But I don`t think it helps to be thought of as a scene-stealer. That`s not comforting for the other actors. They think, `Well, I don`t want to work with him. Go steal from someone else.` So I`m never going into a movie thinking that I want to grab the attention. Quite the opposite: I give that stuff away, because I`m wanting to make the best whole piece. I want to look back at my resume and think, `That was a great movie,` not, `Oh, those four movies were shit, but I was good in them.` I want to be a part of great things.

I also believe that you are what you have to defend, and if you`re a black man that`s always going to be the bar against which you are judged, whether you want to align yourself with those themes or not. You can think of yourself as a colourless person, but nobody else is gonna.

I`ve been doing this since I was 10 years old, inhabiting different people and playing different roles. Thirty years later, there`s still the same sort of excitement I get from it. It`s still fun to inhabit different characters and play different things, so it`s all in that panoply of acting.

In fifth grade I was Templeton the Rat in a production of `Charlotte`s Web`. I remember I had a friend who worked in a doughnut shop. I`d go in, get a doughnut and sit there with my script, going over the lines and making notes in the margin. I was serious!