The ‘American Fiction’ Cast Brings Hidden Depths

As we prepare for the 30th Screen Actors Guild Awards, Backstage is breaking down this year’s film and television ensemble work for your consideration. For more voting guides and roundups, we’ve got you covered here.

Main Cast: Erika Alexander, Sterling K. Brown, Issa Rae, Tracee Ellis Ross, Myra Lucretia Taylor, Leslie Uggams, Jeffrey Wright 
Casting by: Jennifer Euston
Directed By: Cord Jefferson 
Written by: Cord Jefferson (based on the novel “Erasure” by Percival Everett) 
Distributed by: Amazon MGM Studios

How do you portray a two-dimensional character in a way that still reveals depth? That question is on the tip of every actor’s tongue in “American Fiction,” Cord Jefferson’s satire of liberal racism and white guilt in the modern publishing world. 

After he’s fired from his job as a professor, frustrated author Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) pens a hackneyed “Black” novel under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, a fictitious street-smart convict on the run, as an act of spite against a racist industry. But his plan backfires when the book becomes an instant hit, forcing him to attend interviews in the guise of the broad, offensive caricature he invented.

Wright hits every note of Monk’s self-effacement as the literary rat race forces him ever further into gaudy cultural indignities of his own making; and the flattening nature of his novel has surprising implications for others in his life. His problem isn’t just that he can’t sell books as his authentic self, but that his stuck-up, stubborn perspective prevents him from seeing those around him as fully formed people with stories of their own.

Monk’s brother Clifford (Sterling K. Brown) is on a chaotic path of his own. After he comes out of the closet, causing his marriage to fall apart, the successful surgeon copes by going on a promiscuous, drug-fueled bender. Cliff’s carelessness only worsens Monk’s anxiety about their ailing mother’s mounting medical bills. Leslie Uggams’ heartbreaking depiction of a woman going through the early stages of Alzheimer’s makes viewers empathize with Monk’s predicament. But he’s sadly unable to see past the surface of his family’s woes—or anyone else’s. 

At first, the supporting characters in “American Fiction” feel half-formed. That’s
by design, since Monk has little curiosity about the inner lives of those around him; but as the movie progresses, he begins to see their complexities. Wright expertly walks this fine line. 

That’s particularly true of Issa Rae’s Sinatra Golden, a bestselling author and well-to-do Oberlin graduate. Her novels reduce Blackness to painful self-flagellation, seemingly in service of catering to white readers; in fact, her work is the inspiration for Monk’s parody. But beneath this cartoonish facade, Rae reveals Sinatra’s multifaceted intellect and lived perspective.

Other actors perform a similar balancing act, including Myra Lucretia Taylor as Monk’s sweet housekeeper, Lorraine, and Erika Alexander as Coraline, an inquisitive fan who eventually becomes his love interest. “American Fiction” also features sendups of well-meaning white people in the entertainment world whom Monk unintentionally coaxes to his side—among them Miriam Shor as book editor Paula and Adam Brody as movie producer Wiley.

Monk’s limited worldview pushes most of the Black female characters to the margins of the story; but the actors portraying them work within these limitations. Though these women initially come off as literary “types,” their performances gesture at hidden depths that surprise the protagonist, but not the audience.

The entire ensemble is in tune with the themes and narrative approach of Jefferson’s film, and that’s a rare thing. “American Fiction” both portrays the ways we tend to categorize people into stereotypes and calls on its cast to embody those stereotypes—and these actors understood the assignment.