Don’t Act Like You Weren’t a Wesley Snipes Fan
The rise, fall, and possible resurrection of a Hollywood actor who had it all.
By JASON GILMORE
TO TALK ABOUT Wesley Snipes in a historical context, you almost have to reach back to Woody Strode. Strode was a pro-athlete turned actor — a raw mixture of athleticism, stage presence, and charisma clustered in a dark-skinned, high-cheekboned package that, while not conventionally handsome, made many a female swoon.
Snipes and Strode have the same initials, sure, and were born only six days apart. But Woody came of age at a time when comedic or dancing roles would’ve meant playing the buffoon. As a result, he was unable to show his range as an actor until well into his 50s. He never had the opportunity to become a major star.
This is an important distinction. Let’s be clear: Denzel Washington took the Sidney Poitier template and ran to the moon, just as Kobe Bryant took Michael Jordan’s and did the same.
But there was no real blueprint for Wesley Snipes, no rational explanation for the variety of ways he electrified audiences throughout the 1990s. In a row, the films came:
- his magnetic star turn as Nino Brown in New Jack City (1991),
- the savvy basketball hustler Sidney Deane in White Men Can’t Jump (1992),
- the blond, evil warlord Simon Phoenix in Demolition Man (1993), and
- the first commercial black superhero in Blade (1998).
The 1991 double-punch of Jungle Fever and New Jack City certified it: Wesley Snipes was a star.
Wesley Snipes, Star and Actor
Action scripts began to pour in and the first he signed onto, Passenger 57 (1992), was a smash. Snipes filled a nice void. He was the first black man regularly kicking butt in mainstream Hollywood films. Others had tried. Jim Brown. Fred Williamson. But they were too early. Jim Kelly? He couldn’t even stay alive through Enter the Dragon (1973).
By the ‘80s, it was all about making people laugh. The biggest black stars were comics: Richard Pryor, Whoopi Goldberg, Eddie Murphy. By the end of the decade, however, even those blacks were asserting themselves more.
Eddie Murphy played an African prince in Coming to America (1988), then directed himself in the Harlem Renaissance-era comedy, Harlem Nights (1989). Arsenio Hall injected a badly needed dose of soul into late-night television with his groundbreaking, eponymous talk show.
By the 1990s, thanks in no small part to the popularity of rap music, our collective distance from segregation, and the emergence of take-no-prisoners black filmmakers like Spike Lee and John Singleton, the stage had been set for a black man to save everybody on the plane, without breaking a sweat. A brash star was needed for a brash decade.
Wesley Snipes was a real alpha-male, the kind black Hollywood hasn’t really seen since. Denzel was The Man, but of course he was: he was Denzel. He was an ideal. Something about Snipes screamed accessibility. If Denzel was The Beatles, Snipes was the Rolling Stones. Anti-establishment. Rough around the edges. Who in the hell let this guy in the door?
But it was all deception. He wasn’t that rough around the edges. He was an actor.
In 1995 Snipes starred in three movies in which he played 1) a drag queen, 2) a New York City transit cop and 3) a married man who shares a tender, non-sexual night with a vulnerable, separated Angela Bassett.
Snipes was an actor — an actor without limits, who surpassed Hollywood’s expectations, then the African-American community’s, and then found himself more or less blacklisted and relegated to the straight-to-DVD bins at Best Buy.
Beginnings
WESLEY TRENT SNIPES was born on July 31st, 1962, in Orlando, Florida. His father was an aircraft engineer, his mother a teacher’s aide. They divorced when he was an infant. He grew up in the Bronx, where, as he said a few years ago, ‘The Bronx teaches you to survive. It’s like, ‘Bring it on!’”
He was a small, tough child, who gravitated to martial arts early and thought, deep into his adolescence, that he wanted to be a dancer. His aunt entered him in talent shows as a child, which resulted in his being cast in an off-Broadway play in middle school.
After attending I.S. 131 and the LaGuardia High School of Music and Art (best known as the school from Fame), his life was thrown into a tailspin when his mother — concerned about their rough neighborhood — decided to move the family back to Orlando.
The pace of the South bored Snipes, but it was in the drama department at Jones High School that he fell in love with acting. He did puppet theater and mime for several competitions and starred in school productions of The Odd Couple and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
After graduation, he caught a Greyhound bus back to New York and enrolled at the prestigious theater program at the State University of New York at Purchase (Edie Falco, Stanley Tucci and Ving Rhames were there around the same time). Being one of a handful of black students there was difficult for Snipes. He found solace in the teachings of Malcolm X and became a Muslim.
After leaving the university, he got married and, like many actors, he worked an assortment of odd jobs to provide for his young family while still auditioning for various parts.
Fashioning the Snipes Persona
Snipes’s athleticism served him well: his screen debut was as a high school football player (at the age of 24) in a Bad News Bears knockoff called Wildcats. (This was also the screen debut of Snipes’s future comrade Woody Harrelson.) The same year, he played a boxer in the underrated Streets of Gold where even at this early stage, the vintage Snipes persona is almost fully formed: street smart, hip, and boisterous with great comedic timing.
A year later, Martin Scorsese chose Snipes to play Michael Jackson’s bully in the long version of the video for “Bad.” The shoot was only supposed to last three days, but it turned into nearly a month. Jackson’s high performance-level, even in rehearsal, inspired Snipes, even as higher visibility opened new doors.
Spike Lee saw Snipes in “Bad” and wanted him to play a small part in Do the Right Thing (1989). The actor declined and took a bigger part in Major League (1989). Playing another athlete, Snipes dazzled as the brash, flamboyant speedster Willie Mays Hayes.
But Spike was persistent, and he kept after Snipes, ultimately casting him as saxophonist Shadow Henderson in Mo’ Better Blues. As leader of the Bleek Gilliam Quintet, Gilliam (Denzel Washington) and Henderson are in competition almost from the beginning — over solos, over women, over the direction of the band.
Snipes worked overtime to mimic the finger movements of a veteran sax player. The end result is one of the most realistic looking bands in cinema history.
On the last day of shooting Mo’ Better Blues, Spike told Snipes he had “something for him”: his first lead role as architect Flipper Purify in the controversial Jungle Fever. Lost in the contention over the film’s frank discussions of interracial dating and Samuel L. Jackson’s star-making turn as Flipper’s crack addict brother, Gator, was Snipes’ subdued portrayal.
Flipper is the least “hip” character of Snipes’s career to date. He speaks with a nasal tone that is unsettling, his body language is rigid. Snipes struggles a bit with it, especially when his character gets upset, in the scene with Lonette McKee after she throws him out of their home for cheating (video below). Still, Jungle Fever established that Wesley Snipes could carry a movie — that he could play roles that did not require him to be slick or shoot a gun or play a sport.
Wesley Snipes had another admirer, screenwriter Barry Michael Cooper, who had been looking for sometime to write a fictionalized story on the exploits of legendary Harlem kingpin Nicky Barnes. The original script, by Thomas Lee Wright (who had also written an uncredited draft of The Godfather, Part III) was rewritten by Cooper, who had Wesley Snipes in mind for the role of enterprising drug dealer Nino Brown.
Nino Brown was an anomaly amongst movie drug lords. He was intelligent and articulate and — despite the litany of heinous things he does throughout the course of the film — funny and engaging. He is both the most and least likable person in the movie.
What’s most amazing about Snipes’s Nino Brown is that there isn’t much of an arc: he begins the movie evil and ends the movie evil. For example, he throws a white businessman off a bridge, in broad daylight, three minutes into the film. The only thing that escalates are the levels of his insolence and paranoia. The only time he even seems human is seconds before he murders his best friend.
The influence that New Jack City and Snipes’s portrayal of Nino Brown had and continues to have over the African American community was monumental. It was everywhere. Nearly twenty years later, Snipes told Parade,
“It was interesting to watch how Nino […] became this urban folk hero of sorts. Guys would actually come up to me and say, ‘Yo, Snipes, I’m the real Nino. That’s me.’ It was like a badge of honor and they wanted me to be patting them on the back or buying drugs from them. I’m not with that.”
Of course, Nino Brown is all over hip-hop. Rap megastar Lil’ Wayne has named multiple albums in tribute to the apartment complex Brown uses as the headquarters of his drug empire — not to mention his label, Cash Money, which is an homage to Nino’s gang.
In White Men Can’t Jump (1992), Snipes and Woody Harrelson play hustlers who learn about life, friendship, love on the outdoor basketball courts of Los Angeles.
This role is vintage Snipes. In fact, I think he’s better cast here than possibly any other movie in his career. All his strengths came together: his street tough bravado, thoughtful dramatic chops, brilliant comic timing, and raw athleticism. Hey, it’s a basketball film starring guys who can play! The two stars brought out the best in each other — until they brought out the worst in each other, in 1995’s disappointing Money Train.
Snipes starred in another action film, Drop Zone (1994), and then took one more dramatic turn in Sugar Hill, in which he played a drug dealer trying to go straight.
Sugar Hill has great ambitions, but by 1994, gangster film cliches had been done to death (one character even goes so far as to name check Goodfellas), and Sugar Hill borrows a little too liberally from many of them. Yet in spite of all these factors (or maybe because of them?) Snipes gives one of the best performances of his career. His drug dealer is three dimensional: violent, funny, and sweet. We see the weight he carries — despite his always cool demeanor — and understand he wants to live a decent life, even as we know the odds are against his getting there.
As Wesley Snipes’s onscreen career ascended, the action movies became interchangeable — Boiling Point? U.S. Marshals? — but the did provide him with opportunities to act in low-budget, intimate projects like The Waterdance (1992) and One Night Stand (1997).
After taking off 1996 and delivering a humdrum 1997, the highlight of which featured his turn as a Barry Bonds-like player stalked by Robert DeNiro in the so-bad-but-I-can’t-stop-watching The Fan, Snipes became the first successful, black superhero in Blade (the film opened in 2,400 theatres and grossed $131 million worldwide).
Let me say this about Blade since no one else will: in 1998, Marvel Comics was a long way from figuring out any of the seemingly unstoppable movie translations of the characters it has today. There was no Avengers, no Wolverine, no Fantastic Four, no Daredevil. Hell, they didn’t even get Spider-Man right on the big screen until 2002.
There was also no Twilight, Vampire Diaries, or any of the other vampire-themed mega-industries that exist today. As if being the first international black superhero alone wasn’t ahead of its time, Wesley Snipes was also showing us the future of Hollywood.
Then, the Trouble Began
JUST WHEN IT SEEMED as though Wesley Snipes couldn’t be stopped, he was. The 1990s were drawing to a close and, just as he had ridden the tidal wave of the decade’s aggressiveness, conservative times were on the horizon.
The trouble began in Ebony Magazine, of all places, in which Snipes speaks of the appeal of his (then) Asian girlfriend within the context of angry black women of his past:
“I say to Black women: brothers who are successful, usually it’s been at a great expense, unseen by the camera’s eye. I want to come home and I don’t want to argue. I want to be pleasing, but if I ask you to get me a glass of water, you’re going to say, ‘Them days is over.’ [A successful man] doesn’t want to come home to someone who’s going to be mean and aggravating and unkind. So it’s very natural he’s going to turn to some place that’s more compassionate. He’s worked hard and deserves to come home to comforting.” — Wesley Snipes, 1997
The fallout was swift and immediate. Virtually no African American movie star has become such without the ardent support of black women.
News of the quote spread and was discussed and internalized and personalized and misquoted and demonized. People said things like Wesley Snipes is arrogant. The fame’s went to his head. He thinks he’s too good for black women. That’s why he’s doing all this martial arts stuff; who this dude think he is, Bruce Lee? Was it true that he physically abused a famous black actress?
Snipes threw a couple of well-intentioned alley oops to what was left of his black female fanbase by executive-producing and co-starring in Maya Angelou’s 1998's Down in the Delta (in which Alfre Woodard finally got a role worthy of her immense talent) and HBO’s Disappearing Acts. But things were never the same.
The early 2000s were quiet, then turbulent. Wesley Snipes remarried and had four more children. Aside form Blade’s sequel and (horrible) third installment, not much was happening.
Then, in 2005, Snipes sued New Line Cinema accusing them of withholding his salary from Blade, leaving him out of key casting decisions, and cutting out his scenes in favor of his young, white co-stars.
A year later, Snipes was back in court, facing serious tax evasion charges that have continued to mar his name. In the meantime, another stylish, black action superstar/thespian had become the biggest movie star in the world. His name was Will Smith.
In 2010's underrated Brooklyn’s Finest, Snipes plays a(nother) drug dealer fresh out of prison, looking to get his life back on track. Director Antoine Fuqua said repeatedly he cast Snipes because he thought his real-life troubles might’ve helped mirror his character’s disorientation of being back on the block.
Acting alongside Don Cheadle, Snipes seems like the elder statesman, even though, in real life, the actors are just two years apart. Snipes’s movements are measured, and when paired with the intense Cheadle, the contrast is startling.
Several months after the release of Brooklyn’s Finest, Snipes reported to federal prison to begin his three-year sentence for tax evasion. He was released in April 2013.
Most recently, Snipes made a wild, brief return in Expendables 3 (2014) and has been cast in a NBC pilot called Endgame, from the producers of the Blacklist (2013– ).
It is not clear if Endgame is the kickoff to another decade of work for Wesley Snipes. I hope it is. We need him — and actors of his ilk — in this microwave age, where reality stars have longer television resumes than trained actors who have sacrificed to learn their craft.
Robert Downey Jr. (a two-time co-star of Snipes, btw) has found his way out of a far darker past and has emerged a box-office behemoth — and star of several Marvel movies, go figure.
Maybe Wesley Snipes will never be the star he was, but he really doesn’t have to be. To see him, still exciting and thrilling us, still defying the odds after all this time, on a platform worthy of his considerable charm and talent, is enough.
If you enjoyed this, please hit the green “Recommend” button below so others might also enjoy it.
Follow THE OUTTAKE: Medium | Twitter | Facebook
