By Nate Jones
When Winston Duke was a teenager in Brighton, New York, the kids at his high school started calling him a “close talker.” The term — plucked from a five-year-old episode of Seinfeld — unnerved him, since he felt like he was standing as close as anyone else would in conversation with people. Finally he realized what was going on. Duke, an immigrant from the Caribbean by way of Brooklyn, had a growth spurt at 13. He wasn’t just one of a few black students in a school that was 80 percent white, he was black and big. His physical presence put people on high alert.
For Duke, acting has been a way to own his hyper-visibility, “to utilize it for my personal growth and edification rather than my destruction.” He is 6’ 5”, with a wrestler’s physique, and unlike many tall menAhem., he stands up straight. A conversation with him often returns to the subject of his body. “My body takes up a lot of space. My body is politicized. My body is so many different things,” he tells me. His explosive career thus far has been an exercise in working through all this loaded meaning, and getting to a place where he can tell new stories about the way a man with his body can…
