The career-defining role Wesley Snipes was told not to play: “Beneath the skill set”
In the 1990s, Wesley Snipes became one of Hollywood’s fastest-rising young stars thanks to a canny mix of action movies and acclaimed material that flexed his dramatic muscles.
According to Snipes, though, he and his team of agents and managers were always wary of him being pegged solely as an action star, thanks to his incredible aptitude for martial arts. So, movies like White Men Can’t Jump, Murder at 1600, One Night Stand, and To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar were calculated decisions aimed at displaying his acting chops in dramas, comedies, and thrillers.
Fascinatingly, during that time, Snipes – a classically trained actor and dancer – revealed that he was somewhat at war with himself over the kinds of movies he made. “If I’m gonna go to the movies, you know, just to kick back, relax and be entertained, most of the time I’d choose an action film,” he told the Los Angeles Times. However, the actor side of his brain would always gravitate toward drama, as those roles challenged him as a performer.
With this dichotomy in mind, it’s perhaps no wonder that Snipes’ people were initially hesitant to let him star in the role that would later arguably define his career. When David S Goyer’s Blade script landed on Snipes’ desk, the story of a sword-wielding, martial arts-performing vampire hunter made those in his inner circle turn their noses up. The fact that it was based on a Marvel comic book didn’t help matters, either, because this was long before there had been any successful big-screen adaptations of Marvel superheroes.
“Most of the representation I had at the time were very against me doing the Blade role,” Snipes told the Q podcast. “They considered me a classical actor and a professionally trained actor, and that was beneath the skill set. My trajectory was to do dramatic types of roles; you know, work my way towards getting awards.”
Luckily, the side of Snipes’s brain that loved action movies and convinced him to make films like Demolition Man, Passenger 57, and US Marshals made its presence known among the naysayers. He couldn’t get Blade out of his head and soon realised he wanted to play the character for a very straightforward reason.
“I’d never seen a Black vampire that did karate before,” he laughed. “It was real simple! All of my friends, we had never seen a cool Shaft-like vampire who did karate at the same time.”
It left him with one overriding desire: “I’ve got to do this movie.”
So, Snipes ignored the advice of his representation and signed up to play the ‘Daywalker’. It proved to be a brilliant decision because Blade was a roaring success upon release, kickstarting the modern superhero boom in the process. Two sequels quickly followed, and in 2024, Snipes was able to reprise the role with a cameo in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s billion dollar extravaganza, Deadpool & Wolverine.
These days, Snipes and Blade are inextricably linked in the minds of cinemagoers, and the movie is credited with being a vital text in the advancement of Black representation in blockbuster cinema. This was firmly on Snipes’ mind nearly 30 years ago, too, showing he was way ahead of the game when it came to understanding the cultural significance of a movie like Blade.
“I want to not only do films that are good films,” he said, “But also at the same time to show the African-American experience as an American experience and in such a way that people can relate. We have to do stuff that reflects our culture so that people internationally can relate to us as humans.”
