Actor John David Washington was on location in Cincinnati when he got a message.
It was from director Spike Lee, who’d years earlier given Washington his first-ever film role when the actor was just 6.
“So I called him and he kind of elevator-pitched the story to me, and suggested a book that he was going to send to me, that I read,” Washington says. “I called him back and said, ‘I can’t believe this happened. This is real, huh?’ He said it was, and I said, ‘Well, this is amazing.’
“And he was like, ‘All right, great, see you this summer,’” said Washington. “I got the job.”
The job was the lead role in “BlacKkKlansman,” which is based on the memoir of Ron Stallworth, the first African-American officer in the Colorado Springs Police Department and the man who managed to infiltrate the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.
Not that Washington knew it initially.
“Maybe he wants me to play one of the Black Panthers,” Washington says of his first thought. “No way he wants me to be Ron. Maybe there’s another cop that wasn’t in the book that he’s going to make up or something, you know what I mean?
“But I didn’t ask, I was just going with it until it was like a month later and then we talked about the script and everything.”
As Stallworth, Washington is onscreen nearly every minute of the film, which will be released on Friday, Aug. 10, which is the one-year anniversary of the Neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville, Va.
The story is set in the ’70s when Stallworth began speaking often by phone with David Duke, a national leader of the notorious hate group, who signed Stallworth’s official membership card.
Washington, whose best-known work to date is “Ballers,” the HBO series starring Dwayne Johnson, is the son of actor Denzel Washington, who has starred in four of Lee’s films. To research his role met multiple times with the real Stallworth, he says.
“I didn’t want to emulate, I didn’t want to imitate, I didn’t want to try to act like him,” he says. “I wanted his soul. Meeting him, he rented it out to me for some months at a time. And the portal of that exchange, the soul exchange, was when I held that card. He passed around that membership card, the Ku Klux Klan card, the official one with David Duke’s signature on the back.
“That was sort of the access. It just sort of brought it all home. And I talked to him weekly. Obviously, the tactical approach to the cases, and what he had to do, but underneath, too, what motivated him, what it was like being black in those times.”
The period touches are spot-on, from the music and films referenced in “BlacKkKlansman” to the clothing and hairstyles, and Washington says he researched all of that for his character intensely, too.
“I had an extensive playlist that consisted of War and Marvin Gaye, obviously,” he says. “Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana, a lot of Curtis Mayfield. I woke up to Curtis Mayfield every morning before work. I went to bed to ‘Soul Train.’”
He watched ’70s kung-fu movies, blaxploitation films like “Superfly,” and documentaries on the times. Some of that quickly translated to his mannerisms on screen, such as the martial-arts moves he breaks out when he’s alone in the police department and feeling frustrated by the condescension and latent racism of some of his colleagues.
Washington also often pats his afro into perfect shape over the course of the film, but that characteristic came directly from Lee, he says.
“Spike said, ‘Pat it, look up, walk away,’” Washington says, laughing as he describes the scene that introduces Ron to viewers. “That was cool, and it worked.”
“BlacKkKlansman” won the Grand Prix award at the Cannes Film Festival in May, and it’s hard not to think that the film’s connections between past and present struck a chord with the festival jury. At times those links are subtle, but by the end of the film they are clearly stated: America’s problems with race haven’t gone away, and in fact seem to have worsened in recent years.
“It’s the truth, it was necessary,” Washington says of the way “BlacKkKlansman” tackles the topic. “Spike wasn’t trying to hype it up; in fact, I think he really did a great a job of trusting the actors’ performances, and just letting the story get told.”
Those actors include Adam Driver as Flip Zimmerman, a fellow officer who partners with Ron to act as the white version of him when a face-to-face meeting with the Klan members is required. Topher Grace plays David Duke, and Laura Harrier portrays Patrice, a young black activist who Ron meets and falls for even though she thinks the police are part of the oppression faced by blacks in America.
The team of producers are the same who helped make “Get Out,” another genre movie that dealt with this critical issue, and “BlacKkKlansman” uses humor to draw audiences in as that movie also did. It’s shocking to hear a black man using a racial slur on the phone with Klan leaders who think he’s one of them, but while there’s humor, the audience is also discomfited, and that’s part of the point, Washington says.
“Man, the lexicon of hate, it’s so audible,” he says. “When you’re in the theater sometimes you’re cringing. I know I was, just hearing this black man say it. But it wasn’t gimmicky, it wasn’t for shock value, it’s just accurate.”
Changing those words of hate is part of what he believes needs to be done to start healing the nation’s racial divide.
“Even in our own culture, like how we use the N-word,” Washington says. “We flipped it to make it more of an encouraging word, like, ‘My brother,’ but we’ve got to be careful. I use this stuff and I’ve got to be careful.
“These are the kinds of conversations that Ron, the real Ron, said need to be brought up. We’ve got to face our differences together. And I guess I don’t have all the answers, but I’m just saying the language and changing some of the lexicon to where it’s more communal might be a jumping off point of bridging that gap.”
