Here I am, a struggling actor, and movie executives are saying to me, 'My son's not playing much. What can we do about that?' How do I tell someone I'm dying to work with, 'Your kid is kind of lazy?'
Is typecasting really a problem?
There aren't that many great female roles in Shakespeare - none that I'd be desperate to play.
Let's be real: more often than not, Hollywood does not have three-dimensional characters for women to play.
Usually, if there is a woman's part in a piece, there's only one, so you've got no other actresses to work with.
We should be writing more great roles for women, period. Another problem is that movies are generally made for 14-year-old boys, and 14-year-old boys want to watch 25-year-old action heroes.
A lot of times black actors get stuck in a box. They're up against a lot of limitations for the kind of films that they get approached about. It's easy to get stuck in a box and just be approached about nothing but urban films.
There wasn't a single good character in 'Titanic' who was English and this is typical.
There are a lot of funny women in my life. I never understand those movies where there's eight funny guys and two women who don't have any opinion or humour.
We're always trailing, as far as the amount of roles that are written for us and the films that are being made that have black characters in them. I don't know if that's going to change.
There would always be scripts that came along that I turned down, like Gang Member #5 - roles that were just stereotypes.
