The one performance Delroy Lindo will always regret: “I was the weak link”
The British star (he was born in London, so please let us have him), Delroy Lindo, is, without a shadow of a doubt, a legend.
He is enjoying a real career renaissance at the moment, thanks mostly to his performance in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, but the truth is, he’s always been great. Through his collaborations with Spike Lee to his various other accolades across TV and film, he has always brought his A-game, yet even he is prone to not making the best career choices.
Like every actor, Lindo has appeared in his fair share of flops, which includes a brief appearance in the Matthew McConaughey vehicle Sahara, a film as dry and lifeless as its geographical namesake. There’s also the ill-fated 2015 remake of Point Break, the 2014 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, and plenty of other bad decisions that he would rather we all forgot about. When it comes to his self-professed worst day on the job, however, Lindo has an answer that has nothing to do with movies.
In 1983, when he was wet behind the ears as an actor, he landed a part in a 25th anniversary production of A Raisin in the Sun, a play by Lorraine Hansberry, which covers the life of a working-class African-American family living in Chicago, tackling themes of housing discrimination, poverty, and, of course, racism, and has been named by multiple publications as one of the most important theatrical productions of all time.
Lindo was to star as Walter Lee Younger, the patriarch of the family, which placed him under a lot of pressure, not least because the great Sidney Poitier had played the character in a movie version of the story 22 years earlier. Denzel Washington would go on to star in a 2014 Broadway revival and, regrettably, Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs also had a shot in 2004.
Unfortunately, in Lindo’s own words, he didn’t do the part justice, telling GQ many years later, “I was the weak link in that production. It still hurts”.
The play was hosted at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut and also starred future Tony winner Mary Alice and a young Courtney B Vance. A New York Times review labelled Lindo as “a man in a frenzy”, praising his wild interpretation of a human being on the edge, whereas he may have been pursuing something a bit more subtle.
Luckily for our hero, this would not be his only run-in with Mr Younger, as a few years later, Lindo starred in a different version of A Raisin in the Sun, this time at the iconic Kennedy Centre (prior to its embarrassing name change), for which the reviews were much more direct in praising the show and its star, something Lindo was extremely pleased about.
“I remember leaving the room because I didn’t want to hear the review, sitting in the hallway in the hotel while he was reading the review to the other actors in the room,” he recalled, “I remember walking back into the room, and everybody was just beaming.” All’s well that ends well.
