Transcript
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Jeffrey Wright (0:29)
It's the Late Show Poncho with Stephen Colbert.
Stephen Colbert (0:37)
Welcome back, everybody. My next guest tonight is a Tony, an Emmy award winning actor, you know, from movies including the French Dispatch, the Batman and American Fiction. He now stars in the new thriller series the Agency. Please welcome back to THE LATE Show, Jeffrey Wright. Hi, Jeffrey Wright. Good to see you again.
Jeffrey Wright (0:57)
Hello, Stephen.
Stephen Colbert (0:59)
2024.
Jeffrey Wright (1:00)
Yes.
Stephen Colbert (1:01)
Marks 30 years since you won the Tony award for playing Belize in Angels in America.
Jeffrey Wright (1:08)
I was five years old.
Stephen Colbert (1:09)
There you go. There you are playing Belize. And Ron Liebman as Roy Cohn in the original Broadway production at the Walter kerr Theater in 1993. You know, you can kind of measure modern Broadway from like before Angels in America and after Angels in America. It was such a significant, such a mammoth work, you know, just in the scale of it and the reverberations, the artistic community. What was it like to do that play at that time?
Jeffrey Wright (1:37)
Well, you know, I think we should all be so fortunate at times in our lives to say I am doing what I am meant to be doing. And there were moments on stage when I felt that, that I'm where I should be in the world. It was incredible, incredibly powerful. I would look out in the audience at times and you would see people who were visibly sick of this disease, aids, who were perhaps dying. And this play was an opportunity for their struggles, their concerns, their challenges to be validated, their lives to be celebrated in a way that changed me forever. And what it was early in my career, relatively so. And it gave me a sense that, you know what, this work can be important because as well, what followed. And it was part of a wave of things that led to this activism, other works of art, communities coming together to push legislative change that would actually expand the rights of this country to people who had been marginalized previously. So it said to me, you know, this work can make a difference. And I think particularly you just had Hakeem Jeffries on it, who was before they redrew the district lines, my congressman in Brooklyn. I Think that there's a responsibility not only for folks like him to step up now, but for artists as well and storytellers to do what we can to raise the discourse, to call out what is right and call out what is wrong and play a role as those who can help drive our vision toward a more progressive society alive. I think we have a responsibility now more than ever, not to back down.