Jeffrey Wright names his favourite movies of all time
A renowned character actor with a knack for blowing everybody away whenever he’s afforded a leading role, consistency on film and television doesn’t come much more reliable than Jeffrey Wright, a performer who can always be relied upon to deliver a memorable performance.
The Tony, Golden Globe, and Primetime Emmy-winning star recently added Academy Award nominee to his list of accolades after being recognised for his incredible work in American Fiction, and nobody would begrudge Wright in the slightest were he to defy the belief the ‘Best Actor’ trophy is a two-horse race between Oppenheimer‘s Cillian Murphy and The Holdovers‘ Paul Giamatti and emerge victorious.
He’s been in an impressively diverse array of motion pictures, miniseries, and television shows, and that desire to continually try something new is reflected in his quartet of selections for his favourite movies of all time for Letterboxd, which date back from the earliest days of cinema to 1979.
“I gotta throw in Apocalypse Now because, you know, it’s Apocalypse Now,” was Wright’s reasonable assessment for listing Francis Ford Coppola’s wartime classic right off the bat. “I gotta throw in, probably, The Bicycle Thief,” he said, wasting little time in naming Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 neorealist masterpiece.
Charlie Chaplin made the cut because, in Wright’s words, “I can’t double up on Coppola,” which may have meant one of the first two Godfather movies was right on the tip of his tongue. “I’ll just go back to Modern Times, go back to a little Chaplin,” he explained of why he’d plumped for the 1936 comedy.
For his fourth and final selection, though, Wright didn’t just name a feature that was a huge inspiration, but he also gave a history lesson as well. “And since I’m going to Chaplin, I’m gonna throw in a film that’s very difficult to see,” he continued. “You may be able to find it out there. Natural Born Gambler, Bert Williams, 1916.”
One of only two films the comedian ever made, the black-and-white short only runs for 22 minutes, but that was more than enough to get Wright completely hooked. “He does a pantomime thing, a pantomime poker game in that, that’s the most magnificent thing you ever want to see,” he insisted.
“He made this film five years before Chaplin’s The Kid, and if you look at Chaplin’s little tramp and look at Bert Williams’ character – Bert Williams is a black man who played in blackface – he was the first black vaudevillian to make it into the Ziegfeld Follies,” Wright explained of how his hero made his way into the string of revue productions that ran on Broadway from the 1900s to the 1930s.
“If you watch the character he creates, and watch Chaplin, maybe Chaplin’s paying a bit of homage to him,” he offered, wondering if Williams’ shadow loomed large over one of cinema’s iconic-ever performers. “Far fewer people know about Bert Williams than Chaplin. Amazing performer, and an inspiration to me.” It may have been four favourites, but the most influential is clear for all to see.
