal. On “Pieces” he thinks of grief as a teacher, evoking his and partner Chrissy Teigen’s public mourning following the loss of their stillborn child. Then there’s “Wonder Woman,” a devotional hymn, with a video that prominently features Teigen. Does it cost him more to be personal at this stage in his career, given how much people think they know about his and Teigen’s lives? “I think it’s easier, honestly,” he counters. “People ask me that about my political views, too. Do I feel like I need to be more careful? I feel like it’s liberating to tell my truth.”

In recent months, telling his truth saw Legend direct his attention on social media to the recent midterm elections. Though plenty of political artists focus their philanthropy and activism on the bigger picture of the Senate or the House, Legend went smaller, doing his part to spotlight local district attorney races, which he sees as the best pathway to create a restorative society.

“A lot of what I want to do is educate people,” he says, occasionally slipping into second-person plural as he explains the purpose behind his tweets, like a politician speaking earnestly of his grassroots campaign. “A lot of people didn’t know who their district attorney was, didn’t spend a lot of time and energy focused on what they did and how their policies affected everyone’s lives in their communities. Part of what we’ve done is raise awareness that district attorneys matter, and that ending mass incarceration is a goal we should look toward. Once we educate people about that and they start paying attention to who their district attorneys are, then they can make their own decisions about what policies and what direction they think their community should go in.”

The expectation that artists of his stature should “shut up and sing,” as critics once said of The Chicks, is not unfamiliar to Legend, who’s been in his fair share of Twitter skirmishes. But the calculus is different, he thinks, for someone with a direct investment in and lived experience of the causes he amplifies online. “I think a lot of it comes from being a Black man in America,” he says, gesturing to a broader tradition of Black activism in the arts. “I think we feel the stakes more than a lot of other communities feel them. We have been victims of bad policy in the United States for so long that we care a lot about politics. We care a lot about fighting for justice in the political realm. We’ve seen the effects that racist policy has had on our communities for centuries. I think we feel a special sense of responsibility and a special sense of urgency when it comes to how these political issues affect our lives and our families’ lives.”

Legend emphasizes that mass incarceration is not an academic problem for him as a Black man in America, even one with his degree of wealth, fame, and security. He sees his championing of marginalized communities as the fulfilment of his own personal legacy. “I wrote an essay when I was 15 that said I wanted to become a successful musician and use my platform to help my community,” he says. “I’m going to continue to do that. It’s rooted in who I am, rooted in where I come from, and rooted in my knowledge that these things are not just academic: they affect real people’s lives. And I don’t feel removed from those communities who are dealing with these issues, despite the fact that I’ve achieved some success and some fame and some fortune.”

Hearing him speak this softly of his accomplishments, it’s easy to forget that Legend is American industry royalty, having scored the coveted quartet of an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony — the first winner to do so in four consecutive years. With the exception of the Grammys, he confesses a bit sheepishly, he pulled off this achievement mostly by accident, only realizing the significance of the hardware he was accruing as he barrelled toward his Emmy for producing Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert in 2018. The exclusivity of the club, a sort of Mensa group for multi-disciplinary artists, is not lost on him: “Jennifer Hudson was 17,” he notes, when I point out just how few winners there are. Nor is he unaware of the significance of being only the second Black artist to make the list after Whoopi Goldberg. Mostly, though, he sees it as freeing him up from the psychic energy of pining for awards. “Now that I’ve gotten this kind of status,” he says, “I truly don’t need to win anything else. I’m fine. I truly just want to make music that’s impactful.”

Though he’s good on the awards front, Legend isn’t through with the work that got him there. Since April, he’s been revisiting his career in his “Love In Las Vegas” residency at the Zappos Theater at Planet Hollywood, synthesizing his musical past and present. The purity of a residency appeals to Legend, who says that keeping the show in one place means putting the money into the production, the stuff audiences see, rather than in transportation costs. It’s also an opportunity for him to get meta, thinking about what makes a John Legend show. “It gives me the chance to explore my entire catalogue and my roots and talk about the journey that’s brought me to where I am.” Describing the show’s four-part structure, his curatorial instincts kick back in as he patiently walks me through its trajectory from his gospel days in Ohio, to his formative time in Philadelphia and New York, to an impressionistic piano bar section, and finally to a baroque scene rooted in the feathers, glitz, and glamour of Vegas. The subtext of that journey is that Legend remembers where he comes from — and is comfortable with where he is now.

The idea of the Las Vegas residency has shifted in recent years from an institution where aging musicians lay down the last tracks of their careers to a place where mid-career stars such as Legend can explore their roots with plenty of distance left to run. Vegas itself has modernized, Legend points out: its investment in emerging chefs and hoteliers has transformed it from a glorified retirement home into something much more dynamic. Legend is proud to represent a more diverse vanguard gracing Vegas and bringing new audiences along with them, joining the ranks of Cardi B and Drake, younger artists who have brought hip hop to a strip that has been more associated with rock and power pop.

“I think now people are doing it more in the peak of their careers,” he says. “You still have to have enough repertoire to justify getting a residency. But artists like myself and Silk Sonic and Usher, we’re still in our primes as artists, and we are celebrating the journey we’ve been on to this point, while we’ve still got a lot of new music left in us as well. I’m happy to be part of that group of artists who are, I think, modernizing Vegas, diversifying Vegas.”

As for how he feels about being at the self-described peak of his career, Legend remains even keeled. Although he routinely revisits his musical origins in his residency, he is unsentimental about the past, seeing it as continuous with the present. “I think what the streaming era has done is really flatten time,” he says with some awe, “made all times connected to each other, so that anything that came out in 2004 is just as accessible as anything that’s come out now. It makes it so everything’s connected and everything’s accessible and everything’s available. Because of that, there’s more exploration and availability of people’s catalogues now.”

Some artists might balk at that sense of availability, concerned by how easy it is for listeners to drift across different phases of an artist’s musical history, much as they’d quibble with being associated with ballads when their body of work encompasses so much more. For Legend, though, the fact that the Internet has allowed people to instantly connect with his music — all of it — is part of what makes having a repertoire and still being around to revisit, contextualize, and develop it so exciting.

“There are just so many ways for people to feel connected to the past and to have access to this music that was made decades ago all right there at your fingertips. They don’t have to go to some obscure record store to find it. It’s all there.”

Photography: Gioncarlo Valentine

Styling: Matteo Pieri (The Wall Group)

Grooming: Ron Stephens II

Makeup: Pamela Farmer

Production: Caroline Santee Hughes @ Hyperion.LA

Photo Assistant: Wacunza Clark

The post John Legend’s EGOT Was Only the Beginning appeared first on Sharp Magazine.

That’s some of the melancholy wisdom offered up in the nonagenarian Canadian actor, director, author and (unlikely) musician’s new memoir Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder. A whimsical, amiably digressive tour through his many entanglements both eastbound and interplanetary, the book is a profile of a working actor whose Captain Kirk-like thirst for knowledge about the natural world, and its resilience in spite of humanity’s numerous efforts to destroy it, is inextricably linked to his drive to keep exploring new projects.

SHARP recently spoke to Shatner by Zoom about learning to appreciate (and mourn) life on Earth, the cosmic coincidences of his friendship with Leonard Nimoy, and showing up for work no matter the job or one’s age.  

I’m struck by how much of your new memoir sounds like utopian science fiction. You say the weeds are made out of the same star stuff as we are. You’re fascinated by the secrets mushrooms hold about communication.

But that’s established scientific fact, not utopia.

What is it about these scientific facts that command your attention?

We’ve walked around as ignorant entities for so long, thinking we’re unique and we’re separate, and the world belongs to us, that we have dominion over it. That’s been pumped into us for so long that we’ve become this arrogant species who’ve destroyed the world. Not only have we destroyed it — we’re continuing with a greater aggression to destroy it even now that we know we’re destroying it.

My devotion to nature is one of awe and wonder. We develop better instruments, and we begin to realize things about which we had no idea before. We learn that we’re more alike to trees than we are unalike. It’s an increasing appreciation of the natural world and how bound up everything is.

As for whether that’s utopian, you want the book to be entertaining. You want to talk in utopian terms and not these dystopian ones so people will read it. But the future is very hazy.

Do you think we indulge in science fiction or fantasies about space travel to avoid some of these dystopian realities about climate change?

No question. That’s a very human thing. Let’s not think about the mortgage: let’s go to the movies. Kicking the can down the road is a very democratic thing to do. In a more authoritarian form of government, they might say, let’s ignore it completely. It’s so much easier to say, let the next guy do it. Miami comes to mind with people spending millions on seaside property. They’re building 20-foot walls in anticipation of the oceans rising. The world is filled with people who don’t want to look at reality and do something about it.

You say that your trip to space helped you appreciate the fragility of life on Earth. I’m struck by how mournful you seemed in the return footage. There’s a clip of you overcome with emotion, trying to articulate the experience to Jeff Bezos while the team is celebrating with champagne.

I’ll tell you, about the moment you’re describing, that I went to sit down someplace to try and figure out what it was that was moving me so much. And then I realized I felt a sense of grief for the Earth and what we’ve done to it, and the millions of things that are going and have gone extinct, that took billions of years to evolve. And so, I was in mourning and grief for the Earth. And then as a day or two went by, I realized I had known how insignificant the Earth is and I’d seen examples of it. The insignificance of the Earth and the insignificance of human beings on the Earth amounts to nothing. But the final realization is that we’re aware that we’re insignificant. And that awareness might be what makes us unique.

I was invited to a meeting of some well-known scientists sometime after that, and they played the clip you’re talking about, and at the end of it, Bezos embraces me. And I thought, my God, I’d forgotten that. That there’s love. There is empathy and sympathy among human beings.

You come back to your friendship with Leonard Nimoy throughout the book, particularly in a chapter on human nature, where you speculate that we’re made of different LEGO pieces that can work with or against other people’s natures. What were some of those LEGO pieces you and Nimoy had in common?

It’s possible — and I believe 90% of what I’m saying, because there’s always a little bullshit — that there’s no such thing as coincidence. Leonard and I were born four days apart. He was born in Boston and I was born in Montreal, which are similar cities in terms of their age, in terms of the East Coast artistic scene. He was born shortly after me in a family similar to mine and in a city similar to mine.

He had a very academic approach to acting, isolating moments and beats and so on, which was different from my approach, which was chaotic. I did whatever was there: whatever opportunity presented itself. Leonard, although coming to it differently, had the same professionalism about acting I did. So, when we met and were forced by Star Trek to be in each other’s company, we began a friendship. Everything that happened to him, happened to me, through the three years on the set, and the many more years going to events, making the movies. It was a beautiful friendship. I thought and felt about him like a brother, the brother I never had. 

The ending was so peculiar that I grasp at any explanation, one of which is that when you have an illness, when you know you’re dying, you’re not the same person. So that’s what I ascribe his behaviour to in the last several months of our relationship. But for a time, it was like we were conjoined.

Another of your longstanding associations is with Captain Kirk. I wonder if people’s perception of Kirk as a risky maverick isn’t a bit flat. He’s also a Navy guy: solid, strategic. You talk a lot in the book about putting in the time, being prepared for the job, and showing up. How much of William Shatner is in Kirk?

I never thought of it in quite that manner, but I think it’s true. If I use the phrase, “But I’m Captain Kirk” about a situation, I can get a laugh. For example, as the gantry was being readied to be pulled away from the spaceship, the guy who was doing the countdown said, “If you want to get out, you can get out now.” For a moment, I was so apprehensive about the hydrogen and about human error that a part of me thought, Jesus, I’ll get off. And then I thought, I can’t: I’m Captain Kirk. [Laughs] Or people think I’m Captain Kirk, with all those heroic characteristics. I can laugh at it, because I’m a frightened actor about everything. We’re all frightened: of death, of disease, of accidents, of Monkeypox. So, there are elements of Captain Kirk that are in me. But there are also elements that I must aspire to, to keep up the front.

You speak about how your survival instinct has always been bound up with work. How do you maintain that drive to keep working in your nineties?

Well, it’s a process of — what would the word be? — senility, where I forget that I’m 91 and I think, well I could do that. And then I do it and I think, why am I so tired? Because I’m 91, and I keep forgetting. So, the answer is forgetting. You forget your age, you go stumbling on.

May you continue to forget your age.

May I do that until I die. And wonder why I’m dying.

The post William Shatner on Space Travel, Living Up To Captain Kirk, and Forgetting His Age appeared first on Sharp Magazine.