The director who compared Wesley Snipes to James Cagney: “He doesn’t get the credit he deserves”
Comparing action hero extraordinaire Wesley Snipes to Golden Age icon James Cagney might initially seem like something of a stretch, but it’s not as far-fetched as it might sound.
On one hand, Cagney was an Academy Award-winning staple of the silver screen who made such an indelible impact on cinema that he became Clint Eastwood’s biggest inspiration. He thrived on playing tough guys and did the majority of his best work playing tightly-wound characters who could explode at any moment.
On the other hand, Snipes didn’t even make his screen debut until 1986, coincidentally the year Cagney passed away. An effortlessly charismatic performer equally adept at comedy and drama, adding the string marked ‘action hero’ to his bow elevated his career to the next level.
Cagney never played a vampire-slaying superhero, and he definitely wasn’t jailed for tax evasion, but that’s beside the point. Not many people would look at Snipes and Cagney and immediately realise that they were two peas in a pod, but Ron Shelton outed himself as quite possibly the only exception to the rule.
Snipes had already worked with Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee by the time he collaborated with Shelton, but White Men Can’t Jump was a huge moment for the actor. The hit sports comedy allowed him to display those undeniable movie star credentials that would serve him well in the years to come, and he was so good during the audition process that it didn’t really matter if he was good at basketball or not.
“Wesley Snipes auditioned for Sydney, and he was great,” Shelton told Filmmaker Magazine. “He wasn’t a great basketball player but he was a great athlete, so I knew I could teach him certain things to do. You can’t fake athleticism, but you can fake the basketball.” That still doesn’t explain the Cagney connection, but Shelton got there eventually.
“Honestly, I think Wesley is one of our greatest overlooked actors,” he continued. “Like Kurt Russell, he doesn’t get the credit he deserves. Wesley can do anything. Back then, I said, ‘He’s Jimmy Cagney!’ and I don’t mean ‘the Black Jimmy Cagney’. I mean, he’s Jimmy Cagney. He can be scary, he can be funny, he can make you cry, he can do physical stuff.”
In that respect, Shelton isn’t wrong. As mentioned, Snipes has shown that he can do drama and comedy, but he’s also covered romance, biographical drama, music videos, and TV shows, playing characters that range from hardened criminals and cops to drag queens and gangsters.
Eastwood might bristle were he to catch wind of Cagney and Snipes being mentioned in the same breath as comparable talents, but it’s easy to see where Shelton is coming from when he lumped them into the same category as a pair of performers who can virtually do it all.
