The Big Fish

Laurence Fishburne has spent over half his life acting - so well that he's made himself into something of a mystery. Code goes in search of the man behind the mask.

Written by Eugene Robinson
Photography by Carlton Davis


Laurence Fishburne's perfectly iconographic moment playing air guitar on the back of a PT boat in Apocalypse Now and his perfectly unlikable Ike in What's Love Got to Do With It are seared into the collective American psyche. But for Fishburne, they are mere markers in a career that began at the age of ten and has always been about getting from the uncertain here to the definite now - fast.

Other actors talk the talk, but in the end their work, and nothing but, has you guessing that they're just moving their lips, while Fishburne is actually saying something. And with his first flick as director, Once in the Life (due out in April), that something would be those big-ticket items: love, life, the pursuit of happiness and the eventual (and inevitable) ass-beating tragedy. If it gets much better than this, we wouldn't know.

"You buy those trey bags? You remember those trey bags?"

Flatbush boys. Both of us. Flatbush, as in the avenue in Brooklyn, and Laurence Fishburne, as in the Tony-winning, Oscar-nominated, Emmy-toting actor. He presses the question: "You were one of those good boys, huh? Didn't smoke reefer?"

His laughter rumbles against the Grand Havana Room's early afternoon hustle, curling into this Beverly Hills club's blue crushed-velveteen couch; Fishburne fingers his large and unlit cigar and the point is made: He's the baddest mother in here. So bad that he never even lights that cigar. So bad he's sporting a running suit and he drove here. And finally, so bad that he talks about what he does and calls it Art (always with the big A) without the slightest hint or trace of smirking, self-reflexive postmodern irony. In other words: Like he means it.

"I wanted to be a doctor," the 38-year-old Fishburne muses. But that was plan C, well behind his lust for the life of the sideburned, Continental-driving New York Knicks mack daddy Walt "Clyde" Frazier. And even farther behind the place he found himself when plan A struck, jumping him like a New York mugger.

"I was standing on a basketball court and I had this epiphany," he says, his hands dancing around the space in front of him. "As an actor, I figured out I could be anything. The president. A housewife. Anything." So he chose "anything" and was off to Manhattan's Henry Street Theater, the Negro Ensemble Company and almost into the fabled Fame joint, Performing Arts High School. But along came Apocalypse Now, and Art with the big A intervened. One year later, at the age of 15, Fishburne found himself in the Phillippines, sporting fatigues and sharing the company of cinema giants, and started putting his hands around who he was in earnest.

"We were floating down the river and it was nighttime, and Francis [Ford Coppola] and Vittorio Storaro were talking about art. Film as art. Orson Welles, Cecil B. DeMille and on and on, and how these cats were really artists, and how they themselves were following in their footsteps, and I figured, If you guys are artists, so am I. I mean, I'm hanging out with you, so I must be one badass artist."

Bad enough to succumb to the big-ballitis that's caused lesser men to crash and burn in the hyphen supercollider that turns otherwise normal actors into actor-directors (think Costner). Once in the Life grew out of a one-act play he wrote, directed and starred in in 1994. It drills into the shrouded heart that beats at the center of all great tragedy and reckonings, where offended gods exact revenge on the hapless guilty and guilt-free alike. The names roll off of Fishburne's tongue - Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Ike Turner - and his love for them goes beyond an actor's love of challenge or a director's desire for what will win awards. When he says, surprising no one, "I am a tragedian," you feel yourself nodding: uh-huh.

"Look. Acting is a very dangerous thing. I act from a very dangerous place and I've acted all my life from this place, but I didn't realize it until I directed my [first] movie." Dangerous because of what it reveals and what it chooses not to conceal, and dangerous because at some point it just ceases to be acting and is just you, minus a disguise. Or maybe not even you, but the channeled essence of that something that the ancient Greeks thought inhabited all actors and that some called "the gods." Or at least the same something that caused other members of the cast and crew on 1993's What's Love Got to Do With It not to talk to him for the rest of the day after that movie's rape scene; and something that causes Fishburne to say, "I have no idea why."

"Hey…" A man approaches, hand extended. He spots my handheld recorder and says to me, finger spiraling into Fishburne's chest, "The greatest actor of our generation."

Fishburne leans back into a smile and introduces him as Joe Pants. It takes a beat or two before it registers. Pantoliano. From one character actor to another. Moving off to his own couch and his own table, Pantoliano waves, and the list of movies they've made together, as well as separately, jogs through the brainpan. The Matrix (in which he was Brutus to Fishburne's Caesar), The Fugitive, The King of New York, Bound, Searching for Bobby Fischer and on and on. Pantoliano knows of what he speaks.

The Grand Havana Room is filthy thick with juice, and it takes you a while to realize that despite the momentary flash and excitement generated by the Pitts, the Smiths, the Damons - the pretty boys - here is where the smart money bets. Good movie (Deep Cover) or bad (Fled). Fishburne (et al) is good no matter what, and it is this good-no-matter-what quality that is the sine qua non of style.

Simply put: These guys never suck.

Call it a semireligious appreciation for the transformative powers of craft. Or call it the purist's appreciation of a job well done. Whatever the label, Fishburne is decidedly and aggressively in pursuit of what matters to Fishburne, and when asked to guess at whether or not Hollywood is capable of correctly gauging talent, he says quickly, "I don't care."

"I just don't care whether Hollywood rewards talent or not," he says, fork stabbing at the snapper on his plate. "It doesn't matter. And when you focus on that kind of crap, then it's over. You might as well put a gun to your head and blow your brains out, because your focus should never be the reward." Easier to say if you're being well rewarded (read: getting paid), but before letting the matter drop, he rolls it around in his hand some more.

"I remember going home and seeing my grandfather. This is after Apocalypse Now was out, and he said to me,' Hey, boy? You still doing that little acting thing?' And I said, 'Well. Yeah, Pop.' And he said, 'But you still ain't got no job, right?' And I said, 'No, Pop. I still ain't got no job.' He said, 'Why don't you go take the test to become a cop? The police department's hiring. They got some good jobs over there.' Okay? My grandfather. Just oblivious. And that's fine, you know. But acting is storytelling, and explaining this story is who I am at my core. Acting was just the first medium in which I was able to work. And the reason I'm an artist is because of the place I work from. Not what I do. Not even so much how I do it, but where it comes from. I'm giving things from the very essence of myself and from communicating something."

The room holds its breath, as the moment stands poised between happening and not happening. And when it resolves itself into happened, you get the sense that this is all old news to Fishburne, because he's been there all along as the standard-bearer for Eros and Thanatos, love and death, good art and better art. Trying to do a dangerous thing and succeeding beyond any normal measure. As early afternoon slips into late afternoon, and the sun shifts behind the Los Angeles cloud cover, Fishburne peers out a window and says with no small amount of satisfaction, "I've built quite an extraordinary life.... And I like it."

Holler if you hear me, baby.