The only four movies Yahya Abdul-Mateen II liked growing up: “I wasn’t a cinephile”
As well as having a really cool name, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II has also been in some really cool stuff, and in terms of franchises, he’s got almost every base covered, straddling both the DC/Marvel divide, playing Black Manta in the Aquaman movies and recently appearing as the title character in Wonder Man.
And when Laurence Fishburne wasn’t up for reprising the part of Morpheus in The Matrix Resurrections, Lana Wachowski knew exactly who to call.
The New Orleans-born star was always going to do something significant with his life, being a keen athlete in school as well as a chess player, and he was voted the prom king, too. In fact, he was so busy with everything else that he forgot to pay attention to the subject that would eventually make him famous.
“I was never a big fan of movies,” he confessed during an interview with GQ, “Things that I really liked, though, I watched over and over, but I wasn’t a cinephile”, before revealing that he initially became interested in theatre to get over a stutter while he was working as a city planner in San Francisco, and when he was made redundant there, knowing he had nothing to lose, gave acting a shot full-time, and the rest is history.
What did Abdul-Mateen fill his time with when he wasn’t winning gold medals or check-mating people? According to him, there were four films that he returned to again and again: Antoine Fuqua’s corrupt cop drama Training Day, Tropic Thunder, the taste-curdling comedy directed by and starring Ben Stiller, Damien Chazelle’s ambition-challenging Whiplash, and the epic musical biopic from Miloš Forman, Amadeus.
Of those four, Amadeus is the obvious outlier, released before Abdul-Mateen was born and has a radically different tone to the others. The actor revealed that he liked it because it follows somebody who is good at what they do, but not quite the best, indicating that he identified more with F Murray Abraham’s cursed performance as Antonio Salieri than he did with Tom Hulce’s portrayal of the titular prodigy; hopefully, he didn’t take too many life lessons from the bitter maestro.
His selections also indicate that he enjoys films about realistic scenarios that get pushed to the extreme, as all four movies are ostensibly based in reality (some more than others), but accentuate a certain quality or result that pushes things to the periphery of believability.
It’s strange that, given his propensity for playing sci-fi or comic book characters that more of Abdul-Mateen’s youth wasn’t taken up with tales of epic fantasy; maybe he was too busy getting in shape and dating cheerleaders to bother with any of that stuff.
The actor is a textbook example of a late bloomer as both an actor and movie fan, as well as proof that you don’t need to be obsessed with something from an early age to be good at it, though, it would be nice to know that he’s seen more than four films now.
