Las Vegas Weekly

June 21, 2008 · 11:23 AM

Cheadle talks of his (brief) stand-up career and playing Sammy

By John Katsilometes

Don Cheadle is a serious actor -- except when he's not.

Photo: Getty Images

Don Cheadle sank into the large white couch and turned awkwardly to his left to answer questions from renowned film critic Elvis Mitchell. He looked uncomfortable, probably because he was.

“This is really disconcerting,” he said. Mitchell agreed, saying, “Let’s get down here and talk to people.” So they moved to the edge of the stage under the screen at theater No. 5 at Brenden Theaters at the Palms and held their hourlong session looking like two guys handing out on a park bench.

Cheadle was invited to this year’s CineVegas Film Festival to receive one of the event’s four Half Life Awards (Rosario Dawson, Viggo Mortensen and Sam Rockwell were also honored) and to promote the August 27 release The Traitor, in which he plays a onetime U.S. Special Operation officer suspected by an FBI agent played by Guy Pearce of heading an international conspiracy plot against the U.S., including a prison break in Yemen, a bombing in Nice and a raid in London. Pearce’s character pursues Cheadle around the world to uncover the truth.

It is not a comedy.

But Cheadle can be funny. Profane at times, but really funny. Mitchell remarked that one of Cheadle’s “real skills is comedy,” yet Cheadle is not offered many comedic roles. Cheadle shrugged and noted that he was actually a stand-up comic years ago – for less than a week. “I like comedy. I did stand-up for, uh, three nights,” he said, laughing. “So … I did an open-mic thing in Denver, Colorado -- my migrated hometown (Cheadle was born in Kansas City, Mo.) – and it was literally three nights. The first two nights, it was incredible. The last night, it wasn’t so good, and that’s why I said I wouldn’t do this anymore.”

Photo: Getty Images

Don Cheadle and Elvis Mitchell, off the couch and on the edge, at Brenden Theaters.

The reason: There’s nowhere to hide as a stand-up.

“It’s the worst thing. Dying onstage when you’re by yourself and nobody to pass the ball to – or blame – is really rough, really hard,” he said. “I said, ‘I don’t want to do that. I’d rather hide in the character with 20 other people, or blame the director (laughs). I love passing the blame.”

Mitchell – himself owning a Vegas-esque first name – said that since we were in Las Vegas, he had to ask Cheadle what it was like to portray the “compulsive entertainer” Sammy Davis Jr. in the HBO film, The Rat Pack. “In the script, the Sammy part wasn’t there for me. It got there, but it wasn’t there in the beginning,” Cheadle said. “It never dealt with Sammy’s self-identity with regard to racism, with regard to the dynamic that he had to deal with in being part of that group. He was always used for cannon fodder. Whenever they needed a quick joke, it was, ‘Let’s just bust this colored joke on Sammy,’ and he never really talked about that. And I’m waiting for the time he says, ‘Finally I just had to bust Dean in the (f-ing) mouth! I couldn’t take it anymore!’ I mean, it’s something he never talked about. This was one of those times you have to use your artistic license. We have to deal with it, because it is the elephant in the room. So in that movie, there is a look, onstage. I said, ‘If you can just have the camera onstage and have me joke back and forth and do the repartee and he says the thing about eating watermelon and spitting out the seeds, and have a camera onstage during those jokes and have me turn around for a second and have the mask come down, have that private moment to show what that must have really felt like, then turn back around and put it right back on again. We’ve gotta see behind that for just a second.”

After much discussion, the scene of Cheadle-as-Davis momentarily turning his pained face from the audience, was included in the movie. And that, they say, is acting.

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