Delroy Lindo names the most underrated movie of his career: “It has endured”
Actors who aren’t household names but probably should be, number god knows what: Delroy Lindo.
One of the more prominent examples of someone saying “you’d know him if you saw him” and an actor who has been brilliant in countless great movies, going all the way back to Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, through to the 2000s classic Gone in 60 seconds and this year’s jaw-dropping Sinners.
And the best thing is we get to claim him as British, thanks to his being born in Lewisham and raised in Eltham, which is a part of south London that, like all of London, used to be quite gritty but now costs £9 for a pint and everyone sits outside wearing Crocs without shame. Lindo escaped that future gentrification at quite a young age, however, when his family first moved to Toronto and then on to San Francisco.
Lindo then studied theatre and got a break in an early John Candy film in the late ‘70s, before finding some success on Broadway in the next decade. He then got back into film with Rutger Hauer in the cult movie The Salute of the Jugger before beginning his partnership with Lee, although he did turn down a role in the seminal Brooklyn movie Do the Right Thing in 1989.
After his part in Malcolm X, Lee brought Lindo on to his comedy drama Crooklyn, which was another New York neighbourhood-based movie released in 1994, before the following year, he repeated the trick with Clockers, a drama with Harvey Keitel and John Turturro that had Martin Scorsese as a producer and Lindo playing one of the leads, a local drug lord.
Lindo told AV Club: “I’m very proud of that movie, too. Very proud of it. That film… I think, was a very underrated film. Apparently Clockers was on TV relatively recently, and literally just last week, someone came up to me and said ‘Man, Clockers was on TV last night. You were great in that, great movie.’ And again, as proven, it has endured.”
Although the film was a comparative failure at the box office, critics were far more impressed on release and praised Lindo’s performance. The heavily used poster for the movie caused some controversy though, with some feeling it was a rip-off of the promo for the absolutely amazing 1959 courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder starring Jimmy Stewart, which if you haven’t seen then you need to do so as fast as humanly possible.
Lindo still has very fond memories of his early work with Lee, and would partner with him again almost thirty years late in Da 5 Bloods, the war drama telling the story of four Vietnam vets who return to the country as older men.
On Clockers though, Lindo added: “With cable, and 24/7 programming, some of these films have an afterlife, and it’s great that a film like Clockers does, because likewise, at the time it was released, I felt that for whatever reason it was ignored and didn’t get the commercial attention it deserved.”
That’s certainly not the case with Lindo’s most recent film, though, Ryan Coogler’s astonishing genre mash-up Sinners, which is expected to feature majorly in next year’s Oscars and has brought in almost $400m in revenue since its release early in 2025. While there will almost certainly be a sequel, fans of Lindo will have a little bit longer to wait to see him in another big blockbuster, Godzilla x Kong: Supernova, which is slated for a 2027 release, probably because 99 per cent of it will be CGI-based, because neither of those monsters exists, hopefully.
