For most actors, stealing a mere fragment of a moment of a scene from an incandescent talent like Denzel Washington would be a career coup. Even when the power dynamic of a scene favors the other actor, Washington is the guy we’re going to watch, the puckish, pissed-off ball of energy who refuses to bend the knee or cede a centimeter of ground. Washington wins scenes even when his character loses.
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So consider what Delroy Lindo does throughout the first act of Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X” to be a tap-dance-on-water miracle. As West Indian Archie, a Harlem numbers kingpin who takes the cocky young Malcolm under his wing, Lindo holds Washington in check. Archie has accrued significant power in a cutthroat realm, and he knows how to wield it. He’s a man of stillness and meticulously measured menace. He studies this antsy, ambitious kid with cautious amusement; he clocks his potential, but what he likes most is his obeisance. Archie likes that Malcolm has a struck match waiting for him the second he lifts his after-dinner cigar.
He’s flattered that Malcolm treats his numbers advice like it’s the gospel truth, but Lindo lets us see that this man sees many moves ahead on the chessboard. Does he spy a bit of his aspirational young self in Malcolm, or is he slyly planning for the day he checkmates this too-eager, would-be protégé with an elegantly lethal slip of a stiletto? All we can do is watch those wheels turn and, in this and several scenes following it, know that Malcolm is at a strategic disadvantage that could soon become hazardous to his health.
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The ease with which Lindo dominates Washington is astonishing, but his victory is all the more impressive when you realize he’s beating the burgeoning movie star at his own magnetic game. Because the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was almost exclusively a white person’s club in 1992, “Malcolm X” only received two Oscar nominations, and neither went to Lindo. It wasn’t until Lee pressed the matter by giving Lindo two more meaty roles (in “Crooklyn” and “Clockers”) that Hollywood came calling. Over the next 30 years, the industry viewed Lindo as a character actor, and this is a service the professional performer has been more than happy to provide. He’s deep in that pocket as fun-loving blues musician Delta Slim in Ryan Coogler’s juke joint vampire flick “Sinners,” but when he’s this indelibly great in a movie that’s poised to be a pop culture phenomenon, you wonder why more people don’t write for him.
Delroy Lindo’s journey from San Francisco to Broadway to Hollywood
Delroy Lindo was born to Jamaican immigrants in London in 1952, which accounts for that finely shaded West Indies accent in “Malcolm X.” Lindo and his mother moved to San Francisco when he was 16, and it was here that he began studying acting at the American Conservatory Theater. Lindo booked small roles in the little-seen 1976 John Candy comedy “Find the Lady” and the better-than-its-reputation sequel “More American Graffiti” before skipping cross country to New York City, where he found critical acclaim in the legendary Broadway productions of Athol Fugard’s “‘Master Harold’ … and the Boys” and August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.” For the latter, he earned a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Play, which probably put him on Spike Lee’s radar.
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After an 11-year absence from movies, Lindo returned to the big screen in the 1990s and gave a memorable performance in Bob Rafelson’s hugely underrated epic “Mountains of the Moon.” But unless you were an avid Broadway theatergoer during the 1980s, it’s likely that Lindo came crashing out of nowhere with his portrayal of West Indian Archie. And this is where things get frustratingly problematic.
Lindo was never going to win Best Supporting Actor in 1992 (Gene Hackman had it all sewn up as Sheriff Bill Daggett in “Unforgiven”), but it was absurd to snub him as a nominee in favor of David Paymer (a fine actor with quite the Hollywood rap sheet) for his very Paymer performance in Billy Crystal’s vanity misfire “Mr. Saturday Night.” Oddly, the then lily-white Academy’s rejection of “Malcolm X” probably helped Lindo, because I can’t imagine anyone had better roles waiting for this outrageously gifted actor than Lee.
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The character of Woody Carmichael in Lee’s semi-autobiographical “Crooklyn” was based on the filmmaker’s musician father. This speaks not only to the trust Lee had in the actor but his belief in the performer’s versatility. Because Woody’s a different kind of charmer. He’s a struggling musician who, like so many artists, gambles on his talent when the odds are too long and the potential payout isn’t worth the risk. Lindo’s Woody loves his family and wants for their happiness, but he wants to succeed on his own terms, and this way disaster lies. He’s perfectly paired with the equally wondrous Alfre Woodard, and sells his rosy vision with a honeyed Harold Hill expertise, but we come to see through him and, in a way, resent him.
Lindo’s next film for Lee was “Clockers,” in which he gave one of the very best performances of the 1990s.
Delroy Lindo painted an actor’s masterpiece as Rodney Little in Clockers
Rodney Little is a Brooklyn drug kingpin who, like a latter-day Fagin, takes in lost children and turns them into savvy, street-level rock slingers. For Lindo, there’s a psychological makeup to Rodney that isn’t too far removed from West Indian Archie. They’re both expert tacticians determined to dominate a small pond devoid of intellectually formidable competition, but Rodney lacks Archie’s flaws. He doesn’t partake of his own product and preaches sobriety to his charges. As long as his employees keep their noses clean, the heat can’t touch him. And the cops who’d love to take him down, Detectives Rocco Klein (Harvey Keitel) and Larry Mazilli (John Turturro), hate that he runs a tight, law-flouting ship.
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I want to say Rodney is a sociopath, but he’s really an inevitable product of his pernicious environment. The United States government created the circumstances that created Rodney, and, to the core of his twisted being, he believes he’s doing right by the young men in his thrall. He takes a particular shine to Mekhi Phifer’s Strike, a bright kid whose inner anguish has physically manifested itself in the form of a bleeding ulcer. Strike’s body is screaming at him to resist Rodney’s tutelage, but his innate smarts suggest there’s money and something approaching peace of mind should he continue down the path paved by his mentor.
Rodney is a dangerously positive influence. He extols the virtues of getting an education and barks at his kids to do their homework, but if you question him, you might just find yourself tasting the steel of a pistol. This happens to Strike in a horrifying scene where, after challenging Rodney, the mentor punches the protégé in the stomach and shoves a gun down his throat. Lindo was asked about this confrontation in a recent profile for The Believer, and explained that he played the scene as an upset parent:
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“The gun is only the means,” he said. “That scene is fundamentally about a parent scolding his child. ‘How dare you speak to me like that? Have you lost your mind? Who are you talking to?’ That is something that any parent on the planet can relate to, and the behavior — the picking up of the gun — is just an outgrowth of that.”
Lindo didn’t receive an Oscar nomination for that blazingly brilliant performance either.
Delroy Lindo is due an Oscar
Lindo’s character actor career exploded in 1995 thanks to his portrayal of aspiring screenwriter/gangster Bo Catlett in “Get Shorty,” but casting him as uniformed hard-asses in films like “Broken Arrow” and “Ransom” was like hauling lumber with a Ferrari. Alas, the parts stuck to the same range until Spike Lee served Lindo a full thespian meal with all the trimmings as the character of Paul in “Da 5 Bloods.” Like many high-profile Netflix film productions, Lee’s movie initially received a vigorous push before disappearing into an algorithm abyss that would prefer you worship at the church of “Emily in Paris.” If you’ve never seen the powerhouse “Da 5 Bloods,” all you’re missing is a deranged movie star turn that is every bit the equal of Humphrey Bogart’s Fred C. Dobbs in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”
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Lindo’s achievement wasn’t exactly unheralded. The New York Film Critics Circle gave him their Best Actor honor in 2020, but this failed to build momentum for a film that Netflix abandoned during awards season. So it was hard to see Gary Oldman and Steven Yuen nominated that year for solid-if-unspectacular performances in “Mank” and “Minari” respectively, when Lindo spilled his guts as a Black Vietnam veteran driven mad by fortune-seeking greed.
What felt like yet another instance of Lindo’s talent being taken for granted struck the actor in a slightly different way. As he told The Believer:
“Broadly speaking, I don’t feel underappreciated. I feel appreciated. But certainly there have been episodes of not being seen along the way, and there continue to be episodes. I’ll give you an example. The Academy chose not to ‘see’ my work in ‘Da 5 Bloods.’ And I’m saying ‘see’ in quotes. BAFTA [the British Academy of Film and Television Arts], the British version of the Academy, chose not to ‘see’ my work. The Golden Globes chose not to ‘see’ my work as an actor. The SAG [Screen Actors Guild] Awards chose not to ‘see’ my work.”
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I see you, Delroy Lindo. Anyone who understands the power of cinema can see you. We need to see more of you. Because no one can do what you do.
