Abdul-Mateen, Yahya II

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      Corey Hawkins, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in ‘Topdog/Underdog’ and the Art of Deception

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      “I know we brothers,” Lincoln tells his younger sibling, Booth, in Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog.” With a slight hesitation, he then asks, “but is we really brothers, you know, blood brothers or not, you and me, whatduhyathink?”The question, posed late in this dynamic two-hander, is both a catalyst and crisis for Parks’s most famous characters: Lincoln, or “Link,” a three-card monte con artist turned whiteface-wearing Abraham Lincoln impersonator, and Booth, a shoplifter and ladies’ man. And for the actors starring in the play’s Broadway revival, Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, the question takes on an even deeper meaning given their electrifying chemistry onstage.“What I love about this experience is that there’s so much respect back and forth between Corey and me,” Abdul-Mateen, 38, who portrays Booth, said. “It’s no ego, just respect.”Hawkins, 34, playfully quipped, “I have a little bit of ego.”In his review, Jesse Green praised both actors, noting Hawkins’s “astonishing verbal and physical performance” as Lincoln and how Abdul-Mateen, in his Broadway debut, “fully meets the challenge, banking sympathy with his sweetness.”Hawkins, left, as Lincoln and Abdul-Mateen as Booth in the acclaimed production, directed by Kenny Leon.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFor those familiar with his more debonair roles in movies like “In the Heights” or “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” Hawkins, a Tony nominee for “Six Degrees of Separation,” has so thoroughly transformed himself into a man downtrodden by bad choices and racism that he is virtually unrecognizable. Abdul-Mateen, who won an Emmy for “Watchmen,” intoxicates with his exuberant Booth, both flashy and naïve. We realize, too late, that his character has also been changing, and though his metamorphosis might be slower, it is even more jarring.Under the direction of George C. Wolfe and starring Jeffrey Wright and Yasiin Bey (the rapper formerly known as Mos Def), “Topdog/Underdog” first appeared on Broadway 20 years ago. That year, Parks became the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the play, and in 2018, The Times named it the best American play of the previous 25 years.Kenny Leon’s new production of “Topdog/Underdog” was a bit of a risk at a time when young Black playwrights are getting more opportunities on Broadway, and pioneers like Alice Childress and Adrienne Kennedy are finally getting their due. I’ve always considered Booth and Lincoln shaped by the language, swagger and blunted ambition of our earlier hip-hop generation, a sentiment that the show’s sound designer, Justin Ellington, underscores with songs by Pete Rock & CL Smooth, Lupe Fiasco, Kendrick Lamar and Nipsey Hussle.As a result, I wondered how Lincoln and Booth would appear as millennials and in a moment of greater gender fluidity and more nuanced masculinity than the one in which Parks originally conceived them. In an interview this month before one of their performances, Hawkins and Abdul-Mateen described their first encounters with “Topdog/Underdog,” why they think their characters struggles with masculinity still resonate, and how they care for each other as actors and friends in this industry.Unlike the sibling rivalry they’ve perfected onstage, the two men were genuinely excited to be together offstage, often ending their answers with a compliment for their co-star or by finishing each other’s sentences. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.“I felt seen,” Abdul-Mateen said of first encountering the play.Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York TimesHawkins said he views “the play as an ode or love letter to Black men.”Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York TimesDid you know each other before the show?YAHYA ABDUL-MATEEN II I used to say that I met Corey once at a party in 2012. But it just might not be true. But I was familiar with Corey for a very long time. I went to Yale, and he went to Juilliard, and you know who’s who in the New York circles.COREY HAWKINS We all knew of each other. Before I got to Juilliard, I knew how many Black folks were in the program. There were only a certain number of us. But this was my first time meeting him. Of course, I knew his work.When did you first learn about “Topdog/Underdog”?HAWKINS I was a junior in high school when the play first premiered at the Public Theater in 2001, so it wasn’t until I was at Juilliard that I came across the show in a student production. A friend of mine, the actor Sheldon Woodley, was directing Amari Cheatom and Johnny Ramey in a version of this play. I was in my first year, wearing what they call “theater blacks” and moving the set pieces around the stage, so I was in the orbit of the play. And then I read it and fell in love with it from there.ABDUL-MATEEN It might have been in 2010 for me. At Berkeley [where he received a bachelor’s degree], a student was doing a director’s showcase of 15-minute scenes. I had one scene from “Othello,” then I did one scene from “Topdog/Underdog,” and I played Booth. It was the first time I read anything contemporary that felt like it was made for me. There was a line from the play that just stayed with me, “She gonna walk in here looking all hot and [expletive], trying to see how much she can get me to sweat, how much she can get me to give her before she gives me mines.” That made me think of my family, my cousins, my people and my friends. And I felt seen, so I said, “Oh, I got to go investigate Booth some more.”Twenty years ago, we had less nuanced conversations about Black masculinity than we are having now. Do you think that changes how we see these characters?HAWKINS I think naturally those differences will be evident because Yahya and I are Black men who live in this era versus 20 years ago. There have been shifts in the conversations around men’s roles and responsibilities, but how I, as an artist, see those things might be different than how my character, Link, sees them. I have to be true to the intentions of what Suzan-Lori Parks wrote, but I do see the play as an ode or love letter to Black men. We can be raw, right, wrong, joyous, funny, heartbreaking and unapologetically Black onstage.ABDUL-MATEEN I think Booth imagines himself as a romantic who knows about women. He’s probably not in the social circles that are speaking about toxic masculinity, but, like a lot of people I know, he fashions himself a gentleman. But, the beautiful thing about this play is that we get to be masculine and also play husband and wife, be silly, immature and vulnerable. We cry, laugh, talk about being hurt in our family, and tell lies designed to make us seem bigger than we are. And then we call each other out when we can see that we’re not succeeding. The test of the play is who comes out on top, so masculinity is always on display within that room.“There are moments in the play where I just get to listen, and I’m just like, “Man, this brother’s killing this right now,” Abdul-Mateen said of Hawkins’s performance.Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York TimesYour characters’ arcs are subtle and then, especially in Booth’s case, suddenly explosive. How do you prepare for these transformations?ABDUL-MATEEN I make it my responsibility never to see it coming. Because we don’t see our transformations coming in life. As for Booth, I’m trying to keep it positive for as long as possible since he doesn’t know he has a change coming. And as an actor, I also want to stay ahead of the audience so they can be hopeful for as long as possible. And then they’re surprised or caught off guard at the end, which is what Corey refers to as the “three-card monte” trick within the play.HAWKINS With three-card monte, you’re just moving the cards around and trying to react to what’s in front of you. I have to hold off for as long as possible with Link as well. He has to fight the drug that is the cards because there is nothing as powerful as when he picks up those cards one more time. And that’s what begins the downward slippery slope for him. But until then, Link and Booth are just bouncing up against each other, pushing until they can’t anymore. That makes it heartbreaking, tragic and surprising for me every night.Are there any instances in which you’ve been astounded by the other’s performance?ABDUL-MATEEN It happens all the time.HAWKINS All the time.ABDUL-MATEEN Show to show.HAWKINS Moment to moment.ABDUL-MATEEN There are moments in the play where I just get to listen, and I’m just like, “Man, this brother’s killing this right now.”HAWKINS Yeah, at the end of the play, every single show, night after night, I feel like I’m just sitting there watching you give a master class, and I wonder what you will do next. And that’s so exciting, man, because there’s not too many people who can access that range of emotion.Ultimately, this is a tragedy, but I was struck by the handshake and hug that you give each other onstage after the show ends. Why is that important for the audience to see?HAWKINS I know we’re both going through it, so I just think it’s a matter of knowing that I got another brother in the fight. We make it look easy, but it isn’t easy going up there. But, for me, I have to let Lincoln go and literally leave him on the floor. So, when I get up, I’m able to reset.ABDUL-MATEEN I am not Booth, and Corey is not Lincoln. When we take a bow, I am being myself. But, at the beginning, when that curtain goes up, only Corey and I are out there and putting on this show for two and a half hours. I have an obligation to get as close to my character’s truth as possible, and when I want to get that hurt out, I got to give it to Corey’s character. That’s my job. And it’s his job to do the same thing back to me. So, when we take our bows, I get to say, “I appreciate you for taking care of me and that this was a pleasure to do this.” More

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      Black Film and TV Actors Get a Chance to Shine on Broadway

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      On Broadway this fall, it’s less about new playwrights making their debuts and more about established stars giving the stage a shot.One of the most exciting parts of the 2021-22 Broadway season was the number of people who looked like me, both onstage and behind the scenes. We saw the Broadway debut of seven plays by Black playwrights, starring Black actors, in an art form that too often tokenizes people of color, alienates them, misrepresents them or ignores them altogether.But even when productions are bathed in the bright lights of Broadway, they can still be overlooked: Many of last fall’s works seemed to disappear as quickly as they appeared in the tough post-shutdown return period. This fall, Broadway may not have as many new works by Black playwrights, but it will serve old favorites with promising casts of versatile Black actors who have built careers not just on the stage, but also in film and TV.One of last season’s highlights was the playwright Alice Childress receiving her long-overdue Broadway debut with the stunning comedy-drama “Trouble in Mind.” So, what better time to give even more neglected writers of color their moment in the spotlight? The experimental Black playwright Adrienne Kennedy will follow this November with a similarly belated premiere, a production of her harrowing 1992 play “Ohio State Murders,” starring the stage luminary Audra McDonald as a writer who returns to her alma mater to speak about the violent imagery in her work.A lethal mix of present-day racial injustice and unrelenting racial trauma from the past, “Ohio State Murders,” directed by Kenny Leon, will have an exciting peer in a revival of August Wilson’s 1987 play “The Piano Lesson,” directed by LaTanya Richardson Jackson (a cast member of the 2009 Broadway revival of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” to cite another Wilson work). Her husband, Samuel L. Jackson, who originated the role of Boy Willie in “The Piano Lesson” at the Yale Repertory Theater in 1987, will also join this revival, now in the role of Doaker Charles, Boy Willie’s uncle who recounts the titular piano’s history. The Pulitzer Prize-winning play follows siblings who are at odds over whether to sell a piano bearing depictions of their enslaved ancestors.The appeal of these plays doesn’t just come down to the material and the ethnicity of the casts, however; the Black casts this season represent captivating newcomers and veterans from various realms of theater, film and TV. So those only familiar with Jackson’s explosive acting style in, say, an action-packed Marvel movie or a brutal Quentin Tarantino film, will now see how the actor’s energy translates to the stage. The same will be true for Jackson’s castmate Danielle Brooks, a star of the Netflix series “Orange Is the New Black” who made an acclaimed Broadway debut in “The Color Purple” in 2015 and tickled audiences as the brassy Beatrice in the Public Theater’s 2019 production of “Much Ado About Nothing.”Film and TV are, after all, a different ballgame than the theater, where actors must respond in real time to the action onstage and perform with a resonance that will reach the upper echelons of the balcony. That will be the challenge for John David Washington (“Tenet,” “BlacKkKlansman”), who is new to the theater and will be making his Broadway debut in “The Piano Lesson.”Elsewhere on Broadway this season, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II will transition from his arresting roles on TV (“Watchmen”) and film (Jordan Peele’s “Candyman” reimagining) in a revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning work that follows the daily rituals of two impoverished brothers named Lincoln and Booth. He will make his Broadway debut opposite Corey Hawkins, who played the charming cab dispatcher Benny in John Cho’s film adaptation of “In the Heights.” Hawkins also played Dr. Dre in “Straight Outta Compton” and Macduff in Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” and was nominated for a Tony Award for his role as the con man Paul Poitier in the 2017 Broadway revival of John Guare’s “Six Degrees of Separation.”Most of these plays are contemporary, dating only from the last three decades or so. (The neglect or erasure of early works by Black artists and other artists of color is, unfortunately, common.) But a West End and Young Vic revival of “Death of a Salesman” reconfigures Arthur Miller’s beloved 1949 classic into a story about a Black family, starring Wendell Pierce, André De Shields and Sharon D Clarke, who won an Olivier Award for best actress for her portrayal of Linda Loman in the British production and is known stateside for her knockout performance in last season’s “Caroline, or Change.”So anticipation is running high this season not just for the polished onstage products — the glamorous and funny, tense and heart-rending Black productions — but also for the array of Black talent, from the Broadway of decades past to today’s Hollywood stars, that will meet, creating something utterly of the moment. More

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      ‘Topdog/Underdog’ to Star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Corey Hawkins

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      The 20th anniversary Broadway revival will be directed by Kenny Leon. Previews begin in September at the John Golden Theater.Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II will star this fall in a Broadway revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Pulitzer-winning comic drama “Topdog/Underdog.”The play, first staged on Broadway in 2002 after an Off Broadway run at the Public Theater, is a portrait of two brothers: One, named Lincoln (Hawkins), is an Abraham Lincoln impersonator and the other, named Booth (Abdul-Mateen), aspires to play three-card monte the way his brother once had.In 2018, The New York Times declared “Topdog/Underdog” the best American play of the previous 25 years. Explaining that choice, the critic Ben Brantley wrote that the play “plies the fine theatrical art of deception to convey the dangers of role-playing in a society in which race is a performance and prison.”Hawkins, 33, has been featured in a string of films, including “In the Heights,” “The Tragedy of Macbeth” and “Straight Outta Compton.” He has two previous Broadway credits, and picked up a Tony nomination in 2017 for his starring role in a revival of “Six Degrees of Separation.”Abdul-Mateen, 35, is best known for his work in the HBO series “Watchmen,” and he recently was featured in the films “Ambulance,” “The Matrix Resurrections” and “Candyman.” “Topdog/Underdog” will be his Broadway debut.The original Broadway production starred Jeffrey Wright and Yasiin Bey, who was known at the time as Mos Def.This 20th anniversary revival, scheduled to run for 16 weeks, is to begin previews Sept. 27 and to open Oct. 20 at the John Golden Theater. It will be directed by Kenny Leon, who in 2014 won a Tony Award for directing a revival of “A Raisin in the Sun.” The producers are David Stone, a lead producer of “Wicked,” as well as LaChanze, Rashad V. Chambers, Marc Platt, Debra Martin Chase and the Shubert Organization.This season is shaping up to be a big one for Parks. In addition to the Broadway revival of “Topdog/Underdog,” the Public Theater on Tuesday said it would stage productions of two new works she has written: “Plays for the Plague Year,” a series of playlets Parks wrote during the early pandemic, and “The Harder They Come,” a musical adaptation of the 1972 film, with a book by Parks and a score that includes songs by Jimmy Cliff. More

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      ‘Candyman’ | Anatomy of a Scene

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      Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera. More

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      How ‘Candyman’ Star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II Became the Next Big Name

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      The actor’s career has surged thanks to projects like “Aquaman” and “Watchmen.” He’s even become a Warner Bros. favorite. Now on the brink of movie stardom, he’s ready to steer.“What time is it?” Yahya Abdul-Mateen II wondered. “I don’t know. I’ve been in this room …” He trailed off. “It could be any time of day right now.”The bright lights and white backdrop of his windowless room conjured a void from which Abdul-Mateen had been videoconferencing for hours. He was doing remote press for “Candyman,” a new spin on the 1992 horror film with the 35-year-old actor playing Anthony, a painter mesmerized by the urban legend of a hook-handed killer. It’s said that Candyman can be summoned by speaking his name five times into a mirror, but as Anthony goes searching for the killer, he begins to see his own haunted face staring back.Though the film is set in Chicago, Abdul-Mateen was beamed to me from London, where he has spent the last few months shooting a sequel to “Aquaman” (he plays the villainous Black Manta). It was a rare day off from the superhero film, carved out so he could spend time promoting another hopeful franchise-starter. Was Abdul-Mateen tired from working so much? Sure, he told me as he shrugged off his black leather jacket. But he was also used to it.“People tell me, ‘Keep it going, man. If it’s hot, ride the wave,’” he said.Abdul-Mateen has been caught up in a significant swell since 2015, when he graduated from drama school at Yale and promptly booked a showy part as a nightclub owner in the Netflix series “The Get Down.” That role served as a signal flare to Hollywood casting directors: Here was a brand-new, 6-foot-3 hunk with formal training, screen charisma and eyes that can lock onto his scene partner like high beams.Men like that don’t come in droves these days, and Abdul-Mateen found himself entering a seller’s market: After “The Get Down” was canceled, he promptly began nabbing roles in high-profile projects like “Aquaman,” “The Greatest Showman” and “Black Mirror.” Last fall, he won an Emmy for the HBO limited series “Watchmen,” in which he played Doctor Manhattan, a blue, frequently nude superhero inhabiting the body of a Black man; months after that win, he made a strong impression as the Black Panther activist Bobby Seale in Aaron Sorkin’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7.”Abdul-Mateen’s rise has become the sort of thing that everyone wants to get in on, and Warner Bros. is particularly enamored with the actor. In addition to the “Aquaman” sequel, Abdul-Mateen will be seen in December starring opposite Keanu Reeves in the studio’s “The Matrix Resurrections,” and next summer, he films “Furiosa,” the highly anticipated “Mad Max: Fury Road” prequel from the director George Miller.Abdul-Mateen as Black Manta in “Aquaman.” He’s shooting the sequel now.Jasin Boland/Warner BrosThat is the sort of keys-to-the-kingdom access that Warner Bros. has historically reserved for a handful of stars like Clint Eastwood and Ben Affleck, and Abdul-Mateen doesn’t take the studio’s investment for granted. Still, he has recently discovered a brand-new superpower, something he never dared to employ on his path up the summit: saying no.What has he been turning down lately? “Jobs, appearances, meetings, people,” he said. “It’s like ‘no’ is one of my favorite words.” He mulled it over some more: “Sometimes you’ve got to get to zero in order to get back to one, two, three and beyond. You get so far down the line, it’s like, ‘Wait, where did zero go? Where’s the ground?’”Over the past six years, in addition to earning all those jobs, “I’ve been learning life,” he said. “I’ve been learning bills and debt and burying family members — life and death, heartbreak, location, relocation. And having success coincide with all of those things is interesting, because I’m also missing the birth of babies and weddings and things like that.”Sure, it’s great to become a movie star, especially at a time when new ones have proved so difficult to mint. “But I’m also learning that you have to protect yourself,” Abdul-Mateen said. “You have to have balance with all of this.” He scratched his head and put it more bluntly: “Sometimes it’s like, ‘Look, man, I want to get off the wave and create my own.’”THE YOUNGEST OF six children, Abdul-Mateen was born in New Orleans and initially lived in the city’s Magnolia Projects, where the kids would all play outside and the families took care of each other. “A sense of community was such a strong thread throughout my entire life that now sometimes it’s a bit strange to be out doing this by myself,” he said.His family moved around often, and Abdul-Mateen treated it like an adventure even though it meant he went to 13 different schools before he became a teenager. In each new class, whenever the teacher introduced him as Yahya, the other students would burst out laughing at his unusual name. But within a week, he’d have worked to win them all over, a pattern that taught him adaptability.“A sense of community was such a strong thread throughout my entire life that now sometimes it’s a bit strange to be out doing this by myself,” he said.Danny Kasirye for The New York TimesThat came in handy when Abdul-Mateen took an acting class at University of California, Berkeley, where he had gone to study architecture. He found playing different characters to be so much fun that after a short-lived stint as a city planner, he pursued a major swerve and applied to drama school at Yale.Was he good at acting back then? Well, he was good at commanding attention, and that’s not nothing. But a turning point came during Abdul-Mateen’s first year at Yale, when he found himself stymied by the Stephen Adly Guirgis play “The ___________ With the Hat.” He couldn’t understand why his character would brush off a girlfriend’s infidelity, and he stayed up all night until he finally cracked the man’s motivation: Because he loved her, he was able to tell himself a lie.“That’s when I knew that there was something else behind this that I wanted to figure out,” he said. “If I was going to be successful, I couldn’t just think like myself — I had to learn to be empathetic and understanding of other people’s perspectives and lives and outlooks. It would make me a better person, but it would also make me a better actor.”According to his “Candyman” director, Nia DaCosta, that empathy is key to Abdul-Mateen’s appeal. “He is incredibly skilled at imbuing each character he plays with specificity, humanity and a lived-in individuality,” said DaCosta, who praised “his ability to draw you into the life of a character as though he were a new friend or a stranger at a bar you’re dying to get to know.”That’s part of what made “Candyman” such a natural fit for Abdul-Mateen’s first major leading role: The movie is strewn with details that conjure something from his own lived experience. When Anthony is up all night painting, caught in the grip of an artistic revelation, it’s the sort of mania Abdul-Mateen knew from trying to crack Guirgis’s play. And when Anthony looks down and finds his hands smeared in black paint, Abdul-Mateen might have recalled his construction-worker father, whose hands were often covered in grease and motor oil.Abdul-Mateen in his first major leading role, in “Candyman” opposite Vanessa Williams.Universal PicturesThe first “Candyman” grounded its story in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing project, a place that has been long-gentrified by the time DaCosta’s film picks up the tale. That, too, hit home for Abdul-Mateen, whose work as a city planner in the highly gentrified Bay Area gave him even more perspective on the projects he grew up in.“One of the first things that I did when I went to Chicago was to go to Cabrini-Green and put on that community planner hat,” he said. “And for a place that has a history of being as Black as that neighborhood was, that was not what I found. One has to wonder what happened to all of those families, all of those spirits? For every household, there’s a story, but when there’s no one there anymore to tell those stories, then that’s a tragedy.”With the clout he’s beginning to accrue, Abdul-Mateen wants to make sure those stories are told right. He also knows that if he can bring even more of himself to bear on these movies, he can start steering the wave instead of surfing it.Maybe it will help, too, once he feels he has a world to return to. Abdul-Mateen has spent the last few hectic years without a home of his own; even when he secured the keys to a New York apartment in January, he left the next day to film a new movie in Los Angeles. “This has been a very isolating experience,” he said. “I don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t have to do that anymore.”In the future, he plans to take more cues from his “Aquaman” co-star Jason Momoa, who keeps his family and close friends around him on set: “It helps him to stay true to who he is, because he’s not always the one having to speak up and support his own values all the time.” Abdul-Mateen hopes that will help the movies he makes feel more like himself, more like the homes he grew up in, more like the community that raised him in New Orleans.In the meantime, he’ll bring that feeling with him. When I asked Abdul-Mateen if he could name the most New Orleans thing about him, he grinned and spread his legs wide.“The way I take up space,” he said. “Somebody from New Orleans, they sit with their legs from east to west, they’re going to gesture big.” He waved his hands, then looked into the camera and fixed me with those high beams. “I don’t necessarily do that in my everyday life. But when I decide to take up space, nobody can take it from me.” More