Entertainment
Jeffrey Wright wonders what's next. The Pacific Ocean, for starters
“I’d never had a meeting like that before in my career for any film that I’ve been a part of, and certainly not one that I was the lead in,” Jeffrey Wright says of a post-actors’ strike meeting that was filled with people planning out his promotional schedule for “American Fiction.”
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
Jeffrey Wright finished shooting “American Fiction” two Septembers ago and immediately, happily transitioned to becoming what he calls his daughter Juno’s “executive assistant,” helping her navigate her way through college applications and all the other stresses of a high school senior year. When she went off to school in the fall, Wright thought he’d feel liberated, that he’d enjoy, as he puts it, “a new phase of freedom.”
“But I realized that I’ve been doing the father thing for 22 years now, and I think I’m finally good at it,” Wright says, punctuating the thought with a laugh. (He also has a son, Elijah, with ex-wife Carmen Ejogo.) “Being a father has kind of been the primary thing I’ve been … and now I miss it.” He pauses, as he does often in conversation. Wright is a man who considers every word. “Yeah … I wonder what’s next.”
We’d just met 15 minutes ago. Being a father is how you see yourself, I ask. More than an actor?
“Oh, f— yeah,” Wright responds without hesitation.
“So, in a way, my life seems purposeless now,” Wright continues. “It certainly seems empty in multiple ways.”
This sounds serious. And it is, though two things should also be noted up front. First, pretty much everything Wright says in his deliberate, resonant voice echoes with meaning, with contemplation, with weight. He could read the Taco Bell menu — chalupa su-preme — and convince you that it’s a lyrical wonder.
Second: Wright’s doing OK. Really. He’s just a man given to introspection.
In the fall, Wright had time, too much time, really, to reflect. The actors’ strike prevented him from taking a job or going to the Toronto International Film Festival, where “American Fiction” premiered and won the event’s audience award. Wright would have loved to be there and talk about playing Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, an author and professor, who, frustrated with his career, drunkenly cranks out “My Pafology,” a pandering book that fully embraces cliches about the urban Black experience. Improbably or maybe naturally — the film lets you decide — it becomes a bestseller. Monk, an artist, doesn’t know how to feel about its success. After all, he wrote it in a fit of pique.
Jeffrey Wright, left, as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison and Sterling K. Brown as his less responsible brother Cliff Ellison in “American Fiction.”
(Orion Pictures)
So, yes, much to discuss — only Wright couldn’t say a word. So instead he headed west from his Brooklyn home to a Malibu rental just down the coast from fried seafood destination Neptune’s Net, where he keeps his surfboards, truck and bicycle. Time to work on himself. Mind. Body. Spirit. Find some decent waves. Power through eight-mile bike rides through the hills. (“I’ve got a little e-assist,” he says of his electric ride. “I try to use it in moderation … but it is uphill.”) Regular workouts at a wellness center, doing Pilates, acupuncture and weight training.
“I was trying to get back to the old ways a little bit, to the extent that that’s possible in these older times,” Wright, says. He recently turned 58. He knows he’s not going to get back to the shape he was in when he played lacrosse in high school and college. He couldn’t, even with all the training in the world. That’s because when he was 24, Wright was playing Puck in a touring production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and at the end of the first act, he leaped offstage and tore his ACL.
“The loudest silent scream in the history of theater,” Wright says.
Did you return to stage?
“Limping,” Wright says. “But, yeah, there was a second act to do.”
Being “young and foolish,” he never got the knee fixed until eight years later when it locked up on a backswing playing golf. It’s still not great, but being out in the ocean helps. Wright started surfing about a dozen years ago and became passionate about the sport when he moved to Los Angeles after getting cast on the HBO series “Westworld” in 2015. For the show’s first two seasons, he lived in Santa Clarita. Then he moved downtown. Then to Marina del Rey. Finally he got this seasonal rental, just south of the Ventura County line. It’s his through March.
“The single advantage of living out here is the Pacific Ocean,” Wright says. “It’s just a magnificent creature. I could never leave it.”
The morning after the actors’ strike ended in November, Wright opened his email and found a message from one of the “American Fiction” producers. You want to come in for a meeting? When? Tomorrow morning, 10 a.m. at MGM. When Wright showed up, he was taken aback. There were two dozen people in the room brimming with energy and ideas, spitballing how to support the film. One person handed him a tentative promotional schedule. It ran through March.
“I’d never had a meeting like that before in my career for any film that I’ve been a part of, and certainly not one that I was the lead in,” Wright says.
Really? Not with the three Bond movies, the “Hunger Games” trilogy or the last “Batman” reboot? Or with “Westworld” or the two movies he made with Wes Anderson?
“Nope,” he answers. “Never.”
“The single advantage of living out here is the Pacific Ocean,” Jeffrey Wright says. “It’s just a magnificent creature. I could never leave it.”
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)
When Wright earned his first Oscar nomination a couple of weeks ago, that tentative schedule they gave him became permanent, including more post-screening Q&As, more career retrospectives (“it’s like your life passing in front of your eyes”), more interviews like this lunch conversation we’re having, all of which inspire the kind of “intense self-reflection” that Wright hopes might end up being a constructive exercise somewhere down the line.
After he heard he was nominated, the first person Wright called was his 94-year-old aunt, the woman who helped his late mother raise him. (Wright’s father died when he was 1.) She lived with Wright for a couple of years until Wright had a house built for her near the Chesapeake Bay, where the sisters grew up.
“I called her and asked, ‘Did you hear any news this morning?’ ” Wright says, smiling. He made the call because his aunt’s eyesight isn’t so good. “She said, ‘Oh, I heard. Congratulations.’ ” Pause. “ ‘But you know, you should have been nominated a long time ago. You should have been nominated for “Basquiat.’ ” Wright laughs. “That’s the way she is.”
The aunt was the first person he called, but not the first person he talked to that morning.
“I was in my lounge/office area in Brooklyn. I actually grabbed some dumbbells that my son had in there for whatever reason,” Wright remembers, pantomiming doing bicep curls at a furious pace. “And I glanced at my phone and a message pops up. ‘Congratulations.’ And then I looked up and saw the picture of my mom on the bookshelf.” He smiles. “We had an exchange.”
Wright’s mother, Barbara Whiting-Wright, had come up several times during our conversation. An attorney, she was the first Black woman to serve as customs law specialist for the U.S. Customs Service, where she began her legal career in 1964. She also had season tickets to Washington’s professional football team and a record collection that included Miles Davis’ “Live-Evil.” She died four years ago from colon cancer.
“As far as my life goes, she was a visionary,” Wright says. “My mom basically lined up a series of doors around me from a very early age. And they all led to someplace good.”
“Pretty tough too,” Wright adds, making sure he painted a full picture. “She had expectations.”
Did you feel like you met them?
“When I described to a very good friend of mine how I had taken care of my mom at the end of her time, he said, ‘Her investment paid off,’ ” Wright says. “He knew my mom pretty well. I think what I had described to him, what was reasonably comforting to me, was that she trusted me. And that was cool.”
Wright looks down. Our table has been cleared. We’re well past the time we said we’d talk, and he’s had adequate introspection for the day.
“All right, enough of this,” he says, rising, extending his hand. Time to head home.
Too late to surf? Probably. But Wright already has one session circled on his calendar.
“I’ll be out in the Pacific on the morning of the Oscars,” he tells me. “It calms the system.”
The sixth outing in the director’s chair for filmmaker Kirk Jones, I Swear dramatizes the real-life story of touretter John Davidson (played by Robert Aramayo). Tourette’s Syndrome, for those unfamiliar with the condition, is a nervous system disorder that causes various tics, the most prolific being erratic and explicit language. However, as I Swear expertly showcases, the syndrome is far more than ill-timed outbursts of curse words. Davidson’s story is one of societal frustration, finding your people (both with and without the condition), and using your voice to help others rise. The subject and subject matter are handled with absolute care and understanding under Kirk’s measured vision and Robert Aramayo’s BAFTA-winning performance.
The film kicks off with the greatest exclamation to democracy ever uttered (*%#! the Queen!), as a nervous John Davidson prepares himself before entering an awards ceremony hosted by Britain’s royal family. Right away, the film tells us what it is: a triumph over adversity that blends humor and human drama with education. It’s an important setup, as the film flashes back to Davidson’s 1980s youth, where we see his time as a star soccer recruit flatline as his condition takes hold. Davidson’s life spirals from there. Some aspects, like school bullying and accidental run-ins with authority figures, are expected but important to empathizing with young Davidson’s (young version, played with heart by Scott Ellis Watson) new everyday life. The more tragic, a complete meltdown of his family system, is unsettling if quick. His father (Steven Cree) is never given enough screen time to explore his alcohol coping tendencies. However, his mother Heather’s descent into easy fixes and blaming is crushing and convincing. Harry Potter series actress Shirley Henderson (Moaning Myrtle) gives a layered performance as Heather. Someone who loves her son, but also feels cursed by him as the entire family exits the picture. It’s bitter, she’s tired, and fills each conversation with ‘only medication and your mother can save you’ energy.
From there, the viewer and Davidson find refuge in a host of characters. Maxine Peake plays Dottie, the mother of a childhood friend and a retired mental health nurse. Screen vet Peter Mullan plays maintenance man Tommy Trotter. Together, they help Davidson build a life and an understanding of himself that carries the film forward into its second half. After that, the film is primarily a 3-actor show as director Kirk fills the screen with these tour-de-force performances. Peake and Mullan are great vessels to get the film’s main message across: patience, love, and a shared responsibility between the diagnosed and those who understand their struggle can help change the path for people quickly left behind by a normative world. Together, they are the soul of the movie, with the filmmakers clearly hoping the audience will follow their lead after they exit the theater (in my case, the beautiful Oriental Theater for the Milwaukee Film Festival). Both performances are perfectly warm and reflective and shouldn’t be left out in discussions of I Swear.
I say this because the movie is anchored by The Rings of Power actor Robert Aramayo, who leaves Elrond’s elf ears behind to bring an acute naturalism to his performance of main character John Davidson. Aramayo’s physicality and timing of the fitful Tourettes Syndrome never feel out of place or overplayed. In fact, the movie as a whole does an amazing job of never veering into sentimentality. While many moviegoers left with tissues dabbing their eyes, the filmmaking never felt like it was forcing that reaction out of audiences. It straddles the line between feel-good and reality with every story beat and lands squarely on the side of letting the real inform our feelings. Anyone with an ounce of empathy will grasp the film’s message and hopefully take it with them into life.
I Swear continues at the Milwaukee Film Festival on Tuesday, April 21st, and releases nationwide April 24th, 2026, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
Several private equity firms and Hollywood power players, including United Talent Agency and longtime agent Patrick Whitesell, have expressed interest in buying parts of Casey Wasserman’s music and sports management firm after it abruptly went up for sale.
Wasserman became ensnared in controversy earlier this year after his salacious decades-old emails to Ghislaine Maxwell, an accomplice of child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, were released as part of the U.S. Justice Department’s trove of Epstein files.
The agency auction is in the early stages, according to three people close to the process but not authorized to comment.
Earlier this week, several interested parties submitted proposals to meet a preliminary deadline in the auction, two of the sources said.
The company, which changed its name to the Team last month, is expected to be valued at around $3 billion.
Providence Equity Partners holds the majority stake. The private equity firm has discussed selling the entire company or carving off Wasserman’s minority interest. Providence also has considered selling the bulk of the firm and staying on as a minority investor, one of the sources said. Another scenario could involve separating, then selling the individual business units that make up the Team.
Wasserman and Providence’s company boasts an enviable roster of music artists, including Kendrick Lamar, Coldplay and Ed Sheeran. Its sports marketing practice is viewed as particularly lucrative and has potential to grow in value as big dollars flow into sports that draw large crowds.
Wasserman, who declined to comment, has a veto right over any sale of the company that he has spent a quarter of a century building.
UTA, which also declined to comment, is among the most aggressive suitors, the sources said. The Team’s sports marketing and music representation divisions would dramatically boost the Beverly Hills agency’s profile and client roster.
Whitesell, former executive chairman of Endeavor, separately has been motivated to make investments in sports, media and entertainment since last year when he left the talent agency that he and Ari Emanuel built. Whitesell launched a new firm with seed money from private equity firm Silver Lake, and last spring he started WIN Sports Group to represent professional football players.
Whitesell wasn’t immediately available for comment.
European investment firm Permira also has expressed interest, according to a knowledgeable source. Permira declined to comment.
The New York Times first reported that Permira, UTA and Whitesell had expressed interest.
The sales process is expected to stretch into summer, the knowledgeable people said. The auction could become complicated particularly if Providence decides to unwind the business.
For example, UTA could not buy the entire company because of the Brillstein television unit. The agency is bound by an agreement with the Writers Guild of America that prevents it from owning television production.
Investment bank Moelis & Company is managing the sale. A representative of the firm declined comment.
Wasserman also is the chairman of LA28, the nonprofit group that will be staging the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles in two years.
Following revelations of Wasserman’s 2003 emails with Maxwell, several musicians and athletes — led by pop artist Chappell Roan and soccer star Abby Wambach — said that, to stay true to their values, they would leave the agency then known as Wasserman.
Wasserman apologized to his staff for “past personal mistakes” and said he would sell the agency.
He had limited dealings with Epstein, flying on the financier’s jet along with former President Clinton for a September 2002 humanitarian trip through Africa.
Wasserman, a prolific Clinton fundraiser whose legendary grandfather, Hollywood titan Lew Wasserman, helped the Democrat win the 1992 presidential election, was joined on Epstein’s jet by his then-wife, Laura, actor Kevin Spacey, Epstein, Maxwell — who was convicted of sexual abuse in 2021 — and others, including security agents.
The LA28 board’s executive committee unanimously voted to keep Wasserman as chairman, citing his “strong leadership” of the Games.
Pizza Movie (2026) Director: Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney, Star: Gaten Matarazzo and Sean Giambrone
Somehow, I got through an hour of this movie. I was seconds away from turning off in the first fifteen minutes because of the juvenile humor. Pizza Movie is too silly, repetitive, and the characters are annoying. Stranger Things Gaten Matarazzo and Sean Giambrone star as college friends, Jack and Montgomery. College angles are rarely seen in films right now, and that’s the one saving grace of the film. Similar to high school, people are also trying to fit in. The story and visuals were too corny. You can only watch someone’s head exploding for so long without letting yours.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (2026) Director: Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, Stars: Chris Pratt, Charlie Day, Anya Taylor-Joy
I never saw the first Super Mario Brothers Movie when it was out, but I heard it got positive reviews. My brother always loved playing Super Mario video games as a kid, and I’d watch him. I tagged along with my friends to see Super Mario Galaxy Movie, and it’s a cute and fun film. I like it when movies explore the video game world. The animation creates unique worlds and characters. The characters are split into their own storylines, and for me, I felt like it worked. It adds more action, especially for kids who are seeing the films.
Emily in Paris Season 5 (2025) Creator: Darren Star, Stars: Lily Collins and Ashley Park
After a bright spot in season 4, I thought season 5 of Emily in Paris would continue its growth in the story and its protagonist, but no, it’s all drained out in the usual Emily (Lily Collins) mishaps. Ashley Park (Mindy) has become too good for this show. Emily and Mindy waste several opportunities because of their love lives. The whole relationship angle is ruining it. I don’t understand why Alfie (Lucien Laviscount) is still in the show. I thought writers learned their lesson, but by the last episode, they’re continuing to bring the past into an apparent season 6.
Sarah’s Oil (2025) Director: Cyrus Nowrasteh, Stars: Naya Desir-Johnson and Zachary Levi
There’s always history lurking right beneath our noses. Sarah’s Oil (2025) tells the true story of Sarah Rector, an Oklahoma-born African American girl who became the first black female millionaire in the U.S. Naya Desir-Johnson is fierce and driven as Sarah. Zachary Levi is also along for the ride as Bert, a man who helps Sarah. Kate (Bridget Regan) was another favorite character as an intelligent woman. Cyrus Nowrasteh was drawn to the subject for its story and its themes. Nowrasteh’s direction is compelling as he unearths a hidden story from history. The film is streaming on Amazon Prime.
Jack Goes Boating (2014) Director and Star: Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Ryan
Jack Goes Boating (2014) didn’t quite work for me, largely because of its slow pace and uneven storytelling. The film stars the late Seymour Hoffman as Jack, who also directed the film. This was Hoffman’s first and only time in the directing chair. Amy Ryan also stars in the film, giving a solid performance. This was also based on a play that Hoffman starred in. Jack wants to participate in a swim championship. That’s hardly what the film is about, tracking other characters’ stories. While the film aims for quiet intimacy, it ultimately drags, making it an underwhelming viewing experience.
You Kill Me (2016), Director: John Dahl, Stars: Ben Kingsley, Tea Leoni, Luke Wilson
Meet You Kill Me (2016), yet another film that I found in the museum of underrated gems. The concept revolves around Frank (Ben Kingsley), a hitman, who is sent to an A.A. meeting to get his mind focused again. A different story happens, where Frank falls in love with Laurel (Tea Leoni). Leoni is one of my favorite actresses. It also stars the funny Luke Wilson. I liked the trio’s dynamics. You Kill Me is a mental health movie. It’s okay to make changes if you’re not happy. I recommended that you keep an eye out for this movie.
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