Time Traveling With Jeffrey Wright

Filed under: Interviews

From playing James Bond's colleague Felix Leiter, to portraying real-life cultural icons (Jean Michel Basquiat, Muhammad Ali's biographer Howard Bingham, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., General Colin Powell, Muddy Waters), Jeffrey Wright's film roles always span a broad scope.

In his latest film, 'Source Code,' the Washington, DC, native gets to work on a project that involves time travel.

When decorated soldier Captain Colter Stevens (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) wakes up in the body of an unknown man, he discovers he's part of a mission to find the bomber of a Chicago commuter train. In an assignment unlike any he's ever known, he learns he's part of a government experiment called the Source Code, a program that enables him to cross over into another man's identity in the last eight minutes of that man's life. With an additional, and much larger, target threatening to kill millions in downtown Chicago, Colter relives the incident over and over again, gathering clues each time, until he can solve the mystery of who is behind the bombing, and figure out how to prevent the next attack.

Wright recently told BlackVoices.com what appealed to him about working with the film's director, Duncan Jones (who is also David Bowie's first born), and what he's got going on in Sierre Leone.

"Duncan Jones' first film, 'Moon,' handled technology and science fiction ideas in a really fresh way, I thought," says Wright. "So I was attracted to working with him on this [film] because, obviously, there were some of the same types of themes and conventions at work in this script, as well, and he's touching on certain thinking that's going on now in the world of quantum physics and in quantum mechanics. It's fertile [ground] for a sci-fi thriller."

Unlike his co-star Gyllenhaal, whose character has to relive the same scene over and over until his mission is accomplished, Wright's role has him overseeing everything from an offsite compound. In fact, he hardly had any scenes with the Gyllenhaal.

"I worked with an image of Jake's character, or the idea of him, because we communicate with him through the aperture of a camera lens," Wright says. "So that actually yielded an interesting perspective on his performance, which I think is wonderfully sympathetic and charismatic."

Besides doing theater, films and raising a family with his wife, actress Carmen Ejojo, Wright is also the founder and chair for his non-profit organization, the Taia Peace Foundation.

"The Taia Peace Foundation is a group that's been focused on economic development initiatives in Sierra Leone," Wright says. "We just traveled to Sierra Leone last month to celebrate the foundation's largest project to date, which was the rehabilitation of an 18-mile farm to a market road serving one of the remotest corners of the country."

"What we're attempting to do is combine the ideas of commercial endeavors with philanthropic sensibilities," he continues. "So that we create an engine for economic growth within the areas of operation and also, simultaneously, create sustainability for our social endeavors, as well. We're trying to veer away from the historic trends in Africa of an absence of, or a neglect of, local community needs when tied to commercial activity. At the same time, we're veering away from this perception that charity, in and of itself, is a viable solution to some of the challenges that face the continent."

Now, that's doing the Wright thing.

www.taiapeace.org.