“The always elusive Jeffrey Wright,” as Broken City director Allen Hughes calls him, is one of our brightest character actors. From the eccentricity of Basquiat to the quiet cool of Felix Leiter in the Bond films, through his breakthrough role in Angels in America, which garnered him a Tony, Emmy, and Golden Globe award, Wright always leaves his mark.
In Broken City he plays the mysterious police commissioner, Carl Fairbanks, who is at the center of a conspiracy involving a corrupt New York Mayor (Russell Crowe) and a private detective with a checkered past (Mark Wahlberg).
Wright chatted about this new role at a press conference in New York.
Can you talk about keeping the motivations of your character so hidden throughout the film?
JEFFREY WRIGHT: I thought the mystery was an important aspect of who he was, as an observer and manipulator. Clearly someone who was a survivor. That was his MO was to let everyone else reveal their cards and keep his hidden. I thought it served his interests and the film as well, the story. There are certain reveals that work because we don’t know a lot about him, we just know that he’s there.
Did you talk to any New York City cops while preparing for your role, and also did they suggest to you the influence of politics to get their job done every day?
WRIGHT: I didn’t talk to any New York cops specifically in preparation for this, but I am friends with a couple cops and former cops, one of whom came to mind a bit. I don’t think the movie is so much an expose, at least I didn’t read it that way. I read it more as a genre film set within a contemporary landscape that has all this richness within it, and as a contemporary Humphrey Bogart story. New York City here could be Chicago, could be Los Angeles, could be metropolis, as I read it. It brings into play larger ideas about corruption that’s not specific to New York, but there’s something else about the confluence of politics and capitalism. But I read Humphrey Bogart in it, and then getting to know Mark a little better as we worked on this I realized that this guy has the elements of a contemporary Bogart. He has a similar authenticity, the accessibility to audiences, the intensity, all that stuff. It’s very interesting. I tried to do a little bit of my own Claude Rains.
Read more: BlackFilm
