Finally, Dad caved. “Okay. Don’t tell your mother I took you.”
A few days later, well after it was dark, way after the average twelve-year-old would have bathed, climbed into her pajamas, and said her evening prayers, Daddy and I piled onto a Washington, DC, bus headed all the way up Sixteenth Street, into a nice white neighborhood teeming with expensive restaurants, bars, and lots of revelers, drunk, cursing, and hopping from club to club looking for their next bit of fun. Dad and I arrived just in time for the ten o’ clock show; after he got me settled in my seat, my father took a beer out of his jacket pocket, drank it, then promptly fell asleep, leaving me to decipher all on my own Richard Pryor’s commentary on prison, the mafia, masturbation, orgasms, Africa, the word “nigger,” and freebasing. I mean, Richard Pryor said some things, and for the most part, I laughed, but God, I was uncomfortable and embarrassed and ready to melt into that seat. Finally, just as the credits began to roll, Daddy woke up and stretched like it was a new day, then looked over at me and saw my face, wide-eyed and contorted in a combination of horror, fascination, and wonder. Dad laughed his ass off.
“I told yo ass!” he said when he finally composed himself. “Now come on. And don’t tell your mother.”
I kept my mouth shut. But I never, ever forgot the experience, and later, when I had the opportunity to really dig deep into Richard Pryor’s films and stand-up routines, I came to appreciate the intricacy of his humor—how each of his characters, whether wrapped in a joke or prancing across the big screen, revealed something deeper than what was on the surface. A nine-year-old masturbating in a tub wasn’t so much a nasty little boy as he was a kid on a journey to discovering his body; an aggrieved husband shooting up his own car to spite his wife is angry, but he’s also proud that the car is proof he’s a good provider; a backwater country man who runs into Dracula may be too ignorant to know he’s facing off against a killer, but he’s observant, confident, and skilled enough to pick at the vampire’s flaws and fend him off with insulting, cutting words. Each of those revelations, and so many more, goes to the heart of his characters’ humanity, revealing what ultimately rules their actions: insecurity, fear, racism, boredom, empathy, lust, wonder.
This, to me, made Richard Pryor not only funny, but also a master teacher—one of the first entertainers to reveal to me the importance of going deeper than what is on the page. He used his body. He made noises and faces. His sighs and well-timed chuckles and the way he could shrink himself, this superstar, bigger than life, into a pile of everyman vulnerability, made me connect with him. I got the same from watching Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett, Goldie Hawn, Bette Davis, and Tom Hanks, too, each of them masters at transforming themselves—masters at creating iconic characters.
I live for iconic characters. Think Angela Bassett in Waiting to Exhale, when she runs through the closet of her soon-to-be ex-husband, rambling on and on about being the sucker for putting her man above herself, only to have him stomp her heart into the ground. Who can forget the sight of her ripping his expensive suits off the hangers, piling them all into his fancy car, striking that match, lighting her cigarette, tossing the tiny flame on top of that beautiful ride then stomping down the driveway, the inferno behind her matching the rage in her eyes? We’ll never stop talking, either, about Angela’s star turn in What’s Love Got to Do with It, a transformation into the superstar Tina Turner so thorough in its innocence, weariness, fear, and drive that it doesn’t occur to us viewers until the end of the film, when it transitions into a real-life Tina Turner stage performance, that Angela is only playing Tina, and is not the actual singer herself.
This is what I love, too, about Sanaa Lathan, an incredible actress whose performance in the 2000 rom com Love & Basketball was downright transformative. She literally disappeared into her character, Monica, an ambitious but frustrated college basketball player desperate in her pursuit of both stardom on the court and love with a childhood friend who is as passionate about the sport as she. I know Sanaa. She is as far from a tomboy as they come—all curves and soft, pink, and girly. But on-screen, she was a cornrow-wearing, six-pack-having baller with a sportsman’s heart and a disgust for makeup and tight dresses. There’s one scene in particular that stands out to me as the finest example yet of her ability to turn herself inside out and become Monica, so much so that Sanaa disappears. In it, she’s playing an intense high school game in front of a coach scouting Monica for the roster of a college team she’s desperate to play for, when she misses a potentially game-winning shot and has to foul out in order to give her team the chance to win without her. Forced to deal with the disappointment and embarrassment of failing her team, Monica stalks over to the sidelines and literally hides from the crowd, fighting back her tears while she buries her face in the folds of her jersey. What was incredible to me as an actress was Sanaa’s choice to make the scene not about the tears, but the hiding. I watch a mind-numbing number of movies—for work, for pleasure, to study, to learn—and today I remember that scene, more than fifteen years old, as though I watched it five minutes ago. That’s acting. That’s iconic.