Published in the January 2011 "Meaning of Life" issue

I never asked for anything except a purple light saber. George said, "Well, light sabers are either red or green." I said, "Yeah, but I would like a purple one."

I was raised to be cautious. I went to work with my grandfather, who cleaned office buildings and furnaces, and there would be twenty-year-old guys callin' him Ed, and he called 'em Mister. My grandfather was this old guy, very dignified, but he never looked 'em in the eye. He'd look at me like, "Turn your head down! Don't look the white men in the eye 'cause they'll think you being uppity or arrogant." Now the name of my production company is Uppity.

I was the crackhead in Jungle Fever. I was two weeks out of rehab. I'd been smoking cocaine for a year and a half, two years, and I understood the nature of the disease. I had done the research. So when I started talking to Spike about it, I said, "You don't see him high that much. You always see him when he needs something. He's on a mission to get some shit. That's what I wanna do." And that was my breakthrough. That got me into Hollywood. It was the perfect marriage of experience and opportunity.

I don't understand how people live without creating. You know? I don't know how you do one picture a year.

When they killed Kennedy, black people were thinking, Oh, my God, white people are gonna come down and kill us all today! All the rights that Kennedy gave us are going away! So they sent us home from school and said, "Stay in the house."

I wasn't one of those people that was gonna walk around and get spit on and get slapped and not fight back. We were doing some kind of crazy things, like stealing people's credit cards and buying guns with 'em. And because of that, some FBI people showed up at my mom's house in Tennessee and told her she needed to get me out of the South or I was either gonna be locked up or killed. So she came to Atlanta and took me to the airport and put me on a plane for L. A.

When I came to New York, it was bubbling. We watched each other, we encouraged each other, we went to auditions together, we rode trains together, and every Monday we had great parties. But it was also a time of, you know, drugs.

All of a sudden, Morgan's gone. Boom. Then Denzel's gone. The opportunities were there, but I was just never prepared because I was a little bit off, you know? And then when I finally got it together — boom! It just happened.

I always wanted to do a big pirate picture.

I haven't had a drug dream in ten or twelve years. All of a sudden, I had one, like, two weeks ago. Even in the dream, you're hiding shit from people! People that you know pop up in the dream and you got this big-ass ball of cocaine in your hand and you stick it behind your back and go, "Yeah, I'm all right." And then you wake up and you feel as bad as if you'd actually done it.

I went to the movies a lot when I was a kid. That was my joy. Saturday mornings, my mom kicked me out of the house, I went to the movies at nine in the morning and watched cartoons and serials and the double-feature horror picture, and then I would meet her later for the adult stuff. So I love movies that way. So I'll do a movie like Snakes on a Plane, and I'll do a film that's very serious. And I'll do a comedy, because it's there.

I've never been to jail. I've never been arrested. I've never been locked up. I'm a good son, a good father, a good husband--I've been married to the same woman for thirty years. I'm a good friend. I finished college, I have my education, I believe in education, I donate money anonymously. So when people criticize the kind of characters that I play onscreen, I go, "You know, that's part of a story."

I wanna be a scratch golfer for at least one month in my golf career. That's all I want.

My dad was an absentee dad, so it was always important to me that I was part of my daughter's life, and she deserved two parents, which is part of what informs us staying married for thirty years. 'Cause everybody has a chance to say, "Fuck it," and walk away, you know? But you also have a chance to say, "Okay, fuck it, I'm sorry." Even if you're not.

I haven't done a western yet.

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