Jeffrey Wright will star in Spike Lee's 1963 version of Akira Kurosawa's "High and Low."
The film is partially based on Ed McBain's 1959 novel King's Ransom. From IMDB.com, the narrative follows a Yokohama shoe business CEO whose chauffeur's son is abducted by accident and held for ransom.
Coming Soon says that Wright and Denzel Washington will star in Lee's “reimagining” of Kurosawa's classic. Actor received an Oscar nod for playing Thelonious “Monk” Ellison in 2023's American Fiction.
“This character is probably closer to me than any other character I've ever played,” Wright told EUR in an exclusive interview.
“I felt a very personal connection to Jean-Michel Basquiat’s story, he was a different guy, but I understood what it was like to be young and creative on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and running through the streets in the ’80s,” Wright said “I understood his struggles as a free and honest artist...Monk aims to be intellectually and creatively independent, finding his own voice without adhering to others' expectations.His bond with his mother is the heart and soul of the narrative, for me.
“American Fiction” is based on Percival Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure.” The summary says the video “confronts our culture’s obsession with reducing people to outrageous stereotypes,” said People.
Wright is “a frustrated novelist who’s fed up with the establishment profiting from ‘Black’ entertainment that relies on tired and offensive tropes.”
To establish his argument, Monk assumes a pen identity to produce an outrageous ‘Black’ book that plunges him into hypocrisy and craziness he claims to abhor.
Tracee Ellis Ross, John Ortiz, Erika Alexander, Leslie Uggams, Adam Brody, Issa Rae, and Sterling K. Brown feature in Cord Jefferson's film.