By Derryck “Nes” Johnson
I recently chopped it up with seasoned actor Harold Perrineau to discuss his role as Julian Murch from The Best Man (which he was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture in 1999) and his reprisal of the role in the sequel The Best Man Holiday, which was released on Blu-Ray/DVD Feb. 11.
We discussed the experience he shared working with a tremendous ensemble cast, how far Black cinema has come, and his upcoming MLK project. Here’s what Perrineau had to say:
Looking back at the start of your career, do you feel you’re much more driven now to succeed than you were when your acting journey began?
I’m a lot more driven now, though not in the same way. Before, I was actually trying to prove that I could act and I worked very hard to achieve that in my craft. The truth was that sometimes I didn’t really know what I was doing (laughs). I was so driven to execute as a young actor and I was really just trying to figure the whole thing out at that time in my life. Now that I’m more experienced, I’m really driven towards telling stories that I firmly believe in and stories my kids would be proud to see. I also want to be a part of roles that help our country move forward in the way we think about people, race, choices of sexuality and various other issues that keep swirling around us as individuals. Believe me, at the end of the day we’re all people just trying to figure out how to live together. The more images we see in films, the better off we’ll be at dealing with them. I’m much more driven now because there are more issues to tackle with society.
Who are your top three acting influences?
There’s Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, and even though he’s a good friend of mine and one of my acting peers, Laurence Fishburne.
How different emotionally was making The Best Man Holiday than the original The Best Man feature film?
You know, I feel with both of them I found a way to connect with the character (Julian Murch) and thus the storyline. I really found both stories credible. I really believed in these people, you know? I believed where they were coming from and it didn’t seem fake or weak. The circumstances were real. In the sequel, you have my character Julian Murch dealing with the same types of issues as an older man with a family. Now you start to deal with life and death plus how your relationship moves on from here? Those questions I find really real and credible. While the first film centered on getting this wedding done, this one was equally divided as all the characters had their own individual emotional issues, making the sequel a little more personal. Murch not only had to deal with his family problems, but they all had to deal with losing Mia which trumped everything else. There are a lot more grown up scenes in The Best Man Holiday because we’re all more grown now.
With all of these great talented actors in the movie, how focused were you all on the set?
Well you know we did a lot of the work off the set, parking-lot-talking about all our characters and what we wanted to accomplish. So what we really had to focus on was making sure while we were having a lot of fun, we had to make certain that we were doing the job. Because we were having so much fun, we would complete a scene and be like, “Yo…did we just do the scene?” (laughs). It was really nice to work with people that are selfless, giving, caring, funny and smart.
With regards to Black cinema, how far have we come ?
I think we’ve come a bit further than we were 20 years ago. But I think this past year was a pretty special year for the amount of films with African-American actors or Black actors from the U.S. and different countries as well. This year had a lot of big pictures centered on the Black experience that broke through. However, there were a lot of years that had that same effect. While I feel we came far, we really haven’t come that far or convince people the films we star in have universal themes and they’re not just for Black people. They’re for all American people who have families, so we still have a ways to go to convince people of that. But I feel with movies such as The Best Man Holiday, we’re doing a better job at achieving that goal. Films like this don’t focus on so much of the tragedy of being Black, but focused on life experience on a universal level. It’s a pretty revolutionary film in the sense of hey, we’re just people living our lives. We’re coming through though!
What’s next for Harold Perrineau?
I’m about to start working on this film right now called The Dancing Gould about a young boxer coming up and getting a shot at the title. I’m not the boxer, I’m actually his trainer. I’m also working on a film that with be out in theaters soon called Sabotage, which stars Arnold Schwarzenegger and a great actress Olivia Williams, Terrence Howard, and a ton of other great acting talents. I’m producing a film that’s loosely based on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. It’s called Slay the Dreamer and focuses on the events around the assassination and things people didn’t talk about because the FBI sealed the files years ago. You know, just trying to stay busy and creative plus raise my family as well.