Don Cheadle opens up about his acting career and why self-care is so important.
Don Cheadle only had two hours to decide to take the role of War Machine in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But, outside of superhero movies, he has a long history of playing in various dramatic roles including Black Monday, where he plays Maurice Monroe, a ruthless 1980s Wall Street stockbroker living under a fake identity.
In a recent interview with Variety, Don Cheadle talked about issues actors are faced with while playing characters whose actions come from a dark place.
Cheadle says playing a character who is in pain often affects him when he’s off-screen. He says, “It has to come from someplace where you feel the heart beating. I’ll speak for myself: I relish it all. I tend to under-value the effect it has on me, but as I’ve gotten older I realize it’s real and your body and your nervous system don’t always know that you’re acting. You come home and you’re like, ‘Why are my shoulders up to my ears?’”
Cheadle points out how to important it is for an actor to walk away from a dark character. He says, “You put these clothes on and you start to give signals to your body that you’re this person again, and you start getting into these different tempo rhythms and different things start getting accessed. So there is and there can be a residual thing when you get into dark characters and when you’re playing a lot of heavy, emotional stuff — and we can all talk about actors and creative people not being able to pull out of the places they put themselves in. You have to be careful and you have to take care of yourself, especially now, in this environment. Self-care is real and listening to yourself and taking care of that is really real.”
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