Al Weisel
Wesley Snipes: Sweet & Sour Snipes
By AI Weisel
US Magazine, September 1998, pp. 73, 112
First impressions are dangerous when it comes to Wesley Snipes. "When he came to pick me up for our first date," says Donna Wong, a slinky former model for Vidal Sassoon, "he was dressed in baggy pants and denim. I wore a dress." "She thought I was a real 'hood guy," says Snipes, laughing. "She told me later, 'How am I gonna relate to this guy? I'm from Michigan. I'm Chinese. He's black. What do we have in common?' Then we started talking, and she realized I wasn't as street as she thought I was." Two and a half years later, the two are still together, and today they're hanging out at China One, the Chinese restaurant they opened on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles four months ago.
But Wong's initial feelings about Snipes, 36, are understandable; he isn't easy to peg. Take the first two features being released by his production company, Amen Ra (more or less the name of the ancient Egyptian sun god, as well as an acronym for "African minds engaged 'n royal affairs"). Blade, which opened in August, is a blood-soaked $45 million action flick starring Snipes as a chopsocky vampire killer. Down in the Delta, directed by poet Maya Angelou and due at Christmas, is a quiet, moving $3 million drama about a black family that escapes the inner city for rural Mississippi, with Snipes in a small role as a successful lawyer. Angelou was surprised at first that Snipes would be interested in making such a low-key picture. But when she met him, she says, she soon realized he's "brainy rather than brawny."
"The objective is to keep it mixed up," says Snipes, peering through nonprescription wire-rim glasses, which give him a professorial look (though the bulging pecs straining his silk shirt remind you that it might be dangerous to challenge the grade on your midterm). "For nonwhite artists, if you don't have versatility, you have a short career."
Alternating between pumped-up action pictures like Passenger 57 and New Jack City and more thoughtful roles, such as the paraplegic in Waterdance, a drag queen in To Wong Foo and the Sensitive Male in Waiting to Exhale, Snipes has staked out a reputation as one of the most versatile performers in Hollywood. Is he an action star or a dramatic actor? "I'm a physical dramatic actor," he says, hedging.
Snipes' personal life, too, has run the gamut. "I used to go out to clubs until 3 in the morning," he says. "If I was lucky enough to not be alone, by 5 it's time to go to work. Then the opposite side; I was a Muslim for 10 years. I was married. Strictly monogamous. No alcohol. I'm suspended between both worlds; Hollywood and the streets."
He may have a fancy L.A. beach house and make millions of dollars per picture, but he doesn't forget where he came from. His large silver scarab ring, a gift from a teacher who is instructing him in ancient Egyptian philosophy (just one of many disciplines he has explored—from martial arts to African animism), is a reminder of his journey. "The beetle deposits its eggs in a ball of dung," says Snipes. "From that it has to eat its way out, and then it spreads its wings and flies away. We are born to a world of difficulty, and we have to feed on it so that we will spread our spiritual wings and fly away."
Snipes himself was born in an Orlando, Fla., housing project in 1962. He moved with his mother, Marion, to the Bronx when he was a year old and his parents divorced. His father, Rudolph, an Air Force engineer, didn't come around much. Marion, a teacher's assistant, always insisted that Snipes spend time in the library reading and even introduced him to martial arts when he was 12 to keep him off the streets. Aside from using his acting abilities to pick up girls ("When I didn't get that phone number," he says, "I'd weep'), the first test of his talent was in a junior-high production of Alice in Wonderland. "I played Alice," he says, noting that the role wasn't a forerunner to his drag turn in To Wong Foo—there simply weren't enough girls interested in acting. "I was supposed to act like I had taken some of the mushroom and was feeling all dizzy and intoxicated," he says. "Whatever I was doing, the whole assembly was laughing. The more they laughed, I kept doing more."
A teacher who saw his performance recommended that he go to Manhattan's High School for the Performing Arts, the school made famous by Fame. "Like in the movie, we'd dance in the lunchroom," he says. "We'd have a party every day." A few months before a crew arrived to actually shoot Fame at the school, however, Snipes' mother decided to move the family back to Orlando, a decision that still irks him. 'A lot of the kids in the movie were from my class," he says.
Looking back, though, Snipes concedes that the move was probably a good thing. 'A number of the cats I hung out with went through some real trials while I was away," he says. "In Florida, I ended up meeting my best friends, and it became even more creative." Snipes and his friends joined a summer-theater project called Struttin' Street Stuff, putting on puppet shows with songs that they wrote themselves. One of those friends, Victor McGauley, now works in Snipes' production company. Snipes is trying to persuade another friend, Edward Crosby, who works as a bus driver in Orlando, to come out to Los Angeles and work with him as well. "When we were all kids," says Crosby, "we vowed that if one of us made it big, we would help the others out. For the most part, Wes did." Snipes may not have forgotten his old friends, but he hates dwelling on the past. He rejects the suggestion that it might have been better growing up with two parents: "You see someone crying on television - 'I killed everybody in the post office because my dad didn't play catch with me when I was a kid.' That's a bunch of crap." When he's asked if he wishes he and his father had a better relationship, his face twists into paroxysms of discomfort. For a moment, he's speechless. Finally he manages to say, "For me it's not a sore spot, so I don't have the phrasing to say it's bad or it's good. It is what it is."
Nor does he think that his 1990 divorce from his wife, April (whom he married a year after graduating from the State University of New York at Purchase), has affected his 9-year-old son, Jelani. "He was a baby," Snipes says dismissively. Although he admits that his son wishes he could have his father around more, Snipes says that "as he gets older, he'll grow to understand.
"Some people are cut out to be stay-at-home fathers," Snipes continues, "and there are other cats who could die at that. Thomas Edison wasn't a great father. But we're not complaining. He's got the whole world as a family. Every time we flick on a light, we have to thank Daddy."
So what is important to Snipes? Does he want to be a great father, a great husband, a great actor? Snipes thinks about it for a while, looking genuinely perplexed. "I don't know," he finally says. "I haven't figured out exactly what I'm best at."
Angelou thinks that the actor's playing a father who tries to keep his family together in Down in the Delta was "very telling for Wesley. It's a good thing when a strong black man stays through rocky times. I think it was good for Wesley to comprehend that." She hopes audiences will see more of this "sensitive side" of Snipes.
Wong says she has seen that side of him emerge: "He said I've made him more of a gentleman, less guarded, more open."
And Snipes' old friend Crosby says that although Snipes "is a little cockier, which is understandable," he's still in many ways the kid Crosby knew back in Orlando. He plays a cassette of a 17-year-old Wesley Snipes performing "When I Look Inside Myself," one of the songs from Struttin' Street Stuff. A vulnerable, sweet teen-age voice, full of hope and pluck, pours out of the speakers. "I'm doing the best I can," he sings, "making the most of who I am."■
Al Weisel is the co-author, with Larry Frascella, of Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause, being published in October 2005.