An anecdote that Joe Morton related in a recent interview distilled this performer's work philosophy. Said Morton, "When James Cameron asked me why I was so interested in doing Terminator 2, I said because of a joke Richard Pryor had told many years previously. Pryor said, 'Hollywood must believe that black people aren't going to be around in the future. Because in all the movies that take place in the future, we aren't there.'"
For the past 20 years, Morton has had one goal, whether performing onstage, on television, or on the big screen‹to let the audience know he is there: a black character actor who refuses to make his living by playing stereotypical black characters.
As Morton put it, "In the 1980s, there was no category to stick me in. 'He sounds too smart' is what I was hearing. I realized that I had to become a member of the school of what I call 'ugly acting.' Which meant I wanted to do what Dustin Hoffman did very successfully: to play character roles, but lead character roles. The object of the game was to produce a number of different characters who happened to be black, but were diverse and weren't going to be relegated to the urban, impoverished either bad guy or victim."
The director who has most often provided the space for Morton's "ugly acting" is his longtime friend John Sayles. It was Sayles who gave Morton the lead in the actor's first feature, The Brother From Another Planet. In his sad, silent portrayal of an alien contending with the harsh, dead-end environs of Harlem, Morton brought to mind the great performances of Buster Keaton. The very successful film was one of the first attempts to bring a white audience into a largely black world‹through the eyes of an innocent alien. It was also a dream come true for the young actor, but it wasn't the Hollywood entr e he thought it would be.
Said Morton, "This movie pretty much got wonderful reviews across the country and I thought, Well, here's my career. I'm made. Here I go. But that didn't happen. In fact, between my wife and me, it became a joke. Whenever I went into an interview or an audition and somebody said to me, 'You know, I saw The Brother From Another Planet; I loved that movie, I thought you were just wonderful,' I didn't get the job."
Sayles, however, continued to recognize Morton's considerable talent, creating meaty roles for him in the features City of Hope and Lone Star. Yet outside of directors like Sayles who understood his gift, Morton still had to contend with the largely unimaginative and closed-minded world of Hollywood casting. He quickly learned that it was up to him, not the casting director, to have vision.
"You pick up a new script and read it, and even though your agent or whoever has said to you this is the part he would like for you to read, it's still your choice," said Morton. "You can go into that room and say, 'Well, I'll read this for you, but in fact this character over here is the one I'm interested in.' And that's exactly how I did it. I'd go in and say, 'I'll read this for you but this is the character I'd like to play.' And it worked, because I would pick a character I actually knew something about, and had some feeling for.
"Actors are very often people who are placed in a position where they think they have to be grateful for the job and have no control over what they play and how they play it. I was not taught that way. I completely disagree with that. I think that you have more control than you think. You can go in and say, 'This is the kind of thing that I'm interested in doing,' and a good eight times out of 10, for me at any rate, it has worked."
Because of this aggressive attitude, Morton has won a number of parts that were not written specifically for black actors, such as scientist Miles Dyson in Terminator 2, lawyer Michael James on the TV series Equal Justice, or mounted policeman Carleton Thomas in Tribeca. He also spent a lot time on the boards‹a more traditionally color-blind arena‹garnering a Tony nomination for the musical Raisin, performing in numerous regional theatres, and even in the New York Shakespeare Festival productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream and King John. The only reason he got out of musicals, in fact, is because he didn't want to be "one of those musical performers who ended up doing their act in Las Vegas."
Things have come full circle for Morton, who is now exploring the sci-fi genre again with his portrayal of Dr. Grote Maxwell on the new UPN series Mercy Point. Like Brother, Mercy Point actually uses the genre to address issues of racism, as Maxwell must contend with "spacism"‹prejudice against aliens.
"I think that's what good writing is all about," said Morton. "You go into a genre to talk about other things. Tolkein created a whole world to talk about the world he lived in."
By insisting on finding roles that reflect real characters and the real world in which he lives, Joe Morton has made audiences examine stereotypes and assumptions in their own world, and, for a moment, see the world through alien eyes.