IN “Always great,” Awards Insider talks to Hollywood’s least famous actors in career-spanning conversations. In this section, Wire And Book of Mormon alum Michael Potts explores his bumpy journey into the world of August Wilson, culminating in his brilliant turn Piano lessons.
After enough time auditioning in Hollywood, Michael Potts learned to steel himself for the question he would repeat over and over: Where are you from? “I wasn’t considered urban enough—or ‘street’ enough, a word I used to hear a lot—when we first got out of school,” the Yale Drama graduate says. “In this business, you get classified, you get typos…. I am a stranger to them. Alien.” His favorite example concerns the year 1999 Cider House Rules. Potts secured the role of Peaches in a previous iteration of the failed project. He was asked to reread the part – and he knew, in this audition, he really wasn’t the favorite. So he decided to play what he called a “dirty trick” on the director. Lasse Hallstrom.
“He asked me, ‘Where are you from?’ I knew it—I knew it was coming,” said Potts, who was born in Brooklyn. “I just lied and started making up nonsense. Without missing a beat, I said Madagascar. I just made it up, and he couldn’t have been more curious! He was like, ‘Oh, Actually?’ Which I find funny, like, you’re Swedish and you’re asking me where I’m from? He was more willing to believe in ‘Madagascar’ than he was in believing that I was the person he was talking to.
Potts laughs when he tells this story—but for an actor who has shown incredible talent and range between Broadway, film and television, it also makes him seem like an oddity . “Sometimes I have to get angry about it and shake my fist in the air, but what good is that going to do?” he said. “I truly believe they don’t know what to do with the kind of black I am. Let’s put it that way.”
Potts has fought and subverted these perceptions throughout his career, a big reason why it took him decades to be cast in the kinds of roles that got him into acting in the first place—i.e. role created by legendary playwright August Wilson. Potts was a pre-med student when he saw a clip from fence during the broadcast of the Tony Awards in the late 1980s. “It was the first time I heard something that was familiar to me—like my family, it was the language I heard growing up,” Potts said. up around my grandparents, their neighbors and their friends.” He studied the actors in that scene, Courtney B. Vance, and found out he studied at Yale. Potts emulated Vance’s professional trajectory but was not considered a Wilsonian actor by decision-makers: “I used to do more bougie roles, that sort of thing. In many people’s minds, that doesn’t sit well with being the August Wilson character.”
Instead, Potts became known as a leading Shakespearean performer in regional theaters across the country. He emerged as a soft-spoken menacing fan favorite on the iconic HBO drama. He starred in three Broadway musicals in six years. Only after all that did he land his first role in Wilson’s film — and after that, a few more. It turned out he was the right man for those jobs.
In a scene-stealing cast, Potts still finds a way to escape in every moment of his screen presence. Piano lessonsexamines a family’s legacy of trauma and resilience through a sibling’s debate over whether to sell their old piano. Potts went straight from the Broadway revival of Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work to the Netflix adaptation, playing the tragic Wining Boy Charles, a widower prone to spending all his money on gambling and rambling about his days. his glory. “Here is a man who lives his life with a strange mixture of passion and sadness – he may just be a funny guy, but the great thing about him is that he is a man,” Potts said. This man is bringing a lot of pain.” “He’s easily one of my favorite characters I’ve ever played.”
Wining Boy fits Potts like a glove: The actor deeply understands how to express his character’s brilliant sadness, and he fits well into the film’s larger family portrait as the his uncle. John David Washington And Danielle Deadwyler and brother Samuel L. Jackson. It’s wild to think that, just a few years ago, he couldn’t even get in the room to audition for the play Wilson.
It took some luck to bring Potts into this world. In 2016, he starred in the musical’s revival Cabin in the sky Directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who happened to be organizing the revival of Wilson’s Jitney for Broadway. “He gave me a chance,” Potts said of being cast as the gossipy Turnbo in what turned out to be a Tony Award winner. Then the next year, Potts won the opposite section Denzel Washington in a new phase taking on the role of Eugene O’Neill The Iceman arrives. “He grabbed my hand and said, ‘How come I don’t know you?’ and I laughed, ‘Why do you know me? You are Denzel Washington. We don’t go in the same circles,’” Potts recalls. “We developed a relationship.”
Washington told Potts of his intention to bring all of Wilson’s plays to the screen. Although Potts did not wait by the phone, he soon learned who was writing the film’s script. Ma Rainey’s Black BottomThe next film in Washington’s collection: Santiago-Hudson. “After we closed IcemanMaybe three or four months later, I got a call from my manager saying ‘Denzel wants you to join. Ma Rainey movie,” Potts said. After taking the photo, he came over Piano lessons on Broadway, then in the film—directed by Washington’s son, Malcolm.
