*Jeffrey Wright has joined the cast of Spike Lee’s remake of Akira Kurosawa’s “High and Low,” released in 1963.
The film is loosely based on the 1959 novel King’s Ransom by Ed McBain. The story follows an executive of a Yokohama shoe company who becomes a victim of extortion when his chauffeur’s son is kidnapped by mistake and held for ransom, per IMDB.com.
Coming Soon reports that Wright joins Denzel Washington in Lee’s new film version, described as a “reimagining” of Kurosawa’s movie. The actor recently earned an Oscar nomination 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 added. “I understood something about his challenges in terms of trying to be a free and honest artist…Monk wants to be intellectually a free man, creatively a free man, his own man, and find his own authentic voice without conforming to anyone’s expectations…But more intimately for me, is the story of his relationship to his mother…that is the heart and soul of it.”
“American Fiction” is based on Percival Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure.” As People reports, the film “confronts our culture’s obsession with reducing people to outrageous stereotypes,” per the official synopsis.
Wright’s character is described as “a frustrated novelist who’s fed up with the establishment profiting from ‘Black’ entertainment that relies on tired and offensive tropes.”
“To prove his point, Monk uses a pen name to write an outlandish ‘Black’ book of his own, a book that propels him to the heart of hypocrisy and the madness he claims to disdain,” the synopsis continues.
Cord Jefferson directed the film, which also stars Tracee Ellis Ross, John Ortiz, Erika Alexander, Leslie Uggams, Adam Brody, Issa Rae, and Sterling K. Brown.
READ MORE: Jeffrey Wrights’ Emotional Connection to ‘American Fiction’ Character | WATCH
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