Opposite of what you’re best known for?
With The Woman King, with Breaking, with They Cloned Tyrone, I wanted projects where, if I put the characters beside each other, you could blatantly tell the difference. They had different personality traits, they had different accents, they had different ways they walked. I wanted to exercise those muscles and show people what’s up.
Tyrone has a gravity to his personality. He’s a heavy guy, while Finn from Star Wars, or Jake Pentecost from Pacific Rim, they’re much more ebullient and light.
Yeah, for sure.
It has been almost a decade since you signed on to Star Wars. What do you think 10 years later, looking back at that decision?
I think the great thing a franchise does is it puts you in a position to be discussed and considered for certain types of roles, but then it also comes with a challenge where you have to diversify. You have to have versatility. When the franchise is done, the question of what you’re doing next, what your longevity is, starts to become quite prominent. And also, when it’s Star Wars specifically, you want to not have the Star Wars curse, which is, you don’t get to do other roles and are tied to that universe for the rest of your career. I think I was just always working against that notion.
In They Cloned Tyrone, some scenes have you playing three different characters in one scene, each very different in appearance and demeanor.
Given the right prosthetics, I can tap into that drama school stuff and get your character arcs going. Change your body style, the way your hands move, your voice…
The tone of the movie is complicated too.
That was handled through conversations with [director and co-writer Juel Taylor]. It’s got comedy, we’ve got serious social issues mixed with the Blacksploitation feel. It was kind of a mesh of genres and a mesh of a vibe. So, what’s too much? What’s not?
Tyrone Fontaine is the hero, a drug dealer who can resort to extreme brutality at times. How did you figure out how to play him?
Sometimes you can get that wrong, because you feel like, if I’m knocking someone over, if I’m robbing someone, I’ve got to be aggressive and hard and shout at the top of my lungs. But Juel is just like, “Yeah, John …? He’s bored. He’s a clone.” The audience doesn’t know that yet, but he feels it.
He can tell something’s off. And he’s going through the motions?
It’s The Truman Show, man. After you kind of break free from the matrix, you’re like, “This is boring. What are we even doing here?” That’s the vibe and the feel of him. He becomes more alive, the more and more answers he gets. He starts out doing something bad and then all of a sudden you get layers of him as the movie goes along, to the point where Fontaine is fully smiling and keen to go and follow leads by the end of the movie, which is kind of cool.