Don Cheadle, a Star But Still in Character

Veteran character actor Don Cheadle says the story told by "Hotel Rwanda" is what matters, not his first star turn. (Dudley M. Brooks - The Washington Post)

Consider Don Cheadle, the character actor's actor. He is, shall we say, "almost famous," the guy who first stole the show from Denzel Washington in "Devil in a Blue Dress," and then moved on to stealing thunder from the likes of George Clooney, Michael Douglas and Sean Penn. He's the bit player who, at long last, is getting his chance to be the guy who appears above the credits. Finally, after nearly two decades in the business, Cheadle gets to play the leading man, starring in "Hotel Rwanda," a big, beefy role based on a real-life horror story, a tale rich with drama and big acting Moments.

Let's take a moment, then, to consider the character actor. His is the role of the perpetual second banana, consigned to appear briefly on camera, illuminated with a flash that all too quickly recedes. Careers are built on being the hey-that's-the-guy-who, the steady freddy who can be relied on to get the job done but rarely gets to play front and center.

So it is interesting to note that, when faced with such an opportunity in "Hotel Rwanda," Cheadle, stealer of thunder, second-bananas himself in interviews about the film. It's his time to shine -- he also produced his first movie last year and directs his first in 2005, and his star turn is already generating Oscar buzz -- but he'd rather talk about the story behind "Hotel Rwanda," which opens in Washington tomorrow.

That, he says, is what really matters: How Rwanda hotelier Paul Rusesabagina saved more than 1,200 refugees during the massacre of 1994 by giving them shelter at the swanky Hotel Mille Collines. Cheadle felt so strongly about the story that, when director Terry George approached him to play the role, he didn't take offense at George's caveat: If Denzel or Will Smith showed interest, then all bets were off. George would have to go with the A-list, the better to obtain funding. After all, movies about massacres in central Africa aren't generally considered a box office bonanza.

Yes, of course, Cheadle told him, in an anecdote that has become part of the press junket lore. "I thought getting [the movie] made would trump me being in it," Cheadle says.

("He's very humble, he's the real deal, a proper actor," says Sophie Okonedo, the British actress who plays his wife in "Hotel Rwanda." "There's no ego. It's very unusual.")

The film was important, he says as he sprawls about in a hotel suite at the Ritz-Carlton, looking more than a little fatigued by his latest round of interviews, because: "It put a human face on what Rwanda was about."

What Rwanda was about, of course, was the wholesale murder of 800,000 ethnic Tutsis by their countrymen, the Hutus, a genocide that happened over a 100-day period while the rest of the world watched and did little or nothing. Rusesabagina, a Hutu married to a Tutsi wife, was and is a man with a strongly pragmatist bent. He had connections, from high-ranking European bureaucrats to high-ranking Hutu warlords, and he used them all to save his family, his neighbors and the Tutsi and Hutu moderate refugees who'd stumbled into his care.

Cheadle had read the stories behind the headlines, but like most Westerners, he knew little of the origins of the Hutu-Tutsi tensions. He didn't know about its roots in Belgian colonialism, where 19th-century Belgians picked the taller, more European-featured Tutsis to rule over the shorter, more "Bantu"-looking Hutus. "It was really diabolical," Cheadle says. "Like something out of 'How to Make a Slave 101.' "

But he didn't, he says, understand the full import of what had happened until he started doing his research. The horror of it stayed with him. He e-mailed Rusesabagina, who now lives in Belgium, quizzing him on the most mundane aspects of his life, "blanket questions" like "What do you like to eat?" The e-mails progressed to phone calls, and then he flew to Africa to meet Rusesabagina.

"I was surprised by how calm and together he was," Cheadle says. "He's haunted; he has those moments. . . . But there's a real joy about him, too. This is someone who believes every day is a bonus."

Filming "Hotel Rwanda" in South Africa, confronting genocide, day in and day out, even in a game of make-believe, Cheadle says, altered him.

"I go through a mere fraction of what Paul went through . . . but the actual performance of it" was therapeutic. As any performer knows, he says, by acting out, he got to work through a host of painful emotions. His family was on location with him and it was hard to stay morose, he says, when his daughters were crawling all over him, demanding to tell him about their day.

This sense of family has its roots in his own bourgeois childhood. He was born in Kansas City and grew up mainly in Denver, the son of a clinical psychologist father and a psychology teacher mother. Growing up black and middle-class, he says, anchored him. He's partnered -- his long-term love is the actress Bridgid Coulter, who played his wife in John Singleton's "Rosewood" -- with kids, two little girls who figure often in his conversation. He's a soccer dad. He drives a Prius.

He got his bachelor's degree in fine arts from CalArts in Los Angeles, got a gig on the TV show "Fame" and got his first movie role in 1987's "Hamburger Hill."

His face is that of a Gambian mask, an artisan's study in ebony curves and angles. He's a musician, a saxophonist who's been jonesing to portray Miles Davis, and you can see it, yes, in the lithe frame and the air of nonchalant cool. In his roles, he is both comedian and tragedian, wringing humor out of drama and pathos out of humor. He made his mark on the stage in the off-Broadway production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Top Dog/Underdog," as the much-put-upon younger brother who flips the script in a Cain vs. Abel twist.

Take his early, scene-stealing turn as "Mouse" in "Devil in a Blue Dress," starring Denzel as Easy Rawlins and Jennifer Beals in the tragic mulatto role and based on the novel by Walter Mosley. As Mouse, he was Washington's sidekick, the hoodlum whose best friend is his shotgun. At a pivotal moment, Easy leaves a witness/bad guy under Mouse's care. Mouse, being who he is, kills the witness, which infuriates Easy.

"If you didn't want him dead," Cheadle/Mouse deadpanned with a line that brought down the multiplex, "Then why'd you leave him with me?"

With his roles, Cheadle says, "I always want there to be a lot of elasticity, jarring and arresting characters that do things in interesting ways." Those roles are few and far between, he says; "I don't see a ton of scripts" -- a statement that seems a bit disingenuous for someone who works as much as he does. In the past two months he has appeared in "Ocean's Twelve," with Clooney, Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts, and "After the Sunset," with Pierce Brosnan and Salma Hayek. Next up he serves as the moral compass for Sean Penn's seriously addled Everyman in "The Assassination of Richard Nixon," which opens here Jan. 14.

"The scripts I do see aren't overwhelmingly great," he says. "I get a lot of biopics . . . enough already. My manager and I are always calling it 'What Did Your Grandaddy Do?' movies."

More often than not, though, he is called on to fill in the blanks with underwritten roles, to give heft where there is none. This gives him a steady paycheck but doesn't always satisfy. "It doesn't serve me" as an actor, he says. "And sometimes you get on set and say, wait a minute, this isn't what I signed up for."

Still, after nearly 20 years in the business, he's able to call some shots. Like the time he appeared in "Rush Hour II" in an uncredited scene opposite Jackie Chan. He agreed to do the scene under two conditions: One, he had to fight Chan. And two, he had to do the scene speaking only Chinese. It is this sense of quirkiness, frequently playing against race, that shapes his disparate performances, from the country-western porn star who just wants to settle down with a nice girl in "Boogie Nights" to the resolute cop in "Traffic" to the explosives expert with the Cockney accent in "Ocean's Eleven" and "Ocean's Twelve."

"He has that chameleon-like ability," says the Irish-born George, who wrote "Hotel Rwanda" with Cheadle in mind. "The ability to disappear into a role. . . . He's an actor of enormous talent."

Now Cheadle is looking to stretch those talents. Last year he produced "Crash," an ensemble film directed by Paul Haggis and starring Cheadle, Sandra Bullock and Matt Dillon, which is scheduled to open in April. He's directing "Tishomingo Blues," a film executive-produced by Steven Soderbergh and based on the novel by Elmore Leonard. And he's at work on a screenplay with Soderbergh, the director with whom he worked in both "Ocean's" films and "Traffic."

With so much crammed into his calendar, his second-banana days seem to be coming to an end, which is probably a good thing for those A-listers whose thunder he's swiped. But don't hate him because he's a scene stealer, says his "Hotel Rwanda" co-star Okonedo: "He doesn't mean to do that. He's just brilliant."