Don Cheadle’s flimsy defence of his most polarising movie: “I have issues”
Once you’ve seen actors in a bad film or watched them put in a particularly bad performance, it can be hard to separate them from anything else, no matter what they do: take Don Cheadle, for instance, because I hear his name, and I immediately think of his cockney accent in Ocean’s Eleven and come out in hives.
So egregious was it, so completely inexplicable and movie-ruining that it acts like some kind of force against my mind when I remember it, and I completely draw a blank on anything else Cheadle has ever done, all thanks to hearing ‘Basher Tarr’ and his apples and pears nonsense.
Cheadle has of course done plenty of other stuff over the years though, in movies as far apart as Iron Man 2 and Hotel Rwanda, winning Golden Globes, Grammys, Emmys and an Oscar nomination on the way, so it’s probably unfair to judge him off the back of whoever made him have to pretend he was from the East End of London once.
Having started out with bit parts in TV shows like The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, it was in the 1990s that Cheadle began to get some attention, firstly alongside Denzel Washington in 1995’s Devil in a Blue Dress, and then in Paul Thomas Anderson’s debut Boogie Nights two years later. He also made the first of his five films with Steven Soderbergh, the George Clooney-starring Out of Sight.
After winning his Golden Globe for playing Sammy Davis Jr in The Rat Pack, he teamed up with Soderbergh again for the gritty 2000 thriller Traffic, before the ill-fated Ocean’s Eleven the next year and the Halle Berry hacker movie Swordfish, following which in 2005, Cheadle was Oscar-nominated for his leading role in the 2004 film Hotel Rwanda about the genocide in the country in the 1994 civil war, and starred in and co-produced the crime thriller Crash, which would also go on to win several Oscars, including ‘Best Picture’ for director Paul Haggis.
Haggis wrote the film about a real-life incident some years previously when his Porsche was carjacked by two Black men, and the movie has since come under fire for simplifying race relations in Los Angeles. Speaking about the film, Cheadle told Squaremile: “If you’re looking to a movie to speak in a way that is all-encompassing about what that’s supposed to be… The movie was an allegory. The movie is a fable.”
Adding, “I don’t think the movie’s a perfect movie, I have issues with the movie, but I do think that, on balance, it was a very entertaining movie, but if it starts that conversation and gets people talking about that (race relations), even if it gets them saying, ‘This shit’s bullshit,’ I’m like, ‘Cool.'”
Filming the movie proved anything but simple. Two major stars, Heath Ledger and John Cusack, pulled out at the last minute, which reduced the film’s potential global value and meant a reduced filming budget. Haggis plugged that hole by taking out three mortgages on his house while the remaining cast members took pay cuts. Haggis would also have a heart attack on set.
Cheadle, meanwhile, found greater success in the comedy-drama series House of Lies and then in several Marvel Cinematic Universe movies as the ‘Iron Patriot’. Horrendously, he is expected to return as Basher Tarr in the upcoming Ocean’s 14 (check it’s not on April 1st) and also has another Marvel project on the way, the long-awaited Armor Wars.
