Cheadle Discusses 'Iron Man 2' and Miles Davis Role

Jeff Simon - Buffalo News

Don Cheadle sympathized.

He hadn't seen "Iron Man 2" yet either, and he has a key part in the movie.

But there we were talking on the phone anyway, because the film is the official blockbuster kickoff to the movie summer.

Cheadle replaced Terrence Howard to play Rhodie, the goody-goody military pal of hard-partying, bad boy munitioneer Tony Stark, played with infectious narcissistic zest by Robert Downey Jr. And who cares what it's like to play a goody-goody anyway, even when he's as good as Cheadle is in "Iron Man 2?"

So we talked about a film that Cheadle is planning to direct and star in, one scheduled for release in 2013 that has electrified everyone who has heard about it -- a film about the great jazz trumpet player Miles Davis, whom Cheadle will play.

That is great casting, not because Cheadle, with his baby face (at 44) looks much like Davis, with his Cherokee cheekbones and eyes that pierced as burningly as his music, but because Cheadle -- himself a musician -- is a superb actor who has repeatedly proven himself on screen, even when playing a part seemingly removed from himself -- talk jockey Peter Greene, for instance, in Kasi Lemmons' 2007 film "Talk to Me."

"I don't really care about the facts," said Cheadle, of the historic particulars of Davis' life. "It's not a biopic per se," not, then "a cradle to grave view of his life" but rather a portrait of one of the most dramatically compelling artists of the 20th century.

Cheadle was a high school student when he first saw Davis, and he has never forgotten it. Though the saxophone is his instrument, he's been playing the trumpet recently to get himself ready for the film.

He has, ever since the project was announced, hung out with Davis' great 1960s bass player Ron Carter, as well as that Davis Quintet's pianist Herbie Hancock and saxophonist Wayne Shorter, both of whom Cheadle expects to be involved in the soundtrack to his film.

Inside show business and occasionally outside it, Cheadle is widely known for being a committed activist citizen of the world, raising awareness in America of the horrors of Darfur, along with George Clooney, among others.

Nevertheless, he doesn't think there is anything fundamentally different about his generation of activist actors -- Clooney, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, himself -- and the activist actors of the 1960s and '70s (Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, etc.).

"The groundwork was laid by them for us," he says. The difference may be simply in the fact that "the media are so much different now. There tend to be more outlets now" for the actors' messages.

"Our world has gotten smaller and smaller in scale," he says. So that as a member of a privileged class -- "we have the luxury of being able to travel with security" -- actors can go to "places that weren't getting a lot of ink" and cause ink to be spilled about those places (as well as cause TV pictures to be taken).

Cheadle quotes a truism from his friend Pitt about what drives his generation of activist actors: "There are places that can't get the light. We can't get out of the light."

In the case of Cheadle and some of his movies, that isn't entirely true.

About Lemmons' "Talk to Me" -- a good movie in which he, too, is good -- Cheadle says now three years later, "I wish it had been handled better. Yes, I was very happy with that film. I wish it had done better."

So, too, was he happy with the film of "Crash," which he campaigned for tirelessly. He wasn't so happy with the TV version of it.

"It wasn't that successful," says Cheadle. "What made the movie successful was the structure, the condensation of the stories. On TV you can't do that week in, week out."

There are, on the other hand, "some movies you wish they'd buried."

No one could possibly bury "Iron Man 2" -- even if any fool wanted to -- because it's virtually an industrial celebration in Hollywood, of the expectation of audience happiness.

Lest anyone think "Iron Man" director Jon Favreau is in any way happy, Cheadle is ready to disavow that notion with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

People think that, says Cheadle, because "Jon is big and round. He's actually a manic depressive."

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