Delroy Lindo Has Always Been That Guy
There was much to celebrate when this year’s Oscar nominations dropped Thursday morning and Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s thrilling vampire flick/feature-length metaphor, ran up an all-time record-setting score. The Academy Awards are now an all-or-nothing, with-us-or-against-us team sport, so however you felt about this unprecedented haul and the discourse around it—whether it was against your preference, or even for your preference, or even if you were relatively net neutral on the subject and are fine, you know, shutting the fuck up and waiting to see what happens—it was all pretty tribally divisive and needlessly personal and heated and incredibly annoying (except for those of us furious the best movie of the year, It Was Just An Accident, got shut out of Best Picture and Best Director. Our anger was righteous and completely justified). But the lone Sinners nomination that was uncontroversial—the one that was both a surprise and a delight, the one that accomplished the miraculous feat of uniting the entire spectrum of obnoxious movie opiners online—was the great Delroy Lindo’s first-ever Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
Lindo, 73 years old, was born in England to Jamaican parents, moved to Toronto as a kid, then again to San Francisco as a teenager. At 24, he went to the American Conservatory Theater in SF to study, and has been a working actor ever since. Lindo has 73 credits in film and television. His IMDB credits go as far back as 1974, but the career truly kicks into gear, as it did for so many Black actors of Lindo’s generation, on stage in an August Wilson play, with his Tony-nominated performance in a 1988 staging of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.
Over the past 35 years Lindo has worked with John Woo, Nic Cage, Alfre Woodard, Tony Scott, James Gandolfini, Ron Howard, Al Pacino, David Mamet, Aaliyah, Michael Caine, Louis Gossett Junior, Ethan Hawke, Gene Hackman, Harvey Keitel, Denzel Washington, and Spike Lee. If you were to ask a casual, his career would likely be defined by his work with Lee in four films, the first and last of which are nearly three decades apart, and still constitute what are very likely to be most people’s top four performances from him—Malcolm X, Crooklyn, Clockers, and Da 5 Bloods. But longtime fans all have their favorite Delroy Lindo performances, if we’re going with heart over head; mine would be a tie between his Satchel Paige in Soul of the Game, a 1996 HBO film about baseball’s Negro Leagues and his turn (arguably the fullest display of his bag) as Bo Catlett, the gangster with movie-producer ambitions in Barry Sonnenfeld’s adaptation of Get Shorty. (But yes, OK, the actual answer is probably West Indian Archie. Fine.)
