I am racing the rain in the back of a London cab with Mr. Delroy Lindo. I was advised by a well-traveled friend to trust only this as a means of conveyance—the pug-nosed solidity of the classic black taxi, the encyclopedic patter of drivers versed in every alleyway and heath. We jounce over cobblestones, heading out of St. Pancras station toward the Young Vic theater on the South Bank. Mr. Lindo has agreed to answer what questions he can in the little time we have.

Outside, umbrellas amble along Brompton, Harrods breaks like a great ship over gray horizon—an anglophile’s wet dream—yet I am transported by the actor’s unmistakable brow and regal jaw to the smoke and storm of Oakland: Delroy Lindo in a velour black-and-white tracksuit as Aaliyah’s overprotective kingpin daddy, Isaak O’Day, in the raucous Jet Li vehicle Romeo Must Die (2000); Lindo rolling through the Gowanus projects, dispensing wisdom and ass-whuppings, as Rodney Little in Spike Lee’s near-operatic crime drama Clockers (1995); Lindo in cowboy hat and black duster, cutting almost too foine a figure as legendary lawman Bass Reeves in Jeymes Samuel’s beautifully defiant Black Western, The Harder They Fall (2021).

My referents for this moment are deeply Black and American. B-boys and barristers aspire to the slow burn of Southern diphthongs tugging on the coattails of Adrian Boseman’s Chi-Town courtroom manner (The Good Fight TV series, 2017–22). Bed-Stuy divas and Philly schoolteachers cream and sugar over at the Brooklyn drawl of Woody Carmichael beseeching a weary wife for more time, more space (Crooklyn, 1994). Delroy Lindo embodies the inextricable intermarriage of urbanized Southern origins: an easy gait quick to turn from pirouette to dagger, an unflinching gaze that sifts softly into listening yet is honed sharp enough to mark the fool. He is Black America’s quintessential older brother, uncle, deeply present and wayward father, enforcer, pusher, lover, with a voice modulated to the rise and fall of stride piano. Even as he “took an’ tole us” who he was, channeling the swag and patois of West Indian Archie in Spike Lee’s 1992 masterpiece Malcolm X, we continued to believe he was solely our own, and nothing could keep us from it.

In his yet-to-be-titled memoir, slated to be published in 2026 by Little, Brown and Company, Delroy Lindo does not challenge the lineage Black Hollywood and ardent fans have assigned him, but instead asks that we see him—see him truly—as a child of the Diaspora, the son of a Jamaican émigré, a young woman who journeyed alone across the waters to London during the historic Windrush migration. Alongside some surprisingly personal and painful revelations, this history and his mother’s struggles—to survive the inclement social and economic weather of 1950s London while raising a Black boy on her own so far from home—haunt the pages of a book crafted with the same lyricism and command the Tony Award–nominated actor is known for bringing to the stage.

I am here as part of a trio of early readers of his memoir—what Delroy calls the Triumvirate—that includes British writer and cultural critic Miranda Pyne and San Francisco–based author Diana Cohn. Delroy and I have spent much of our time visiting the sites of his childhood, including foster and group homes across southeast London, deep in the belly of white working-class British kindliness and aggression. Our cab ride was preceded by a day of riding shotgun in a black Peugeot, Mr. Lindo at the wheel, double-clutching, gearshift in hand, navigating narrow streets, talking about many things: art, longing, excellence and fear, the uncanny necessity of both exile and return.

—Erica Vital-Lazare

I. “A HUMAN POINT OF VIEW”

THE BELIEVER: I want to know how you get to a place where you are so real, in front of a camera, in front of an audience, onstage.

DELROY LINDO: It may sound glib, but it’s practice, practice, practice. Thank god I took the time to train as an actor and to form a relationship with craft, so that when I’m working, no matter in what medium, I am attempting to pay attention to the technical aspects of the thing.

BLVR: I want to ask you about a scene.

DL: OK.

BLVR: It’s a scene in Get Shorty. You’re Bo Catlett, a gangster who is very obviously a student of film. He’s dabbling in screenwriting and falls into something of an impromptu development meeting with John Travolta’s character, Chili Palmer, a gangster breaking into movie production. You, as Bo Catlett, are in your element. You can feel your character thinking, Hey, I have someone here I’m talking to about the thing I love—moviemaking rather than gangstering. You’re so beautifully ebullient. You want to share ideas about the script that Chili’s strong-arming into production. Where someone else might have played the part with some sort of bluster or bravado, you instead become so vulnerable. There’s an undercurrent of joy, but you don’t know if you can claim the joy, because you’re also a gangster in a confrontation with a gangster.

DL: Listen. Here’s the thing. And this is where I believe technique comes in. For me, being inside the life of a character—and this, I think, speaks to the choices one could have made compared to the choice one actually makes—that scene is about two aspirational human beings trying to get a job done. And it’s aspirational because we both want to be in the movie business. And here’s a piece of material, a script, that will allow us both to transform. And in that moment, in that scene, he figuratively slaps me in the face.

BLVR: He shuts you down when you offer notes on his script.

DL: He shuts me down. But from a technique or technical point of view, one does not go into that scene thinking, Man, I’m a gangster trying to do this other thing [moviemaking]. I go into it thinking, from a human point of view, I’m Bo Catlett and here’s an opportunity to achieve a dream of mine.

Early on, I knew I wanted to pursue a certain versatility. I knew I wanted to create a range of different characters, which was the reason why, after I left the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, where I studied for two years, I went to New York, as opposed to Los Angeles: because I hoped that in going to New York and working in the theater, I would be challenged to do a range of different parts, and that’s exactly what happened.

II. PLAYING THE FATHER

DL: I’m going to give you another example of deciding to see the humanity in characters whose actions are villainous: I did a film called Clockers, the third film I did with Spike [Lee].

BLVR: Yes, where you played Rodney Little, a Brooklyn drug lord.

DL: Rodney Little. I was doing a workshop at the University of Michigan, and many people asked about the scene in the car when I put a gun in Strike’s mouth¹ [Strike is a drug dealer who works under Rodney Little]. I forget the exact question from the workshop, but it was something along the lines of How did you do it? That scene? And what I found myself saying was that the scene has nothing to do with the gun, per se. The gun is only the means. That scene is fundamentally about a parent scolding his child. “How dare you speak to me like that? Have you lost your mind? Who are you talking to?” That is something that any parent on the planet can relate to, and the behavior—the picking up of the gun—is just an outgrowth of that.

BLVR: Wow. You are talking about Rodney Little scolding his child—a situation that demonstrates love—with a gun.

DL: No question. It’s been many years since I revisited it, but if you remember, there’s another moment between Rodney and Strike: We’re sitting in a car, and we’re looking at a crack addict, a woman who was once a beauty and is now a shadow of herself. I remember this was in 1995, the height of the crack epidemic. I don’t remember the exact words, but I say something to Strike like I don’t ever want to hear about you using this shit, you understand. And that’s not a threat. It comes out of concern.

There’s another scene, earlier in the film, where we’re watching a former mentor of mine, Errol, who is just disintegrating in front of my eyes, and it hurts. Having seen that, I turn to Strike and I ask him, You eating, man? And he says, Nah, I ain’t eating, and I ask, Come on, man, why you don’t eat? That comes out of love. There’s a genuine caring the drug lord harbors for this young kid.

BLVR: You’re also trying to save him but doing so with techniques born of your character’s specific pathology.

DL: No question. But I think you know this: It’s not my job to judge what’s “pathological.” It’s my job to key into, on a human level, what makes [snaps fingers] Rodney tick. What kind of human being is Rodney, and how does Rodney do what he does?

There was a scene that was cut out of the film, but it was really important to me. The film is based on a book by Richard Price, and in the book, Rodney helps the kids with their homework. He’s attempting to school these kids who are out on the block clocking, selling drugs—to educate them about how they should be in the world. “Y’all done your homework? Come get those books, man.” It’s complex. That’s Rodney’s MO, that’s his humanity. And so while it’s my job to key into those aspects of this human being, it’s absolutely the audience’s prerogative to look at me and say, That dude is pathological. But that has nothing to do with what I’m trying to build in that character.

BLVR: And that’s the complexity—it goes back to what you were saying about being committed to exploring and expressing the full range of a character. He can be someone who loves like a father, but also someone who’s willing to kill.

DL: Well, well. Before you said that, I was gonna say, Loves like a father, scolds like a father, disciplines like a father, in the particular ways that I [as Rodney Little] do those things. That’s as far as I take it. Again, it’s the audience’s prerogative to label my activity, to describe my activity in the way they choose to. Does that make sense?

BLVR: It does. [Laughing] It does.

DL: Look, there’s a wonderful thing with that particular character. As I said, it’s based on a book, which I read twice before we started filming. When Spike told me he could introduce me to Richard Price, I said, “Of course I want to meet him.” When I met Richard Price, he then introduced me to the human being that Rodney Little was based on. And one of the things I observed in this very charming man was that he liked to have a good time; he was a very funny man who just happened to do this other thing, to operate as a drug dealer. And in fact he insisted, “I don’t do that anymore, man.” Of course, it was an open question whether he still did or not. Again, not my job to judge.

BLVR: So you want to embrace the fullness of a character’s humanity first.

DL: Yes. That’s the actor’s job. That’s any actor’s job.

BLVR: That takes me back to that moment we talked about in Get Shorty, where Travolta’s character shuts you down. And it breaks my heart, the moment when your character says, “You don’t know me.”

DL: “You only think you do.” Yeah. Now, if Spike had directed that film, I feel like in that moment right there I would have had more latitude to experiment. But it was a big Hollywood production with, like, bona fide Hollywood movie stars in it, and I was just coming off three films with Spike. If I had to do it again, I would play that scene a little differently. The thing is, you’re gonna ask me, Well, how? I’m not sure what I would do differently.

BLVR: OK, I am going to ask you: How would you do it differently?

DL: It would be more benign. I remember that I kind of scowl in that scene. I would show less of that.

III. THE WANDERER AND THE GUIDE

BLVR: Right now we’re sitting in the Young Vic, in London, and I want you to tell me, please, a little bit about yourself in this space, your relation to this space.

DL: In 2010, I played Bynum in the brilliant August Wilson play Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.² It was a creative return of sorts for me, because I had played Herald Loomis in the same play on Broadway twenty-two years earlier, in 1988. The interesting thing for me about playing Bynum Walker is that he is the nemesis—I’m saying “nemesis” in quotes—of Herald Loomis. I can chart my progression as an actor through those parts. There is the actor that I was prior to playing Walter Lee [in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun] and Herald Loomis, and then there’s the much improved actor, with a firmer grasp of technique and of myself as a creative worker, as a creative instrument. I had played Herald Loomis in 1988, and in 2010 at the Young Vic I came back to play Bynum Walker—two sides of the coin. It was a seminal experience for me as an actor to see the transformation from before 1988 to after.

BLVR: So you play the wanderer, and then you play the one who realizes that what is broken cannot be fixed by wandering.

DL: Listen, it’s interesting that you say “the wanderer.” To take that metaphor further—if in 1988 I was playing the wanderer, in 2010 I was playing the guide.

BLVR: Oh, damn.

DL: The brilliant thing about being the guide is that I’m guiding without letting him know I’m guiding. I’m giving him these clues throughout the play, all of which Herald is rejecting. “You don’t know me. You don’t know me. Get up off me. You don’t know me.” And the secret is Bynum Walker knows Herald Loomis better than he knows himself. I love the play. I have a very, very strong connection to the work. So it was wonderful to come back here and play the part.

BLVR: Really, that entire process of coming back here to play the guide versus the wanderer—it mirrors your journey, personally and professionally. You said that you could see the transformation from before 1988 to after. It’s a transformation of craft, but it’s also a transformation of identity as someone who’s coming into mastery. It’s a continuous journey.

DL: All of the above. That question, “Who am I?,” or, more acutely, “Who the hell am I?,” is the basis of everything. And if the answer to that question is “I don’t know,” that’s OK, because in actuality, we’re changing from moment to moment, second to second. Synapses are those electrical charges inside ourselves—neurons that fire off in response to stimuli. And maybe the synapses are firing off that much more intensely when one is in the process of making work, of creating. Because in those moments when you’re in pursuit of something, you have a heightened level of consciousness.

IV. “ON SOME LEVEL WE’RE EVERYTHING AND EVERYWHERE”

BLVR: So we’ve just come from an exhibit at the British Library, Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music.³

DL: Now, I don’t know about you, but my synapses were firing off big time.

BLVR: Yes, very much so.

DL: Who we are on the planet, what our contributions have been, how our contributions have been undervalued—even an exhibit like that, with so many levels, only scratches the surface. Yet it’s still formidable. When we were all rocking to the music, we’re reacting and responding—the synapses were just firing off, man.

On some level we’re everything and everywhere. For somebody like myself, an artist, the challenge is to embrace that knowledge and then to have that become part of my awareness about myself, about my history, about my mom… to give the animating force of our history its existence, to let it manifest in everything I do. How I raise my child, how I communicate with my loved ones, everything, all of it. Does that make sense?

BLVR: It makes absolute sense. I’m gonna take it somewhere because of your use of the word we. You mean all of us, right? All of humanity? All of who we are?

DL: Yes, well, I’m speaking about humanity, but I’m also speaking about African descendant humanity, because (a), to state the obvious, that’s a particular reality, and (b) it’s our reality.

BLVR: One of the video installations in that exhibit charts Black presence in Great Britain through the slave trade, then through migration—going back to the 1700s—and how music, or the sound of us, had to follow. There’s a moment in a video from the 1960s when a young dub artist reflects on the class and race divide of the time, and the irony of Black music in white record shops, living rooms, and on the airwaves. He says, “Our music goes where we can’t.”

DL: I didn’t see that, but I’m hearing you. That’s profound, that’s right.

BLVR: I think that speaks to all Black performance.

DL: Absolutely, because there are always those who are trying to constrain, restrain, suppress.

One of the reactions I was having fairly consistently at that exhibition was that I found myself responding to references to the first Black artist to blah, blah, blah… And I was irritated. And I think what irritated me was that the larger, dominant cultural and social forces allowed this one Black person in, so now they can say, This was the first Black person; this was the first time. But don’t you know there was so much more where that came from? If y’all would just… [Laughing] But they can’t, they can’t help themselves. Bless their hearts. So, anyhow. That is an acknowledgment of the power we come with, and one of the identifying, ever-present characteristics of Black people everywhere, but certainly of Black British, which is the attempt to bust out of the constraints. To take the chains off.

V. “MY SALVATION IS WITHIN MYSELF”

BLVR: You were on a promotional tour, I believe not long ago, for UnPrisoned, and you and Kerry Washington made an appearance on The Breakfast Club. First of all, I was struck by the ease between the two of you, the camaraderie, the respect, the appreciation. All that is apparent, particularly during a moment when Kerry Washington says of you, “Delroy is one of our national treasures.” Do you remember her saying that?

DL: I do.

BLVR: And she went on to say you are part of her Mount Rushmore of great actors. Those are two references that fix you in a place and fix you in an identity. There’s something in your cadence, in your aesthetics, and in your ethos that is deeply urban, urbane, Southern, all those things that I equate with a Black American identity. So that’s what I mean by I’m “fixing you in place” in that way. But there’s a complexity to that. I want to know how you feel about how I’m claiming you. I think a lot of Black American audiences do, and I want to know your thoughts about it.

DL: That’s a beautiful thing. I can’t say too much in response, because you said it. And what I mean by that is: Oh god, the kind of terminology you used, and the terminology that Kerry, as a colleague of mine, was using to describe me and to describe what I mean to her, how she’s responded to my work, how she’s responding to the two of us making work together—those comments, they speak for themselves. So I should allow them to speak on their own terms, and just live and breathe and be out in the world. My job is to continue to be a creative worker and make my best efforts at creative output wherever, however, I’m able. It’s all fundamentally really affirming, because you’re speaking about how you reacted and responded to my work as an actor. Right?

BLVR: Right. We’ve been talking about your ability to embody so many identities, which makes me think of DuBois’s “double consciousness”: two warring souls in one dark body. And you’ve got this dual—or I’ll call it global—citizenship that’s both Black and British. But in claiming you—as a stubborn Southerner and as a longtime film aficionado, particularly of Black film—I’ve always and will probably continue see you as a Black American actor. Even though you’re a Black British actor.

DL: And that’s OK. You know why it’s OK? I say that my career was birthed in the United States. And you know why it’s extra fine to say that, why it’s important to say that? It’s very simple, Erica. I could not have had the career or the life that I’ve had here. I could not.

BLVR: Why?

DL: Oh my god, how much time do we have? Because of empire, the continued entrenchedness of empire and how empire directly impacts and influences the position of Black people within the United Kingdom. There is a consistent, ubiquitous glass ceiling through which the majority of Black British actors do not go. They don’t pierce that veil. What do they do? They go to America. Idris Elba. David Oyelowo. There are others. So I am completely fine being referred to as an African American actor. That’s where my career was born, has grown, and has flourished.

BLVR: But we have so firmly claimed you in the pantheon of Black actors that I think I’m worried there’s a part of us that refuses to see a part of you.

DL: I don’t think so. I’m not quite sure why you’re saying that. Here’s the irony: I don’t feel unseen in that way. And that’s a big word. Broadly speaking, I don’t feel underappreciated. I feel appreciated. But certainly there have been episodes of not being seen along the way, and there continue to be episodes. I’ll give you an example. The Academy chose not to “see” my work in Da 5 Bloods. And I’m saying “see” in quotes. BAFTA [the British Academy of Film and Television Arts], the British version of the Academy, chose not to “see” my work. The Golden Globes chose not to “see” my work as an actor. The SAG [Screen Actors Guild] Awards chose not to “see” my work.

BLVR: But the public saw the work, and deemed it work that needed to be recognized by all those institutions. And as we sit here, we’re putting quotes around the ability of those institutions to “see,” because they’re not particularly your audience. They are an audience, but they’re also involved in and attuned to those methods you mentioned that may suppress, control, and contain.

DL: Yes, I have a relationship, whether or not I want to, with those “institutions.” Because I work in Hollywood, I work inside that construct. So, look, I don’t want to harp on that. I raise that just as an example of not being “seen.”

BLVR: I remember, in one of the first phone conversations we ever had, you were in Oakland at a grocery store. And as you were making your way to the checkout line, a woman stopped you—a Black woman, a Black American. She saw you and she said, “I know you.” In all her excitement and love, she began gushing about the roles she’d seen you in. That moment reminded me of bumping into someone you did not expect to see at a family reunion, and then tracing back the ways you’re related. There was a kind of claiming—she was claiming you.

DL: Yes, and you asked me, What does it mean to be seen? It means everything, particularly in the context of those areas of the industry that do not “see” me. So, on some level, my salvation is within myself—the ability, the capability, the will I have to continue working. And it also resides in my audiences: people like yourself, the woman in the grocery store, the people in the British Library this afternoon. It resides there.

BLVR: I cannot help but think of stopping by Peckham Hill to see the large-scale murals of Black British actors.⁴ You were standing near your portrait and a young brother walked by and said, “I see you.”

There were several encounters with folks who stopped to talk with you about your work, people of all walks of life who recognized you—who saw you. I am remembering in particular, as we were leaving Peckham Hill, the young British Caribbean woman, an aspiring actress, who stopped to talk and who knew the very hospital you were born in. That’s how much you mean to these audiences as well.

DL: And that means the world to me. I made a little joke—I think I said something flip. But yes, she knew that.

BLVR: She knew that. It meant something to her. It told her something about herself.

DL: Yes. That’s exactly right.

[1] The scene has become a cult classic: Mekhi Phifer, as Strike, is an hour late for his shift bagging crack. Delroy, as Rodney Little, pulls up, as a frustrated father would, and orders Strike to get his ass into the car. As they ride, Strike talks back. Little stops the car, thumps Strike in his notoriously sore gut, then grabs the nape of the young man’s neck, forcing his head down, and places a gun in his mouth.

[2] This is the second of Wilson’s ten-play Century Cycle, chronicling Black life shortly after Reconstruction and into Jim Crow.

[3] Curated by Dr. Aleema Gray and MyKaell Riley, Beyond the Bassline is a multimedia exploration of the uncanny creation of Black music in Western spaces in the wake of the transatlantic slave trade, from classical to rhythm and blues, lovers’ rock, hip-hop, and beyond.

[4] This is a series of striking sepia portraits, by photographer Franklyn Rodgers and conceptualized by Fraser James’s organization Underexposed Arts, that includes David Oyelowo, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, and Idris Elba.