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Sometimes when we sit down to write these Fame Audits, and the actor in question happens to be black...but then, that's the thing. In Hollywood, no actor really "happens to be" of any ethnicity, unless they "happen to be" white, in which case his ethnicity has no significance and he can play any part that comes down the pike, up to and including Othello. (Explain that, Sir Anthony Hopkins.) Anyway, we sit down to write a Fame Audit, we observe that the subject of the Fame Audit isn't white, and we realize that there isn't much for us to say that we haven't already said in our profiles of Delroy Lindo and Orlando Jones -- that Hollywood casting should be colour-blind, but it isn't; that their careers would be a lot different -- a lot more successful -- if they were not performers of colour; that, someday, Hollywood will realize that there is room on the A-list for more African-American actors than Denzel Washington and Samuel L. Jackson.
But. The fact that we've said these things before doesn't make them any less true. And this time, we're turning our attention to the limitations evidently placed on the career of Don Cheadle.
Don Cheadle is a classically trained actor. He's been honing his craft nearly twenty years. And the bulk of his résumé is made up of cop and criminal roles. This is not to say that he has not done a fine job in these roles. His performance as Maurice "Snoopy" Miller in Out of Sight perfectly married genuine menace and equally genuine ineptitude. In the current Traffic, he fearlessly portrays a DEA agent reluctantly re-evaluating the meaning (or lack thereof) of his chosen career. He was, by all accounts, convincing and compelling as D.A. John Littleton on Picket Fences (which, while not quite a cop, is still a role in the law-enforcement niche). But that's just it -- he's always good, no matter what's thrown at him. In Boogie Nights, he embodies the ennui of a man always at odds with his time, trying desperately to fit in and find love in the mercurial world of adult films. He portrays Sammy Davis Jr. in The Rat Pack, and gives a glimpse of what it was like to break the colour barrier back in the '60s.
Don Cheadle is so seldom given roles worthy of his talents. And yet, even in dreck like Volcano and Mission to Mars, he (reportedly) rises above his less-than-mediocre material without seeming like it's beneath him, even though it completely is. The most worrisome such role thus far is his turn as the latest in a series of films of the "Magical Black Man" genre, playing an angel -- or ghost, or ephemeral spiritual guide of some description -- in The Family Man. This movie may not be the shittiest on his CV (truly, no matter how bad The Family Man is, could it possibly be as bad as Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead?), but the fact that Cheadle has reportedly mused that he and Will Smith frequently compete for the same roles, one would think that he would leave the shucking and jiving to Smith's specialized...er...do we want to use the word "talents" here?
But the man's gotta eat. We don't fault him for taking the big money when he can get it, since it's roles like that, we assume, that subsidize his smaller paycheques in movies like the aforementioned Out of Sight, and the upcoming Ocean's Eleven. We just wonder whether, if Anthony Hopkins can play Othello, Don Cheadle could someday play an interesting part that happens to have been written for a character whose colour doesn't matter.
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