Only six black actors have won Oscars in the 69-history of the Academy Awards. Wesley Snipes isn't one of them, but he is shaping up as a contender in the near future - and possibly as soon as next year if he is recognised for his performance in One Night Stand. Only his former co-stars, Denzel Washington and Samuel L. Jackson, come close to Snipes in the rankings of black actors in the US today, and his mature, intelligent performance in One Night Stand further extends his range as he continues to move smoothly between comedy, action movies and serious drama. "Doing everything is truly satisfying," says Snipes, who paid his first visit to Ireland a fortnight ago for the opening of Planet Hollywood in Dublin. "I'd be stupid to turn down X million dollars to do something like Demolition Man or Money Train. Were I not doing it in film I'd be doing it in theatre, going from company to company, repertory to repertory, role to role. To do it in film is a blessing - the dream of most actors, to be versatile, to play a variety of roles."
A tall, affable and jocular man, Wesley Snipes was wearing a black cap, striped rollneck sweater, dark trousers and a pencil-thin goatee when we met. And his chest and hands were adorned with large silver jewellery. His chain and rings are based on ancient Egyptian symbols of life, he explains. And his bracelet? "That's ancient Milwaukee," he laughs.
In a recent interview Snipes made the analogy that actors are like whores and the film studios are like pimps, adding that some actors get to be powerful enough to be the pimps. "Very few actors get to be that powerful," he says. "In context that comment I made is not as crude as it may sound. There's some truth in it, in that as an actor you just sit around and do what you're told to do and when to do it. "Of course, you have the discretion of not working. So does a woman who's a lady of the evening. But she's usually told when to go to work, when to stop and what she's being paid. It's the same with actors. I haven't found that place yet where I can decide `No, I'm not going to work today, I don't feel like it'. It doesn't happen that way - except for some actors who have that ability, that power. That's the stage I want to reach."
Has he ever worked with some of those actors? "Oh, yeah," he says. "Most of the big actors I've worked with have been like that. You know, some like golf, some like tennis, and when they're tired they just go, `That's it, I'm gone, bye-bye' - and then people like me are asked to do a scene I haven't even rehearsed, just to make up the day's shooting schedule.
"It's like being part of some fraternity. You're put through this initiation and you're longing for the opportunity to return the favour to some newbie who comes along after you. I haven't done it yet, but first chance I get, I tell you I'm going to do it. I'll just say I'm not going to work that day and I'm just going to sit at home." He chortles at the thought, then adds: "You know I'll probably spend that day sitting at home nervous as hell waiting for the phone to ring - in case it's my lawyer." He discreetly declines to name the "big actors" who behaved like that on his movies, even when I raise the names of Sylvester Stallone and Sean Connery, the two most powerful actors with whom he has worked.
Like so many actors, Snipes took a circuitous route into his profession. Born in 1963, he grew up in the South Bronx of New York and studied acting at the High School for the Performing Arts in Manhattan, the school featured in the movie Fame and its spinoff TV series.
"In hindsight it's kinda wild," he says. "I had an intermediate schoolteacher who had a drama class and she was the first to suggest that maybe I should pursue acting as a career - or at least as a direction to keep me out of trouble. She set up the audition for me at the High School for Performing Arts." He left the school when his family moved to Orlando, Florida, just before Alan Parker filmed Fame at the school. "Had my family not moved when they did, I'd have been right there when they were shooting it," he says. "Who knows? Maybe I'd have gotten into movies earlier." He pauses for a moment and laughs out loud. "Then again, that might not have been a good thing. A lot of those actors from Fame are out of work right now."
He was disappointed to find no theatre opportunities when he moved to Orlando. "I had Mickey and Minnie and the meeces, and that was that," he says. "So I basically just chalked up what acting I had done and said that's that."
However, another schoolteacher intervened and got him placed on a programme for acting students. Returning to New York he enrolled in drama studies at the state university in Purchase and he then worked as a telephone installer before breaking into movies. After a few supporting roles, in Wildcats and Streets Of Gold, he was cast in the pop video for Michael Jackson's Bad, directed by Martin Scorsese. He was 24 at the time and thrilled at the opportunity to work with Scorsese and Quincy Jones.
And Michael Jackson? "A tour de force - just unbelievable," he says. "Scared of Harlem, though," he adds in his infectious laugh. "Bad was supposed to be a one-week gig and turned out to be three and a half weeks. What was originally just a video turned out to be a mini-movie. Trust me, I have used it on my resume!"
That exposure landed him supporting roles in Major League and King Of New York and brought him to the attention of Spike Lee who cast him in two movies - Mo'Better Blues, which starred Denzel Washington as an obsessive jazz trumpeter, and the provocative Jungle Fever in which Snipes was the male lead, playing an architect who gets involved in an adulterous inter-racial love affair with his Italian-American secretary (Annabella Sciorra). In between the two Spike Lee films came the gritty and stylish Mario Van Peebles thriller New Jack City, in which Snipes gave a bold, strutting and menacing performance as the ruthless kingpin of a crack-dealing empire. It cleaned up at the box-office and propelled him to stardom.
He has worked steadily ever since, starring in three movies a year, many of them forgettable - playing a psychotic criminal in a shocking tight orange haircut in the daft Demolition Man with Stallone; the pretentious thriller Rising Sun, with Connery; the sub-Priscilla road movie To Wong Foo, in which Snipes camped it up as a drag queen named Noxeema; and the hijack yarn Passenger 57, which was essentially a demonstration of his martial arts prowess. Altogether more satisfying was the intimate, unsentimental The Waterdance, in which Snipes, Eric Stoltz and William Forsythe immersed themselves in the roles of paraplegics sharing the same hospital ward. And Snipes found a showcase for his boisterous personality in the entertaining White Men Can't Jump, which costarred Woody Harrelson, an actor who was starting out in movies when he and Snipes featured together in Wildcats. Snipes and Harrelson were reunited to less impressive effect as double-dealing transit cops in Money Train. His new film, One Night Stand, has been his most rewarding experience to date. "I'm very proud of it," he says. "I like the work in it from all the actors. And it's nice for me to be in a movie that I actually like for a change." Directed by Mike Figgis, it features Snipes as a commercials director who is happily married to an Asian-American (Ming-Na Wen) - until, stranded overnight in New York, he has an adulterous fling with a married woman (Nastassja Kinski). Although it is saddled with one huge coincidence which it just about gets away with, this is a thoughtful, intriguing and compelling drama, and made all the more atmospheric by Figgis's own jazzy score. Robert Downey Jr. is haunting and touching as Snipes's best friend, a gay man dying of AIDS.
Wesley Snipes took the best actor award at the Venice Film Festival in September for his performance in One Night Stand. "I was very keen to work with Mike Figgis," he says. "I like his work. Also, Mike's a jazz musician and I'm a jazz fan. I like the mentality of musicians. They are flexible, adaptable and creative, and they leave room for other people to create. I felt that would be good for me, that I might get a chance to do some acting for a change!"
It was Snipes who came up with the idea of his character having an Asian wife. "Once Mike decided I was right for the role and we agreed to do the film, we discussed who would play my wife," he says. "In the States, as you know, we have some issues about race relations. If I were married to a black woman in the movie and had an affair with a white woman, memories of Jungle Fever would have come up. It would have been a problem. I suggested going with an Asian woman or a Hispanic. There are some wonderful actresses among both groups, and Mike thought it was an interesting idea."
Snipes was particularly impressed with the work of the movie's Irish-American lighting cameraman, Declan Quinn, who also had been the cinematographer on Mike Figgis's Leaving Las Vegas. "He is a good, good, good cinematographer," he enthuses. "Given all the different racial make-up of the movie I think he did a fine job in making everyone look beautiful and keeping it balanced. That's very hard and a lot of cinematographers are not well versed in that - taking a black actor, an Asian actress and two whites, putting them all together and having them all look good. Because each one's skin requires a different lighting scheme and to balance it is a really difficult task. You've got to be really sharp to do it well."
Since completing One Night Stand, Wesley Snipes has been back in the action genre for Blade and US Marshals. Blade, which also features Stephen Dorff and Kris Kristofferson, is the first picture from his own production company, Amen Ra, of which he proudly states he is "the sole owner and sole shareholder". Regardless of how his own stellar status progresses, he swears that he will turn up every day on the set of his own productions. "I'm ecstatic about it," he says of Blade, in which he plays the eponymous superhero who first appeared in Marvel Comics. "He's half-human and half-vampire," he says. "I get to wear this wild costume and this truly wild hairdo, and I get to do a lot, a lot of martial arts." And we know he's good at that. "Ooh, man," he grins. "Oooooooh! Oooooooh! I can't wait for people to see this one."
US Marshals is a sequel of sorts to The Fugitive, with Tommy Lee Jones reprising his Oscar-winning role as the dogged Marshal Gerard. Snipes is not replacing Harrison Ford as Richard Kimble. "Hah!," he hoots. "I'm a new fugitive in this one, an assassin, and Gerard's chasing me all over the place and I'm giving him a run for his money. It's got a lot of suspense and some good, realistic action - though not as much action as Blade, of course!"
His Amen Ra company has two movies and two TV series in production and has completed Maya Angelou's first feature as a director, Down on the Delta. "You'll hear a lot more about that," he promises. And he is developing a long-cherished project on Miles Davis. "I'm intrigued by his sense of freedom, his ability to do what he wanted to do the way he wanted to do it," he says. "How someone does not compromise and doesn't care that he is hurting someone's feelings, while at the same time creating a whole genre of music." Snipes, who intends to play Davis, says the musical performances will be mimed in the movie, as they were when he did Mo' Better Blues, a movie in which Denzel Washington's character was loosely based on Davis with elements of Wynton Marsalis and Louis Armstrong. "I would learn the music musically in my head," he says, "and learn all the correct keys, so when we played the music track I would sing it in my head and press the right keys."
He is dismayed but not undaunted by the resistance of the Hollywood studios to his Miles Davis project. "Seems like I'm going to have to develop that through my own company because no studio seems to want to pick it up," he says. "We had a script. It wasn't tight, but the studios didn't want to know. "Miles is not very palatable to a lot of people for some reason. I think he's misunderstood. Sure, he's made a lot of enemies. He's done himself a disservice in some ways, I think, but people seem to have a very one-sided impression of him. But how do you expect a genius to be normal?"
One Night Stand goes on release in Ireland on January 9th. US Marshals opens on April 24th.
