Lifestyle
No matter what happens at the Oscars, Delroy Lindo embraces ‘the joy of this moment’
Delroy Lindo is nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actor for his role in Sinners.
Rebecca Cabage/Invision/AP
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Rebecca Cabage/Invision/AP
Over the course of his decades-long career on stage and in Hollywood, Sinners actor Delroy Lindo has experienced firsthand what he calls the “disappointments, the vicissitudes of the industry.”
On Feb. 22, at the BAFTA awards in London, Lindo and Sinners co-star Michael B. Jordan were the first presenters of the evening when a man with Tourette syndrome shouted a racial slur.
Initially, Lindo says, he questioned if he had heard correctly. Then, he says, he adjusted his glasses and read the teleprompter: “I processed in the way that I process, in a nanosecond. Mike did similarly, and we went on and did our jobs.”
Lindo describes the BAFTA incident as “something that started out negatively becoming a positive.” A week after the BAFTAs, he appeared with Sinners director Ryan Coogler at the NAACP awards.
“The fact that I could stand there in a room predominantly of our people … and feel safe, feel loved, feel supported,” he says. “I just wanted to officially, formally say thank you to our people and to all of the people who have supported us as a result of that event, that incident.”
Sinners is a haunting vampire thriller about twins (both played by Jordan) who open a juke joint in 1930s Mississippi. The film has been nominated for a record 16 Academy Awards, including best actor for Jordan and best supporting actor for Lindo, who plays a blues musician named Delta Slim.
This is Lindo’s first Oscar nomination; five years ago, many felt his performance in the Spike Lee film Da 5 Bloods deserved recognition from the Academy. When that didn’t happen, Lindo admits he was disappointed, but he had no choice but to move on.
“I have never taken my marbles and gone home,” he says. “And I want to claim that I will not do that now. I will continue working.”
Interview highlights
On his preparation to play Delta Slim
Various people have mentioned … [that] my presence reminds them of an uncle or their grandfather, somebody that they knew from their families, and that is a huge compliment, but more importantly than being a compliment, it’s an affirmation for the work. My preparation for this started with Ryan sending me two books, Blues People, by Amiri Baraka — who was [known as] LeRoi Jones when he wrote the book — and Deep Blues, by Robert Palmer.
Lindo, shown above in his role as Delta Slim, says director Ryan Coogler “created a sacred space for all of us” on the Sinners set.
Warner Bros. Pictures
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Warner Bros. Pictures
In reading those books and then referencing those books, continuing to reference those throughout production, I was given an entrée into the worlds, the lifestyles of these musicians. There’s a certain kind of itinerant quality that they moved around a lot. The constant for them is their music, so that there is this deep-seated connection to the music.
On being Oscar-nominated for the first time — and thinking about other Black actors, including Halle Berry and Lou Gossett Jr., who had trouble getting work after their wins
I will not view it as a curse, because I am claiming the victory in this process, no matter what happens. … In terms of this moment, I absolutely am claiming, as much as I can, the joy of this moment. I’m not saying I don’t have trepidation, I do. It’s the reason I was not listening to the broadcast this year when the nominations were announced. I did not want to set myself up. But I’m … attempting as much as I can to fortify myself and know in my heart that I will continue working as an actor. I absolutely will.
On being “othered” as a child because of his race
Because my mom was studying to be a nurse they would not allow her to have an infant child with her on campus, so as a result of that, I was sent to live with a white family in a white working class area of London. … I was loved, I was cared for, but as a result of living with this family in this all-white neighborhood, I went to an all-white elementary or primary school. And I was literally the only Black child in an all-white school.
So one afternoon, after school had ended, I was playing with one of my playmates … And at a certain point in our game, a car pulls up, and this kid that I was playing with goes over to the car and has a very short conversation with whomever was in the car, which I now know was his parent, his father. He comes back and he … says, “I can’t play with you.” And that was the end of the game.
On the experience of writing his forthcoming memoir
It’s been healing, actually. I’m not denying that it has opened me up. I’ve been compelled to scrutinize myself. I’m using that word very advisedly, “scrutinized.” It’s a scrutiny, it’s an examination of oneself. But in my case, because a very, very, very significant part of what I’m writing has to do with re-examining my relationship with my mom. And so my mom is a protagonist in my memoir. I’m told by my editor and by my publisher that one of the attractions to what I’m writing is that it is not a classic “celebrity memoir.” I am examining history. I’m examining culture. I’m looking at certain passages of history through the lens of the “Windrush” experience [of Caribbean immigrants who came to the UK after World War II].
On getting a masters degree to help him write his mother’s story
My mom deserved it. My mom is deserving. And not only is my mom deserving, by extension, all the people of the Windrush generation are deserving. Stories about Windrush are not part of the global cultural lexicon commensurate with its impact. The people of Windrush changed the definition of what it means to be British. There are all these Black and brown people, theretofore members of what used to be called the British Commonwealth. And they were invited by the British government to come to England, the United Kingdom, to help rebuild the United Kingdom in the aftermath of the destruction of World War II. My mom was part of that movement. They helped rebuild construction, construction industry, transportation industry, critically, the health industry, the NHS, the National Health Service. My mom is a nurse.
The reason that I went into NYU was because my original intention was to write a screenplay about my mom. I wanted to write a screenplay about my mom because I looked around and I thought: Where are the feature films that have as protagonist a Caribbean female, a Black female, where are they? … I wanted to address that, I wanted to correct that, what I see as being an imbalance.
Ann Marie Baldonado and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
On Tuesday, during its cruise show in Biarritz, Chanel introduced a creation that was not so much a shoe as a sh—. Not a sandal but a san—. Just small bits of leather cupping the model’s heels, held in place by angel-hair straps tied over the instep. The model’s feet, from about mid-arch to the toes, were left naked to feel the plush ivory carpet on which they walked. I am sure they were thankful it was not a stark cement floor.
Chanel said the designer Matthieu Blazy “wanted to evoke the down-to-earth feeling of a woman coming out of the beach or the sea.” The result was, it said, “shoes that almost look like jewelry.”
Indeed, this design is gossamer to the point of becoming a metaphysical paradox. (I believe it was Freud who went mad positing when does a shoe stop being a shoe, right?) But really, these heel caps represent irrational, nonsensical luxury at the highest tier — shoes made for feet that never touch the ground. Maaaaybe these are for your private spread in Capri, not the lowly public beaches of Delaware. Also, these shoes — if they are produced, of course — provide the rich with a chance to show off their Chanel-caliber wealth, even while barefoot.
As stunty as these shoes are, it’s worth pointing out the extent to which fashion brands are reconsidering what a shoe can be and how to charge money for less and less coverage.
What is the success of Margiela’s cloven Tabi boots if not a testament to the fact that people want to turn their lower extremities into an alien form? We’re in the shadow of the Row’s $890 jellies and Alaïa’s $990 fishnet flats. It goes on. This spring, JW Anderson is selling flip-flops shaped like a Monstera leaf, and Balenciaga’s got a platform thong in satin.
Chanel has deduced that you can’t add to a shoe to make it extraordinary anymore. To cut through, you have to strip it all away. Or, I guess, strip it half away.
Fashion’s Most Insatiable Collector
A retrospective is opening today at the Design Museum in London on the A Bathing Ape founder, current Kenzo designer and world champion collector of stuff: the Japanese designer Nigo. When the museum first contacted me about the exhibition, which encompasses more than 700 artifacts, largely from the designer’s archive, I thought how could that be? Over the years, Nigo has had several highly publicized auctions of his holdings. Turns out, there was always more. Here are a few highlights from the show, which runs until October.
The custom denim jacket was made by Levi’s for Bing Crosby. As the story goes, Crosby was turned away at the Vancouver Hotel in 1951 for wearing denim, which was deemed déclassé. Smelling a PR opportunity, Levi’s made him a denim tux, which Nigo later bought and wore.
Growing up in Japan, Nigo was smitten by American musicians like Buddy Holly. He would later remake his version of Holly’s blocky-block eyeglasses and purchase a signed copy of the singer’s high school yearbook.
What’s notable about this 30ish-year-old sweatshirt, an early design for Nigo’s Bape label, is that it’s produced by Camber, a manufacturer in Pennsylvania. It’s a testament to how Japanese designers often hold American-made clothes in higher regard than many Americans do.
Ask Vanessa
Does my handbag need to match my shoes, my coat or what? Does that rule even matter anymore, and if so, where and when does it apply? — Madeleine, New York
The “matchy-matchy rule” — which is to say, the idea that you should match the color of your handbag to your shoes or your outfit — is a sort of postwar, midcentury-modern (or not-so-modern) trope, originally sold as an easy hack to demonstrate sophistication and attention to detail. Read more.
The Japanese T-shirts so many of you wanted to know about are …
A number of you have written to ask about the T-shirt in the photo illustration at the top of my article on Japanese designers. Unfortunately, that was just an illustration. Sorry!
If you are looking for something similar — a heavyweight tee with a sturdy neckline — the Uniqlo U T-shirts are close. As are those from Lady White Co. and Velva Sheen. My advice. though: Try eBay. I’ve found the bulk of my shirts by searching “vintage deadstock white T-shirt.” Simple white tees are ones of those things that were made better back in the day.
Other things worth knowing about:
Lifestyle
L.A. Affairs: Our flight felt like a first date. Would it continue after we landed at LAX?
When I was 30 years old, my agent told me I needed to go to Los Angeles to get some “West Coast credits.” I didn’t want to go because it meant I’d lose my precious rent-controlled apartment on Central Park West as well as the supportive New York theater community I’d worked so hard to get into. After graduating from Juilliard five years earlier, I was getting theater work in and around the city.
I didn’t think I was pretty enough to get work in Hollywood, but my agent disagreed. She had faith in me, so I reluctantly packed up my stuff and moved to Santa Monica with Gus, my German shepherd. A week after we arrived, the Northridge earthquake happened. I crouched under a table, holding Gus close. Aftershocks filled me with terror, and I wondered if California was telling me I wasn’t welcome.
Over the next few months L.A. slowly recovered, and I started going on auditions. Much to my amazement, I got hired to do a new play and got a couple of small roles on some sitcoms. In between gigs, I took Gus on long walks along the beach and found that I was starting to like California.
One afternoon, I went to a coffee shop in Santa Monica where a middle-aged red-headed guy with a beard was playing Van Morrison songs on his guitar.
After he finished, I thanked him, and we started talking. He explained that he was a neurologist at USC but loved to play guitar in his free time. I was intrigued. So when he asked me out, I said yes. He took me to dinner a few times in his snappy red Porsche, then invited me to join him for a weekend in Yosemite National Park.
As we were eating dinner in the quaint little cabin on our first night, he said he really liked me, but if our relationship was going to go anywhere, he wanted me to “get out of show business.” Did he seriously think I’d give up acting to be his girlfriend? That was a role I couldn’t and wouldn’t play. After that, I stopped taking his calls.
A few weeks later, I had to travel to Indiana for my grandfather’s funeral. On my way back to Los Angeles, I changed planes in Cincinnati, and as I sat down, a nice-looking, 30-something man with a boyish smile in the next seat gave me a welcoming nod. I nodded back, got a script from my bag and tried to read but promptly fell asleep.
Half an hour later, I woke up with a little drool seeping from the corner of my mouth. I laughed at myself, and the man with the boyish smile laughed with me.
“Sorry about the drool,” I said, wiping my face.
“It happens to the best of us,” he said with a smile.
I noticed a book in his hand. “What are you reading?”
“The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.”
“Sounds good.” I thought, “This guy must be pretty cool if he’s reading that book.” I looked forward to sitting next to him for the next three hours.
“I’m Martha, by the way.” I offered my hand.
“Nice to meet you Martha-by-the-Way. I’m Don.” We shook hands.
“Do you live in L.A.?”
“Silver Lake, and you?” he asked.
“Santa Monica. Are you a native Californian?”
“No, I’m from Pennsylvania. That’s where I’m coming from now,” he said.
He seemed so nice and normal. I worried he might be married, so I asked, “Do you have family in Los Angeles?”
“No, just me,” he said with a smile. I hoped that meant he was single.
He gestured to the script on my lap, “Is that a script you’re reading?”
“Yeah, I have an audition for ‘Diagnosis Murder.’ Maybe I’ll get to work with Dick Van Dyke.”
“I hope you get it.” He sounded genuinely supportive, which was so different from the neurologist’s response to my work.
“Thanks. Me too. What do you do?”
He said he’d studied filmmaking at the University of Texas at Austin and had made a few films, but now he split his time between the press box at Dodger Stadium, charting pitches for Major League Baseball, and judging scripts for the Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I was impressed.
The rest of our flight felt like a first date, complete with dinner and a movie. When we landed at Los Angeles International Airport, I got nervous because I wanted him to ask for my number but worried he might consider me geographically undesirable since we lived on opposite sides of L.A.
As we headed toward baggage claim, he asked if I wanted to get together for coffee sometime. I said yes, and we exchanged numbers. Don’s smiling blue eyes and witty conversation had me feeling giddy at a time when I least expected it. The universe had taken my grandfather but had given me a new friend.
A week later he drove all the way to Santa Monica to take me to coffee. When we finished, he suggested we go to a movie, so we went to see “The Last Seduction,” a neo-noir thriller. During our discussion afterward, I learned how much Don knew about filmmaking, and from then on we started spending Saturday afternoons at the academy, watching screenings of new films for free since he worked there.
Don also introduced me to the joys of hiking in Griffith Park and the Santa Monica Mountains. Being with him felt so right. He was unlike anyone I’d ever met, childlike and grown-up at the same time, goofy and intellectual. But the most important thing was that he wasn’t asking me to change. He accepted me for who I was.
As Don and I grew closer, my desire to return to New York faded. After six months of dating, we decided to live together and rented an old Craftsman home in Echo Park, which sat at the top of a hill that overlooked Dodger stadium and Elysian Park.
A few years later, we got married and bought a house in Glassell Park, where we still live today. I came to Los Angeles to find work, but ended up finding so much more.
The author is a freelancer and storyteller who lives in Glassell Park with her husband, two dogs and four quail.
She’s on Instagram: @marthathompsonbooks.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
Steven Patrick Lynch made Madison Ashley Greco laugh when he walked up to the counter at Anderson’s Frozen Custard in Tonawanda, N.Y., where she worked as a cashier, in January 2019.
“What would you recommend: the roast beef or the lemon ice?,” Lynch asked her, knowing he would order both.
“Well, one’s a dinner, and one’s a dessert,” she responded.
She already thought he was cute when he walked into the ice cream shop, but when he started ordering, his humor won her over. After Lynch paid with his credit card, she took notice of his name at the bottom of the receipt.
Greco went home after work that night and couldn’t stop thinking about him. She managed to find his X account and followed him. A few minutes later, he sent her a message: “Wow, I’m impressed.”
They had their first date five days later at the local shopping mall, walking around and people watching. “By the time we knew it, we were lapping around the mall for three or four hours,” Greco said. Two months later, he asked her to be his girlfriend.
At the time, Lynch, now 32, was about a year sober, and Greco, now 26, was supportive of his journey.
“Instead of going to the bar and getting a beer, I would just go to Anderson’s and get a custard,” he said. “It was awesome seeing my girl and visiting her at work.”
They soon discover an unexpected connection. They both had grown up watching wrestling with their siblings, and they even realized that they had been at the same World Wrestling Entertainment “Armageddon” event in Buffalo in 2008, when he was 14 and she was 9. But both had drifted away from the sport for years.
They rediscovered their love for wrestling, and in March 2020, they went to their first WWE event together. It was one of their last public outings before the Covid-19 pandemic. By June, they had moved into an apartment together in Buffalo.
“Being home and having so much more free time, we picked up where we left off as kids with watching weekly,” Lynch said. “Every Monday night was ‘Raw,’ Friday night was ‘SmackDown.’ Now, Tuesday, they have ‘NXT.’”
They also rewatched old events they were nostalgic about and got into wrestling reality TV shows, like “Total Divas,” “Total Bellas” and “Miz & Mrs.”
They love the theatrics of WWE.
Lynch, who graduated from Niagara University with a bachelor’s degree in sports management, always loved sports. Greco, an independent house cleaner, has always been a reality TV fan. “It’s kind of a meshing of the two together,” Lynch said of their interests. (He now cares for his grandparents full time. They had invited him to move into their home when he became sober.)
[Click here to binge read this week’s featured couples.]
At the 50th birthday celebration of Greco’s mother in Rincon, Puerto Rico, in October 2024, Lynch, who had said he couldn’t be there because of work, surprised her on the last day of the trip with a pear-shaped diamond ring by Neil Lane, the jewelry designer for “The Bachelor,” a show she loves.
Shortly after the proposal, in January 2025, Lynch was diagnosed with a bladder cyst and underwent surgery to remove it in April. He was out of work for four months. “I had enough to pay all our bills and make ends meet, but definitely not enough to pay what most people are paying for weddings these days,” said Lynch, adding that they otherwise “definitely would have started saving for a wedding and making plans a lot sooner.”
But that turned out to be “a minor setback for a major comeback,” he said.
The “major comeback” came on April 16, when they were married in Las Vegas by Michael Mizanin, better known as The Miz and Greco’s favorite wrestler.
After spotting a post on X about getting married during WrestleMania, the annual professional wrestling event, Greco applied. About two hours after she submitted an application on a Thursday, she received a phone call explaining that they were selected to be married the following Thursday. They immediately began scrambling to book flights.
The ceremony, organized by ESPN and WWE, was held in a wrestling ring set up at the Viva Las Vegas Wedding Chapel, where 16 friends and relatives cheered as The Miz led the ceremony. Kalin Ivanov, an ordained minister at the chapel, signed the marriage license.
After the ceremony, the couple had an impromptu celebration at In-N-Out Burger before hopping from casino to casino, Lynch wearing a WWE belt the entire time. Greco had proposed back to him with the belt in January 2025. “He deserved his special moment, too, because he blew me away with our engagement,” she said.
Lynch fully embraced the excitement of the moment. “I just felt like a million bucks everywhere we went,” he said. “I thought, ‘I am the WWE champion.’ I had my belt on. I had my dream girl on my arm. And we just got married.”
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