Yaphet Kotto: Don't Act, Just Be.

I once remember watching a Turner Classic Movies dedication to Katharine Hepburn in which Anthony Hopkins said that while working on the set of “The Lion in Winter” the great gave him a wonderful piece of advice, she told him “Don't act, read the lines, just be, just speak the lines”. It's a very specific piece of advice for a very specific type of actor of which Katherine Hepburn was, Anthony Hopkins is, and now Yaphet Kotto was. Yaphet Kotto enjoyed one of the greatest careers I think anybody so clearly held back by the industry has ever enjoyed. He got a bevy of unique and varied roles which allowed Kotto to flex his acting muscles in different ways, whether it be using his full 6ft 3 frame, his elegant way of movement, or his effortless way of speaking, and many times all three. Its the speaking part though that is my favorite part or talking point in regards to discussing Yaphet Kotto, because it plays so much into how Kotto's legacy engraved itself into our collective consciousness. Kotto like Hepburn, Hopkins, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, was an extension of that fold of actor where all the lines or the words find their meaning in the throat of the actor. The “heady actor” divines the meaning in the words, the “transformative actor” twists, bends and conforms the words to their will, the “straight shooter” just aims and fires, let’s the words find their target….and yes I made all those terms up. It has been spoken about many times, but far too many people have a disdain for actors who speak plainly, who in essence as Hepburn said don’t” act.” If it's not John Wayne it's Hepburn, or its Bruce Willis, Sam Jackson, or the Rock, but what's missed is in the case of all of these actors (and of course in varying degrees) there is an extreme degree of difficulty in just being. Number one, it must be said that from the moment an actor arrives on stage, or in front of the camera - there is almost instantaneously this need to be someone other than oneself. You realize we're here, that we are watching you, and all of a sudden every fiber of your being is telling you we can see right through you, we can hear you not being an actor and you need to emphasize more, or maybe that last word needs more accompanying face because yours , well that’s just plain silly. People are watching everywhere and all of a sudden all of the lessons that the world has taught you in that you yourself are not enough - arrive fully formed at your doorstep, and a great deal larger than yourself usually. These feelings of immense doubt and self deprecation growl and swipe at you, and you stand there and do what comes natural to do which is to defend yourself, and in comes all these elaborate techniques and ways to hide yourself, make yourself better, to make yourself appear larger, and before you know it you’re acting, just not…well. The most difficult questions for the actor are based in and around building at least a very good edifice of comfort in oneself to the point where you stop looking to be larger than, smaller than, more important than, and you just trust that you already these things. Now as for number the small aspect, this is made all that much more difficult when you add the politics of being black and let me be frank “Ugly” and then the politics of being black and “ugly” in Hollywood in the era in which Yaphet Kotto was to break into Hollywood. I don't use the word ugly lightly, and most definitely not objectively, but I do use it plainly, because it is what many people including black people themselves would call someone who looks like Kotto were he not an actor. The politics and the indoctrination of anti blackness, that hatred for blackness especially overt and explicit blackness in and around the body in America, are well documented. Yet somewhere in his childhood growing up maybe possibly watching the very white idols of a former generation - the Montgomery Clifts, the Marlon Brando's, the Gary Cooper's this child and then man had the audacity to want to join them on screen. Where does such boldness come from? To stand and affirm oneself, to push so boldly against what remains unseen, to place ones strengths and weaknesses bare in front of so many? .. only God knows, but it's extremely affecting when you watch it, and alluring in that Kotto found something beyond the superficial aspects of our underlying desires to be or be with those we watch on screen, he and others liked him forced us to reckon with our attraction to what we disdain, what we are told to dislike. In “Bone”(1972) he plays just this ..the avatar of americas deep obsession with, its fascination and love of all things black and its hatred. He is there to pull on and from what may or may not have ever existed. A white man insist that he sees a rat, his wife does not see a rat, when the camera pans to the pool where the rat supposedly is WE don't see a rat, but when Bone arrives literally out of nowhere he sticks his hand in the water and pulls from the blackness just that a rat. Kotto plays this as a secret only hes in on, even though the white man swore he had seen it too, it’s as if he knows it’s not there but that he can conjure it. There's a quiet sureness to his gaze which he holds that exists squarely in that special place between threat and sensuality. Bone knows, and because he too is a conjured idea of the white man’s fear and hia wifes lust ans this is all in movie, but its lifeless until Kotto erects it. That was his appeal to lean on, to pull us in, to mesmerize us with, and in so doing helped open our eyes to the possibilities for masculinity and desire if only we were so inclined. Whether in “Bone” or “Live and Let Die" he found a “constantly evolving before your eyes” concoction of raw power, sexuality, grace, and confidence that rent asunder many of the standing expectations of a man, a black man such as himself, and its extremely audacious and extremely effective much like his Bond Villian Mister Big…yeah that’s Yaphet ..Mister Big…

I was scrolling my Twitter timeline the other day and I fell on an interesting tweet where someone speaking about Anne Hathaway said “She always understands the assignment”. Once I got off thinking about whether or not it was true, I started to think about that particular usage of words, and how much I really liked it.. “always understands the assignment” - It's a vital integral aspect to acting. Amongst the great separators between the greats and the So So's. There are quite a few actors who I believe are quite good at what they do on paper, they have all the goods, but consistently they misunderstand the assignment, that is - what the role needs with the role calls for, and their interpretation of the role. Many times I've seen performers who are actually not that good become so good in a role that they become somewhat overrated as an actor - as it pertains to their skill level or the skill level involved with the work - simply because they were so good at understanding assignment! Thats the power of that factor. Think recently of Adam Sandler in “Uncut Gems”. In my opinion it's not so much that the man is so great in this role as far as the actual attributes important to acting, it's that he understands the assignment so well, so deeply, thqt it organically melded to everything he already had in him and it functions on a level akin to symbiosis. It's what many refer to as being born for a role in that there just weren't that many people who could cater to that role in the way Adam Sandler could and that's not to take away from him because part of that is that he had an imagination. He saw it so clearly, understood it so clearly and there are a lot of other actors who some might deem more intelligent, better actors who I think would absolutely fumble this because they'd overanalyze it, think it to death, or just dont have what Sandler has that kinetic, nervous energy alwaya coiled rans ready to bute has really been apart of hia entire brand for years, its very specifically his and only his and anything less might’ve ruined it, - With Yaphet though this specific attribute was not a one or two ( If you consider Punch Drunk Love another) time happening, it was his career. I've seen a lot of his films “Live and Let Die” “Alien” “Brubaker” “Across 110th Street” and lesser seen ones like “Bone” and “Friday Foster”. I've never seen one role, one word where it seems the Yaphet Kotto did not understand the assignment. Ridley Scott's Sci-fi horror classic “Alien” is the most ready made example of this, I think it’s why his role in it resonated with so many. There's a quality to the character Parker I think is built into the script. Class wise most of the crew is ambiguous at best, they could come from a wide range of backgrounds but it's Parker, Lambert, ( an under discussed Veronica Cartwright) and his partner in crime “Brett” (Harry Dean Stanton) that come closest to basically putting out a large neon sign that says blue collar.. working class. No one seems to get it more than Yaphet, its what separates him, not only understanding his class, but his blackness, but not forcing it, just letting it breathe it’s own life into the role. Perhaps coming directly off of Paul Scrader's magnificent “Blue Collar” just one year earlier he brought some of what he had there straight into the set here. The artifice is there - in the details; the bandana around the head the open shirt, the lack of any respect for decorum, that's the superficial calls to class, which many times in our collective minds has to do with our indoctrinations around certain behaviors mainly a sort of coded rigidity versus in openness and freeness, on the “Nostromo” you can almost rank their class and rank by just how open their shirts are . The blackness though is deeper, or maybe less noticeable I mean, but still very clear to the initiated, its in the way he checks folks, the seriousness about his money. Its in the fear he shows, how it registers in his body, it could be anybody but it reads as definitely black that's not just represented in the words that he mouths, but the way that he mouths them, and the body language that accompanies it. Its comforting to watch blackness flourish in a mostly white film without being embellished upon. I'm reminded of another role that I love and which a black man is surrounded by white people where his blackness is affirmed while never being overtly expressed to in a way that seems mawkish or exploitive ..Ernie Hudson as Winston Zeddmore in 1984's “Ghostbusters”. In both these roles there is a relaxed authenticity to how these men interact with and stand apart from the world in which they are involved, they understand how the world sees them in this place, they may even nod to it, but never overtly condescending to us the audience or to themselves, they simply let it be …

The politics surrounding the body in regards to Hollywood is important, especially when speaking to or about careers. Hollywood was never completely a safe comfortable space for atypical looks, bodies, minds, for anyone but especially not anyone who wasn’t white and cis male, but if ever a time came as close to being somewhat relaxed in the physiology and ideology as to who and who couldn't be a leading man or matinee idol in the realm of looks it seemed the 70s was that. It was it’s own kind of incubator for counterculture of which cinema of course didnt escape. The strong-jawed Lancaster's, Grant's , Pecks, and Mitchum's had aged out, and different types of men were taking their place with differing types of sex appeal and masculinity. It was now Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Jon Voight, Robert Duvall. These men werent the apex of male bodies, many of them had strange faces, broad and lean, with asymmetrical properties. They could be balding, or fat, or lanky and awkward, they had the everyman quality of a Stewart or Joseph Cotton rather than the reverential beauty of a James Dean, Clift, or Roc Hudson, but as is always the case whatever happens to the white male in this society is not merely or easily transferred over to black men, so while the ideas around what constitutes beauty and masculinity was broadening as it pertained to white males, for black men, and any other group not cis white males it led to a large void if represented at all. The “Blaxploitation” movies provided a lot of would-be suitors for black straight appearing ( because who knows) cis men in Billy Dee Williams, Calvin Lockhart, Richard Roundtree, Glynn Turman, Fred Williams, and of course Yaphet, but Hollywood seemed much more hesitant and apprehensive to crowning any one of these men as a new leading man, and so that void pretty much remained until Denzel Washington arrives nearly a decade later. It says quite a lot for Yaphet that out of all of these men that it's Yaphet, blacker than all of them, somewhat portly, and atypical even while in truth being beautiful man- who arguably had the best career. To watch Kotto was always to watch a sort of mini revolution in my mind, infinitesimal, maybe subatomic, but it was nonetheless a revolution. Every Kotto appearance was a small act of defiance against the standard, the ideal, there were very few actors like him then, and there are still fewer now who look like him now in looks or abilities. I don't know anything about Kotto in firmness, I don't like to make large grand statements about representation or what seeing a black man who looks like Kotto on screen does for all black people, but it implies a lot about HIS survival skills, about HIS abilities, and to some extent about HIS confidence. Kotto was a bit of a conundrum like so many black actors, (especially from his time) in that it is only after they pass you find that all these people knew of them, that they were beloved and their work was deeply appreciated because for so long they live unspoken of. You go to Kotto's Wikipedia and it's almost farcical how small it is. You try to look up information online it's not much there. Homicide life on the street ends its run in 00’ and for 21 years this man has one credit to his name. Did he retire on his own volition? Did he just feel like he had nothing more to say, did Hollywood decide that for him? We don't know because it seemed very few people cared enough to want to ask Mister Kotto, yet on the day he dies, with no political affiliation to speak of or to, only small mentions of a legacy in civil rights work, no celebrity gossip, no books or memoirs no lifetime achievement awards or various ceremonies celebrating his career, there is an outpouring much larger than the man's actual career really would speak to, and you would be a fool to belive this outpouring disingenuous. You can feel it in the size of the words used around his name, and the frequency. That…THAT to me is his legacy.. that he just let things be, that he just existed and yet despite or maybe because of that the respect for him is larger than most actors could hope for being given the same variables and forces working against for them as Kotto. Whether it was his life, or the words that he spoke in film, he just seemed to let them speak for themselves, rather than trying to force some meaning upon either his life or the words, and in that right there is his power to rest in.