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My wife and I moved to New York on Halloween Night 1976. We drove right into the middle of that parade ’cause we were going to stay with some friends down in the Village. It was a great time to be an actor or be a Black actor in New York. I mean, Joe Papp had the Black-Hispanic Shakespeare Company, and Negro Ensemble Company was bustling. Billie Holiday Theatre. Henry Street theater. The Frank Silvera Writers’ Workshop was going on. And there was a really, really great group of actors running around there that we either worked together, auditioned together, or went to see each other work all the time. I was there when Morgan Freeman got plucked out of the theater world.And Wesley Snipes and Laurence Fishburne. I remember auditioning for Platoon, but Keith David used to always get all the jobs everybody wanted.

I don’t know how young people are in New York now, but we were a very big family. If I went to an audition that I knew I wasn’t going to get, I could always call somebody I knew that was better for it. It wasn’t a dog-eat-dog world. It was a very, very sharing and communal world.

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I was taught that if my character’s background is not there, give him one. How far in school did he go? Has he been in the military? Has he been in jail?

Even now, with Nick Fury, he had a whole other life that we hadn’t dealt with. Having the theatrical background allows me to imagine what nobody’s ever seen on film. And whether I talk about it or not, I carry that information around with me; I know who that person is or what their history is. When I hit the screen, a lot of times audience members go, I want to go with him. Because I’ve got something interesting happening in my body language or how I present myself. All those things I learned to do when I was on the stage.

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There’s no other reason to do something like The Hitman's Bodyguard other than wanting to be in that space with somebody like Ryan Reynolds, who’s just an enormous amount of fun to be with. I don’t think the Hitman’s Bodyguard is an A-list movie in anybody’s category. But I also know that if it’s me and Ryan and we’re having a good fucking time, a lot of people are going to watch it and they’re going to be like, This is fucking great. We changed the tone of that material because we did it.

Ryan is a savvy motherfucker. I knew him from when he and Scarlett Johansson got married. My wedding gift to them was a beehive. Scarlett was always talking about nature. So I had my assistant go out and buy 10 pounds of bees and then I bought them bee suits and the whole thing. They kept bees for a while. They got honey for a couple of years while they were married. And then one day the bees abandoned the hive or they abandoned the queen or some shit.

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In my opinion, the worst thing that happened to movie making is people stopped making movies on film. ‘Cause young directors have no idea how much it cost to make a movie. You had to process the film. You had to watch dailies, you had to hope it’s in focus. Sometimes you had rollouts; you had to stop, wait, change. Young directors don’t know anything about any of the things that it takes to make a movie that used to be part of the skill of making it. So they do take, after take, after take, after take, after take, after take, after take.

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