Don Cheadle seems as if he’s at the end of his rope, metaphorically speaking. We’re in the Spare Room, a hybrid bar and bowling alley in the upper levels of the historic Hollywood Roosevelt hotel in Los Angeles. It’s a classic mid-century establishment, full of character and intimations of film noir mystery. Cheadle’s just completed a photoshoot in which he has tried on all manner of jackets and waistcoats. He can’t wait to get out of the costumes and return to the business of being himself.
We settle into a quiet corner of the bar as he tells me about his new film Miles Ahead, a biopic about Miles Davis’s five-year hiatus from making music and his subsequent comeback. The film took 10 years to migrate from a casually tossed-off germ of an idea at an awards show to reality. “Miles was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” Cheadle explains. “They were interviewing his nephew, Vince Wilburn Jr. They asked if they were ever going to make a movie of his life, and he said, ‘Yeah. And Don Cheadle’s gonna play him.’ That started people calling: ‘Oh, what’s this about the Miles Davis movie you’re doing?’ ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I’d say. ‘I guess if they call me or let me know, there will be something to talk about.’”
Eventually, Cheadle met with the team from Davis’s estate about the idea of making a film. At first, he was hesitant to take on another biographical role, after portraying real-life figures in Hotel Rwanda, The Rat Pack and Talk To Me (a heroic hotel owner, Sammy Davis Jr, 1960s talkshow host Petey Greene). “I’ve played these guys, and I wanted to play someone close to me, who’s modern. So I wasn’t looking for it. In fact, I didn’t want to do it.”
It was seen as period, niche, difficult. No needle moved until we cast Ewan McGregor
What ultimately convinced him was an agreement that he could reshape the project from a straightforward retelling of Davis’s life to a jazzier, more dream-like film that bounces from era to era, including fictionalised elements, and even a car chase and a bit of gunplay. Cheadle, who became producer, lead actor, co-writer and director, told the keepers of Miles’s flame that, “It has to be hot. It has to be creative, insane, improvisational.”
It also ended up needing a white co-star with international appeal, to muster the funds required for such an audacious project. Producers and financiers struggled with the script, because it was “considered jazz, niche, period, all the things that they see as difficult”, Cheadle explains. Race didn’t matter so much as the casting of an actor, any actor, who had box-office clout in territories outside North America. “I could have cast a huge French actor, or an Asian actor who’s big in Japan, China, and try to make it work for that. Because it’s all about selling foreign. No needle moved until we cast Ewan McGregor.”
McGregor plays the fictional Rolling Stone journalist Dave Braden, who interviews Davis and then gets mixed up in a search for stolen session tapes worth millions of dollars. The finished film – a prickly, surly, poignant, yet oddly amusing caper – was cobbled together with just about every form of financing one could imagine. “We crowdfunded via Indiegogo, deferred payment, I put money in myself. Kevin Hart, Pras, my producer’s cousin, my other producer’s friend put money in. It was just like that kind of a situation.”
At some point, the strain of showbusiness can drive a person mad. The press junkets, the profiles with strangers prying into one’s personal life. I ask if Cheadle enjoys these photoshoots, and he responds with a long-drawn-out, “Noooooo” that communicates a lingering disdain for the process. “I don’t have an entourage, I don’t have bodyguards, I don’t have security. I don’t have any of that shit. If I’m at the store, I’m at the store. It’s just me. If I go to play poker in Commerce [a small town south of Los Angeles] or something, it’s just me. That’s disarming to people, too, in a way. First of all, they’re like, ‘Eh? Bullshit. That’s not him, because he wouldn’t be here sitting at a table by himself.’ And then, once they realise who I am, they’re like, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Then, after a while, it’s like, ‘Oh, you’re just a dude sitting here playing cards like I am.’ I would feel weirder doing the other thing.”
By the other thing, he means playing the celebrity game. “There’s always this dream of being able to shut it down. I would love to be able to do what I did in this movie: play music and not act. I would love just to go hang out and play with musicians, because that’s the most rewarding thing ever.”
Leather jacket: Perfecto Brand by Schott NYC. Knitwear and shirt: Prada. Trousers and boots: Paul Smith. Photograph: Robert Gallagher/The GuardianDonald Frank Cheadle Jr was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and has used music as an escape since childhood. He played the saxophone, mostly alto, through his adolescence. As a teenager, he fell for the saxman Cannonball Adderley, which was what first got him into Cannonball collaborator Miles Davis.
Cheadle first took up the trumpet – Miles Davis’s instrument of choice – for the HBO TV movie The Rat Pack, in which he played Sammy Davis Jr. For Miles Ahead, he picked up tips from trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. When I ask if he’s considered playing the trumpet live in the future, Cheadle laughs. “I don’t need to do it out in public. I don’t need people to see it. I just love the experience of sitting in a room with people who can play, speaking in another language and on another plane. The fun of all these disparate voices coming together, all different walks of life, all different socioeconomic whatever, then you start playing music and all of that goes away. It’s just conversation that you’re having. Everybody’s following, but nobody’s following. Everybody’s leading, but nobody’s leading. It’s an experience that’s unlike anything outside it. That’s the most fun I’ve ever had doing anything.”
Acting, on the other hand, is all about leaders and followers. His first role was as Templeton the rat in a school production of Charlotte’s Web. I ask how one gets into the mind of a rat. “That’s what I was wondering at 10 years old. I come from a very hammy family. Everybody likes to play. It was a continuation of that.”
His mother, Bettye, was a teacher and his father, Donald Sr, a clinical psychologist. His family (he has a brother, Colin, and a sister, Cindy) moved from Kansas to Colorado, where he graduated from high school. At 18 he enrolled at the California Institute of the Arts.
A year later, Cheadle had an agent, thanks to his unwavering work ethic. “I used to read Shakespeare with my friends in our house. We’d read a play for entertainment. If you want to act, you don’t need anything but your own body and some words.” I ask if he still keeps that ritual up now. “Yeah. Now it’s cool, because my kids did theatre in school. It was fun to read their parts with them. My wife’s an actor. It’s always kinda in the fabric. You are what you do in that way.” His children – Ayana Tai, 21, and Imani, 19 – are now pursuing careers outside acting. His wife Bridgid runs an interior design firm in nearby Santa Monica, in between small acting gigs on the US remake of Shameless and her husband’s series House Of Lies; the couple met on the set of the 1997 film Rosewood.
Cheadle with wife Brigid Coulter (left) and children Imani and Ayana Tai. Photograph: BEImages/BEI/ShutterstockDuring college, when his peers would be popping beers or sleeping in, Cheadle would drive into Los Angeles from campus for auditions, then drive back to attend classes. This allowed him to get the first few years of professional rejection out of the way while still a student. “When I was going out and hearing all those ‘no’s, I was coming back to school and coming back to work. It wasn’t like I was going back to a job I hated. I wasn’t discouraged in that way. I was glad that I had that sort of confidence.”
After graduation, he moved to the city with a group of other black Cal-Arts alumni. That group turned into a support system for the difficult transition from college life to the grind of professional acting. “If I had an audition, I’d take all of them. We all took each other to auditions, and we’d bumrush the city like that. If a casting director said, ‘You realise if they get that part, you can’t get that part.’ Well, one of us has to get that part, because we’re all eating. We’re all sharing the money. Somebody has to get it out of this group. I don’t care about that. It was kind of an insulated way to come into the business. We felt like a little pocket, a little group of people.”
Having that peer group, with whom he is still in touch, was also a buffer against the more morally questionable aspects of the film business. “We could see that everybody else was kinda cut-throat, and things were really nasty, but we just hung out, acted, played ball, ate ice-cream and smoked weed. That was our actors’ training. And we booked jobs.”
The choices weren’t wide for young black actors in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Cheadle’s early roles all seemed to involve criminal activity of some kind. “I did a play with all of these friends I worked with, and one of the sections of the play, I just cut together all of our work, all these young black actors’ work. And we were either on the business end of a gun or in front of the gun. I was either a cop or a thug who was getting shot by a gun. It was all violence. There was a lot of work, but it was all that kind of work. If you were Mexican or black, you got shot. You got to shoot people.”
I tweeted about Taylor Swift and it became a whole thing. She’s a millionaire who’s crushing it. She can clap back
Now, Don Cheadle isn’t holding a gun or having a gun pointed at him. He is the gun, in the form of the robotic War Machine, in the Marvel Comics Captain America franchise. Cheadle has held the role, of an air force pilot who gets a mechanical suit to fight crime in, since 2010. It’s rare that a black actor gets to play a superhero, an opportunity that he hopes will open doors for others. In the wake of the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, Cheadle is eager to remind people that it’s these jobs that count, more than winning awards.
“It’s not getting a statue at the end of some season, and everyone campaigns and spends thousands of dollars on ads, and you go to every party and talk to every reporter, and show up to everything there is to show up to, so people see you. All that bullshit doesn’t have anything to do with either the work or the ability to get the work or dealing with stuff at an early, early level – where we’re trying to be impactful to the powers that be so that we can be seen as a good risk.” Of course, it’s debatable whether he would have been cast as War Machine without the career boost of his 2005 Oscar nomination for Hotel Rwanda. He might not have commanded enough industry muscle to make Miles Ahead, either.
Cheadle runs his own Twitter account, a risky proposition for someone who doesn’t suffer the bullshit of notoriety. His candour makes him susceptible to the occasional misstep. After this year’s Grammys, Cheadle tweeted, “I almost Kanyed tonight. #Restraint #Temperance @kendricklamar #AlbumoftheYear” in response to Taylor Swift’s victory over Kendrick Lamar in that category. It became a minor news story – and a major headache for Cheadle.
Jacket: Sandro. Shirt: Outerknown. Trousers: Paige denim. Boots: Paul Smith. Styling: Anna Su at Art Department. Stylist’s assistant: Val Matienzo. Grooming: Q Pierce and Eric Ferrell. Photographed at The Spare Room at the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel. Photograph: Robert Gallagher/The Guardian“I tweeted something that was hilarious and it became a whole thing,” he tells me. It might have been a joke to him, but there were those who took it seriously. “I don’t think [Taylor Swift] took it as seriously as her fans did. She’s not a nine-year-old girl. This is a professional woman, a multimillionaire who’s crushing it, who has an empire and can clap back. And she does clap back when she wants to say something.” That didn’t stop the story following him around. “It can be exhausting sometimes, when you get out of the airport and there are six guys, paparazzi, who are like, ‘So what’s that thing you said about Taylor Swift? What’d you mean?’ Man, get the fuck away from me, dude. Go ‘@’ me.”
But that’s an inescapable aspect of showbusiness success and notoriety. It’s the ugly, messy part. It is, as Cheadle says, “the part they pay you for”. He’d gladly act for free, as he used to in college, but at the age of 51, with the responsibilities that come with adulthood, that would be highly irrational. “The business aspect, and all the trappings of it, do get tedious. There’s no break, sometimes.”
After this, Cheadle would like to take another job that allows him to work on his craft. In the in-between times, that metaphorical rope gets shorter and shorter. “People treat actors and people in the public eye differently from how they’d treat anybody else in their lives. You would never come up to a stranger, throw your arm around them and say, ‘Hey, buddy, lemme get this picture.’ You think it’s OK to do that? I have a fork in my mouth with food on it, but you’re cool just to put your arm around me and pull out a phone. And if I’m like, ‘Hey, do you mind?’ It’s like, ‘Don Cheadle’s an asshole.’ So you just have to know that that’s the contract. For all this other stuff, you give that up.”
It sounds as if Don Cheadle is pining for something resembling the simple days of reading Shakespeare and bumrushing casting offices with his friends – a time before paparazzi and Twitter feuds. What keeps him going is the need to keep asking that same question he asked himself when he was 10: “How do you get into the head of a rat?”
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