Laurence Fishburne: the actor who puts risk before reputation - and proves why that matters so much

When Laurence Fishburne burst out of a flatlining career with his angry, righteous Furious Styles in Boyz N the Hood (1991), it was as though a long-nurtured racehorse had finally been given its head. He'd had a few decent roles in the years since he excelled as the young Bronx soldier going upstream in Apocalypse Now (1979): He'd played Bumpy, the quintessentially cool gangster, in The Cotton Club (1984) and the deadpan Jimmy Jump in Abel Ferrara's hilariously overheated King of New York (1990). Keeping one foot on the stage and winning a Tony for Two Trains Running, he'd even had fun guying his own machismo as Cowboy Curtis on Pee-wee's Playhouse.

Fishburne existed in the memory of anyone with an eye for a sharp performer crackling with energy. Hollywood recognized this for itself, Oscar-nominating him for his portrayal of Ike Turner in What's Love Got to Do with It (1993). But no one quite realized how high Fishburne had always been aiming. Actors ordinarily make a big show of modesty; to hear Fishburne's naked admission that he covets greatness is startling. Two things keep an interviewer's face straight when Fishburne talks this way: the actor's undeniable charm and the memory of just how close he came to being demonic as Tina Turner's tyrannical husband. Those with a taste for irony may like the fact that the St. James Club's princely suite, where Fishburne and I talked, overlooks the House of Blues. The headliner that weekend was the original Ike. Fishburne himself headlines in two movies this month, Higher Learning and Bad Company, followed by Just Cause in February.

SHEILA BENSON: Before Apocalypse Now you'd been a child actor. What had made you want to act?

LAURENCE FISHBURNE: I wanted to be a doctor, I wanted to be a basketball player, but I was an actor. Acting chose me; I didn't choose acting. My mom says I was always very happy onstage, as far back as kindergarten, more comfortable than in the real world. It's a safe environment, and there's a freedom in it that's amazing. You get to express a lot of things that are perhaps in you, but you get to do them in a safe way.

SB: Growing up, what actors did you admire?

LF: James Earl Jones, Sidney Poitier, Michael Caine. When Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, and Robert De Niro came along, I would watch them. I always liked the English actors: Peter O'Toole, Richard Burton, John Gielgud. I liked the way they spoke, I liked their intelligence; they were just incredibly passionate cats. As a youngster, my mom would have had me doing musicals on Broadway, but I fought tooth and nail against that. [imitates his mother] "Ahhh, you make me crazy. You could be making this kind of money. . . ." My feeling was, "But I'll never be a great actor if I do that."

SB: How did you consciously set out to be one?

LF: I was already thinking that at ten, eleven, twelve, when I was working on a soap opera [One Life to Live]. Then, on virtually the same day I was supposed to open in a play at the Negro Ensemble Company, I got accepted into the School of Performing Arts and I got Apocalypse. I decided to do the movie. I figured, Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, the guy who made The Godfather? I'll go work with those great cats in the Philippines and learn something.

SB: People forget that you were just fourteen when you were cast in Apocalypse Now.

LF: I grew up going to war movies. I guess I always fantasized about being in one, so Apocalypse was kind of a ready-made way to live out that fantasy.

SB: For two months, maybe, but for two years?

LF: It was hard being away from home and friends. I didn't have a lot of friends my age when we were doing the movie.

SB: Did you miss out on school?

LF: My mother's a schoolteacher and she was my tutor in the Philippines. I learned the acting part by doing. The most fundamental lesson that I learned as an actor was how to move around a camera. Vittorio [Storaro, the cinematographer] would get really frustrated with me because I'd never stand still. He'd say, "Move an inch to the left," and I'd go three feet to the left; I was out of the picture already. Slowly but surely I got sucked into what it was like to be in Vietnam. So, at the age of fifteen, I'm sitting in the jungle in the Philippines, listening to the best psychedelic music ever made, smoking the best reefer ever made.

SB: Did that distress your mother at all?

LF: Nah, I could have been back in Brooklyn, having gang fights or getting into trouble with the law, or getting into serious drugs. Then, after a year and a half, I became aware that we were making this artistic thing. Francis [Coppola] would have these conversations about D. W. Griffith or Cecil B. DeMille. He'd say, "These guys were artists, and we're artists." He'd look at me and go, "You, too!" So that really formed me.

SB: What happened after you came back to the United States?

LF: I went wild and I drank a lot of beer and smoked a lot of reefer and had a good time. [sardonically] I missed the prom. I wasn't on the track team or anything, so I did the teenage angst thing for a while. Actingwise, I ran into a new wall. Prior to that, I had been young--black and cute--and when I came back I was six feet tall; I had been hanging out with Vietnam veterans. I was seventeen and looked twenty-seven. So people didn't really know what to do with me, unless I was playing bad guys. Once I figured out I wasn't going to get hired to play nineteen-year-old college boys, I was like, "O.K., well, villainy is open, let's do that." I wasn't going to be a waiter, I wasn't going to go to college to study theater or film--I had just worked with a master of American film.