Jeffrey Wright on finally being up for the best actor Oscar: ‘I was frustrated, but I’m not frustrated now’

There’s a fascinating Instagram account that digs up paparazzi shots of stars attending premieres and film events in the 1990s. The main attraction is the outlandish fashion, but also the randomness of the guest list and the questions the images throw up: why were Angela Lansbury and John Oates invited to the Untouchables premiere in 1987? Did Sidney Poitier really enjoy Predator 2? Why did Richard Harris decide to bring his dog to the 1993 Independent Film awards?

One that caught my eye recently was the premiere of Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting in New York. Metallica are there, looking wild-eyed and inebriated, as is a smouldering Ray Liotta. An incredibly young-looking trio of Jonny Lee Miller, Boyle and Ewen Bremner attempt to fit in.

Among this very 90s milieu sits Jeffrey Wright, sporting a goatee, buzz cut and flamboyant spotty shirt. This was 1996 and a time when Wright was just emerging as a talent. He’d finished Angels in America on Broadway the year before, for which he won a Tony for his portrayal as a gay, HIV-positive nurse, and he’d also just played the lead in Basquiat – Julian Schnabel’s biopic of the Haitian-American visual artist. Back then there was a bit of Oscar buzz around Basquiat and three decades on Wright is back in contention, this time as a nominee for his performance as writer Thelonious “Monk” Ellison in American Fiction, Cord Jefferson’s award-winning dramedy, which is up for five awards.

“I think American Fiction serves as a type of bookend to that period,” says Wright, referring to the 90s and the start of his career. “Basquiat and Monk share similar journeys driven by their own desires to be their own authentic selves and to be creatively and intellectually free while facing underappreciation and undervaluation along the way. I can draw a line from my most recent work to the central piece of work that I did at that time. So, yeah, I think that that guy in that picture would look at his career and say yes, this all makes sense to me.”

Wright is talking to me from his home in Brooklyn, but he’s not been on home turf for a while. The past few weeks has seen him crisscrossing the Atlantic and the US as part of a promotional push for American Fiction, a process he says is like being on “a hamster wheel inside a circus train”. But he’s not complaining. He knows the alternative – no buzz, zero studio backing, no hectic travel schedule – too well, despite a career that has seen him established as one of the most respected actors working in Hollywood.

“It’s actually been the first time that I’ve had this level of support for a film that I’ve been so central to,” he says. The day after we spoke, his nomination for an Oscar was confirmed and he told journalists he made sure he was nowhere near a TV screen so that he didn’t smash it if he didn’t get a nod.

The New Yorker critic Hilton Als once wrote that, whatever play or film Wright is in, he will bring “complexity, shades of light and dark, that sometimes go far beyond what is in the text”. Throughout Wright’s career it’s easy to find the overachievements Als alluded to. When he was brought in to replace John Leguizamo as a Dominican drug lord in John Singleton’s remake of Shaft, he stole the show, taking a stock baddie and turning him into a menacing tormentor of Samuel L Jackson. He did the same thing in Boardwalk Empire with Valentin Narcisse, while in Westworld, his portrayal of the cyborg Bernard Lowe was the emotional centre of the show.

He has also sprinkled his magic on major box office fare: turns as Beetee in The Hunger Games, Commissioner Gordon in The Batman, and Felix Leiter in the James Bond franchise took him into the mainstream, while more recently he has developed a partnership with Wes Anderson, first playing a James Baldwinesque writer in The French Dispatch and then a verbose army officer in Asteroid City. When the Guardian took a poll of the best actors working in 2013, Wright came ninth on the list, billed as “Hollywood’s Mr Dependable”, someone who took “supporting-actor duties to new heights”.

American Fiction is a different beast: Wright is no longer the critically lauded supporting actor. This time he’s playing the lead as Monk, a frustrated university professor and writer of big, serious books – most of which have nothing to do with Black life. But it’s when he jokingly turns in a book about ghetto violence and domestic dysfunction – apparently written by a convict on the run – that he’s celebrated and becomes a bestseller.

The film is very much Wright’s vehicle and he’s already driven it to success, after it won the audience award at Toronto film festival. But how much of Wright is in Monk? “I understand the resistance that he faces,” he says. “I understand the misperceptions and the preconceptions but I think that I’ve managed to circumnavigate those in my own experience.”

So has he been frustrated at the time it’s taken to get a project like American Fiction in contention? “There have been projects that I felt that I know should have been supported more rigorously. Basquiat is one: that movie was pulled early from the theatres. There were times at which I was frustrated, but I’m not frustrated now.”

Wright recently gave an insight into what it’s like when his perception clashes with that of studio executives. After he’d finished working on Ang Lee’s western Ride With the Devil, he was asked to record audio that would replace swear words for aeroplane audiences. One scene they took exception to was when Wright’s character referred to himself by using the N-word. For Wright, it was imperative that the word stayed in: it wasn’t there for show, its usage made the whole scene work. “I just couldn’t bring myself to replace it,” he says, adding that the episode altered his approach to choosing projects. “If you’re working with partners whose perspective is aligned with yours, then you don’t necessarily need to have those types of fights. So I try to choose wisely.”

In American Fiction his perspectives are very much aligned with the film-makers’. He heaps praise on Jefferson, who has made the transition from screenwriter (he was part of the Succession team and wrote a particularly impressive episode of Watchmen) to director, but he also feels a connection to Monk. “What I’m most aligned with relative to Monk’s journey, is his relationship to family, which I should probably not delve into too deeply. I also relate to his tendency to be his own worst enemy in relation when it comes to certain personal aspects of the film,” adds Wright, laughing. (He married to British actor Carmen Ejogo in 2000 and they have two children. The pair have now separated.)

There’s another deeply personal aspect to the performance. Wright was brought up in Washington DC by his mother and aunt, after his father died when he was young. Both women were high-achievers: his mum was a lawyer at US customs, while his aunt, who is 94, was head surgical nurse at DC general hospital. “My mother passed away” – of cancer – “a little over a year before I received this script from Cord,” he tells me. “It was a kind of shockingly quick process … then my aunt immediately came from Washington to live with us here in New York. This was at the start of the pandemic and I have kids as well, so in a flash I was in the thick of things and trying to manage, to the best of my abilities, the numerous cracks in the dyke.”

Amid the familial strife of the film, there are a lot of laughs. Anyone who works in book publishing and has attempted to buy a work from a Black author might well cringe in horror at some of the scenes. There are toe-curling attempts to appeal to Monk’s alter ego, during which you can almost see the publishers counting the money they think it will generate. “The satire in the social commentary, I think, is timely and sharply drawn,” Wright says. “It’s ironic, funny and important but in some ways, it exists as neon advertising for the deeper, more satisfying meal that is the son of a family and the portrait of a man.”

In American Fiction, a supporting cast including Tracee Ellis Ross, Issa Rae and Sterling K Brown try to overcome grief and loss, historical family trauma, substance abuse issues, fraternal resentment and arguments over estate management. These are problems that, in American cinema, are usually reserved for middle-class, white characters. Wright refers to the characters in his film as “free people”. Meaning that “these people are as human and flawed and wonderful and beautiful as anyone else,” he says. “And we celebrate that.”

The other thing the film is sending up, according to Wright, is mainstream presentations of Black life in the US. “It’s about larger perceptions and misperceptions of us people who exist outside what is perceived to be the mainstream,” he says, before unloading on contemporary pop culture. “If you look at the music industry now, and the various personas that are presented – let alone the music – it’s just kind of a ridiculous caricature. It’s the most simplistic and banal and silly types of narratives that we’re hearing and our kids are hearing. I mean, it’s just laughable stuff.”

But isn’t that just a natural generational divide? People in the 1970s complained about Chic and other Black disco acts presenting a commercialised form of Blackness. Wright isn’t convinced. “What I’m suggesting is there’s a level of toxicity that exists now that I don’t think existed then … just the nature of the tone: there’s violence, there’s misogyny, there’s self-orientation, there’s a materialism that is so intense now. Maybe that’s reflective of the times but there’s also an absence of originality. It seems so conformist to me. There was a lot of weird backlash when Andre 3000 put out that flute record. Weird commentary, like, ‘What is he doing?’ But God, you know, how beautiful for him. He got to play and put out what he felt within. That’s what it’s all about.”

You get the sense that with Monk and American Fiction, Wright has achieved something similar, whether or not he can wrestle the Oscar from Cillian Murphy’s grasp. The important thing seems to be that he’s back in the conversation. So now that things have come full circle, how does Wright think the young goateed version of himself would feel about his career? “I think he would be cool with where he’s ended up,” says Wright. “It’s been a long, strange trip in some regards, but it’s been good.”

• American Fiction is released in the UK on 2 February.