From West Indian Archie to Delta Slim: Oscar Nominee Delroy Lindo Makes Every Role Count

In 1992, Delroy Lindo made his first film with director Spike Lee, “Malcolm X,” and showed audiences that he was as formidable a talent on the screen as he was on stage, where he had previously been nominated for a Tony for his work in August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.”

Lindo should have been nominated for an Oscar for his work as Malcolm X‘s mentor, then nemesis, West Indian Archie, but this year the Academy has finally come around and given him a well-deserved Best Supporting Actor nomination for his beautiful, funny, wrenching performance as the gifted but haunted blues musician Delta Slim in “Sinners.”

In the 34 years between “Malcolm X” and “Sinners,” Lindo’s body of work has exhibited a range and depth that would be the envy of any actor. From the characters he created with Lee, which run the gamut from the father in Lee’s affectionate remembrance “Crooklyn” to an ice-cold drug kingpin in “Clockers” and a proudly MAGA Vietnam Veteran in “Da 5 Bloods,” to his 40-episode run as slick attorney Adrian Boseman on television’s “The Good Fight” and his verbally dextrous thief in David Mamet’s “Heist,” Lindo is a gifted chameleon whose performances all have one thing in common — when he’s on screen, you can’t take your eyes off of him.

Lindo’s greatness lies in his ability to give each character a fully realized inner life no matter how little time they spend on screen — West Indian Archie, a character who makes a lasting impression in “Malcolm X” and serves a key function in the narrative, only appears for about five percent of that film’s 202-minute running time, but once you’ve seen Lindo’s performance it lingers in the mind forever.

For Lindo, the key to West Indian Archie was finding an arc he could explore in just a few scenes to give the sense of a life fully lived. “In terms of screen time, it’s less than 10 minutes in a three-hour film,” Lindo told IndieWire, “but West Indian Archie has a very specific and particular story inside of the film with a beginning, middle, and end.”

Lindo’s delicate depiction of West Indian Archie’s journey from successful criminal powerhouse to destitute stroke victim provides “Malcolm X” with one of its most affecting moments, when Malcolm (played by Lindo’s former theater school classmate Denzel Washington) visits a diminished Archie for the last time. Ironically, however, when they were shooting Lee wasn’t so sure about the bold choices Lindo made for the character’s speech and physicality.

“Spike was like, ‘What the fuck is he doing?,'” Lindo said. “Thankfully, Ernest Dickerson, who was the director of photography on that film and has since become a great director in his own right, was looking through the lens and could see what I was doing. He told Spike, ‘No, it’s good. Leave him alone.'” The self-imposed pressure Lindo and everyone else felt on “Malcolm X” was enormous, not just because of the importance of the subject matter but the need to prove the naysayers wrong. “Spike was treated very unfairly on that film. He received a lot of criticism before he even shot a frame of film. So we all knew we had to bring our A game.”

‘Malcolm X’©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

The precision and complexity of Lindo’s performance as West Indian Archie is typical of his work, as his resume is heavily populated with characters who feel authentic and lively even if they’ve only got one or two scenes — his dynamic portrayals of, for example, the intimidating Captain Wanta in “Congo” and the even more intimidating (and eerie) Santeria practitioner Phillipe Moyez in Taylor Hackford’s “The Devil’s Advocate,” make a viewer want to see entire films devoted to these figures. Lindo’s approach to these characters is to do as much homework as possible so that they have a life beyond what’s written on the page.

“You don’t just show up and do the scene,” Lindo said. “There’s preparation, and I’d like to believe that preparation pays off when audiences encounter the character. For Phillipe Moyez, I talked to a number of people about Santeria because Moyez was steeped in it. For the final scene as West Indian Archie, I made three or four trips to Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn and spent time in a ward where people were recovering from strokes, observing.”

In the case of Delta Slim, Lindo immersed himself in the world of the blues. “I steeped myself in the music, exposing myself to Son House, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf. … I listened to a broad range of musicians from the Mississippi Delta, and I also watched a lot of documentaries about ‘regular’ people from the Delta to get a sense of how they lived.”

Lindo found particular inspiration in two books “Sinners” director Ryan Coogler gave him, “Blues People” by Amiri Baraka (writing under the pen name LeRoi Jones) and “Deep Blues” by Robert Palmer. “Those two books gave me an understanding of the lifestyle and culture of these blues musicians,” Lindo said, adding that his work with composer Ludwig Göransson and executive music producer Serena Göransson also informed his work. “I also worked with various New Orleans-based musicians who helped me navigate both the piano and the harmonica. I joined all of these things with a biography I created for myself, and when all of those come together they create Delta Slim.”

Lindo says that when he’s working on a character like Delta Slim, he still experiences the same joy that he experienced when he was a five-year old who fell in love with acting while appearing in his first school play. “I’m still very much in love with the craft of acting,” Lindo said, “and I consider that to be a major victory after all these years and the various ups and downs of a 40-year career.”

The pleasure Lindo takes in performing is infectious, particularly in a scene like the one in “Sinners” in which Delta Slim eats garlic to prove he’s not a vampire. It’s a hilarious riff on a similar moment in John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” a major influence on Coogler, though Lindo says that, when playing a comic scene, he doesn’t so much do it for laughs as simply adhere to the truth of the character.

“I didn’t enter into that scene thinking, ‘Oh, this is funny,'” Lindo said. “On the contrary, for Delta Slim it’s a very serious moment. But there’s no question it’s a meaty scene for an actor to sink his teeth into.” The ability to play the comedy, the terror, the poignancy and the tragedy of Delta Slim is emblematic of Lindo’s ability to encompass and clearly convey all of a character’s rich contradictions, something that was obvious in his early work with Spike Lee — not just West Indian Archie but drug dealer Rodney Little in “Clockers,” a film that remains one of Lindo’s favorites and in which Lindo has to convincingly portray Little as both a father figure and a ruthless exploiter of his “children.”

“As I started working, I read Richard Price’s book twice,” Lindo said. “Then he gave me a real gift when he told me Rodney was based on a real person. I got to meet him and hang out with him before we started shooting, and he was a very charismatic individual — but he had this underside. That led to me asking the question, how does a man become like that? How does he become a father figure to these young men he has working for him? I wanted to explore him cutting their hair, helping them with their homework, giving them advice about life. All of those elements were as interesting to me as the selling of the drugs, and I hoped they would round Rodney out in a way that would make it more difficult for the audience to judge him.”

‘Da 5 Bloods’Netflix

That lack of judgment is an important part of Lindo’s process, as he tries to connect with characters whose lifestyles and values — or, in the case of his character in “Da 5 Bloods,” politics — might be diametrically opposed to his own. “The way into ‘Da 5 Bloods’ for me was understanding the depth of abandonment my character Paul felt having served three tours of duty in Vietnam, serving my country and then coming back and getting my ass kicked, feeling worthless,” Lindo said. “I’m not a social scientist, but I think there are MAGA people who feel left behind, that other people are getting opportunities and they’re not. That’s one of the things I understood about Paul.”

Just as “Da 5 Bloods” was a film speaking to both America’s past and present, Lindo feels that “Sinners” is both a rigorously researched period piece and a contemporary film that speaks to where we are now. “For me, it confirms the importance of each of us preserving our history,” Lindo said. “I knew it was special when we were filming it, but I didn’t get a sense of the impact until after the premiere, when I was working in Australia. I started getting texts and emails from people I hadn’t heard from in years, talking about how the film had affected them. That’s when I started to realize, ooh, we really have something here.”