Wesley Snipes, Hollywood's hottest new star talks about: his divorce, his days on the streets and why he doesn't have 'jungle fever.' - Cover Story

Laura B. Randolph

SIX years ago Wesley Snipes was installing telephones in New York. Today, he has his own direct line to the power operators in Hollywood. With touch-tone speed, he's gone from unknown to unforgettable, from obscurity to celebrity.

Not yet 30, he's among the most sought-after actors in Tinsletown. Everyone wants the 4-1-1 on Snipes. Who is he? Where is he? How can we get him?

Film critics say he employs "a dizzying talent." You can't pass a newstand without seeing his face. The Washington Post called him "the most celebrated new actor of the season." Jet and Newsweek put him on the cover. Major studios fall all over themselves to sign him for their latest movies (since Jungle Fever wrapped, he's already shot The Waterdance in which he plays a paraplegic and White Me Can't Jump for 20th Century Fox.) And in the ultimate Hollywood litmus test f what makes an actor a star, women luuuuuuuuuuuuv him. So much so, in fact, that they appear ready to propel him into major league hearthrob territory. Leaving a Saturday night showing of Jungle Fever, in which Snipes stars as an architect having an affair with his White secretary, three teenage girls (all White) voice what is clearly the collective industry wisdom on Wesley Snipes: "He's young, hot and he's cool."

Exactly. And absolutely nothing like you'd expect a just-turned-29 suddenly famous ex-pool shark from the Bronx to be. For one thing, he's uncommonly centered--grounded in a way few people, never mind sudden celebrities, ever manage. For another, there's nothing affected about him--nothing pompous or put-on. In person, he wears his fame as casually as his gold hoop erring, seemingly oblivious to the fact that his career is in full ascension. Since 1985 when he landed his first film, Wildcats, after the first-choice actor didn't work out, it's been pretty much a roller-coaster ride to fame. He played a boxer in Streest of Gold, turned down a role in Do The Right Thing to play baseball speedster Willie Mays Hays in Major League and, last year, hooked up with Spike Lee to co-star in Mo' Better Blues, where his who-the-hell-was-that performance reduced women to confetti. No easy feat when you're playing opposite the lethally sexy Oscar-winner Denzel Washington. "I just wanted to go in, do a good job, and not let Denzel blow me off the screen," says Snipes of his role as saxophonist Shadow Henderson.

Not only wasn't he blown off the screen then, he was even mo' better the next time audiences saw him. As Nino Brown, the brilliant but ruthless drug lord in New Jack City, Snipes gave a chillingly real performance that turned the low-budget sleeper into a monster hit. Made for $8.5 million, New Jack City earned more than $20 million in its first three weeks and is the year's fourth highest-grossing picture.

Writer Barry Michael Cooper wrote New Jack City's starring role specifically for Snipes after watching his portrayal of the rival gang leader in Michael Jackson's Bad video. "Wesley's finger-in-the-face questioning of Michael Jackson's bravery was so realistic that I thought [director MArtin] Scorsese had hired a homeboy off the streets," says Cooper.

All of which brings us back to the "young" and "hot" and "cool" assessment of his three young fans. The young part is clear. But the hot and cool? It's just in him. It comes from the early years in, as he puts it, "the boogie-down Bronx." The intensity. The extremes. The hot passions, the frigid indifference of inner-city living.

Though not in the bad-guy gangster sense Cooper thought, Snipes will be the first to tell you that, in some ways, a homeboy from the 'hood is exactly what he is. His mother, a teacher's aide, and his father, an aircraft engineer, divorced before his second birthday, and he and his sister grew up in a third-floor apartment in the South Bronx. "We were oor. There wasn't any middle class happening for us . . .," he says. "I was raised in a single-parent household and my mom worked jobs on the side to provide for these two crumb snatchers. She was hard on me and, though we laugh about it now, I tell her sometimes she was unnecessarily hard with her punishments."

When, for instance, Snipes became a regular at the neighborhood pool hall ("I got real good--money good--so I started hustling and staying out later and later"), his mother packed up the family and moved to Orlando, Fla., ignoring Snipes' desperate pleas to stay in New York. "I was going to the High School for the Peforming Arts . . . and it was girls, girls, girls all over the place. I was a junior and coming into my puberty and my hormones were going like 'Ahhhhhhy.' I didn't want to leave that . . . . If I could have walked back to New York I would have."

An award-winning high school drama student when he graduated, he got his long-awaited opportunity to return to New York in the form of a Victor Borge scholarship to the State University at Purchase. There, the two seminal events of his life occurred. He became a Muslim. And he met his wife. Though neither experience worked out--he eft the Islamic faith in 1988 and divorced last year--both, he says, changed him in ways nothing has before or since.

Snipes was one of only four Black students in the theater arts department at State University at Purchase. "I felt like mold on white bread," he confides. Then he saw a documetary on Malcolm X, and the Muslim faith--with its emphasis on Black pride--became his consuming passion. "What saved me was being exposed to Malcolm," he says. "When I saw the documentary, it changed my whole life--everything. . . I went straight to the library and literally stole the [Autobiography of Malcolm X], and for two days I just read."

As a young Black man coming of age surrounded by a sea of Whites, says Snipes, Islam was a lifeline for him. Today, however, he is no longer Muslim. "A brother of mine used to say, 'When you're drowning, grab onto a log to keep afloat. But don't hold on to the log when the boat comes by. Get on the boat and bring your butt on back home.' So Islam for me was the log to make me more conscious of what African people have accomplished, of my self-worth, to give me some self-dignity."

Deciding to leave his marriage was decidedly more anguishing. He and his then-wife had been together since his senior year in college. They'd married a year after he graduated and four years later, in 1989, they had a son. "When the doctor pulled Jelani out and held him up . . . that was definitely the greatest moment," he remembers. "There's never been anything like that."

Things between him and his wife, however, wen't so incredible. In fact, things weren't working out at all, and Snipes was intensely conflicted about what to do. "When you marry a person you think "til death do us part," he says, his voice and eyes filling with pai. Whenever he thought about separating, he thought about Jelani, about hisown father leaving when he was just one, about shattered dreams and broken promises.

The memory is still painful. "I think being in this industry had a lot to do with it," he says of his divorce. "It's so difficult for a person who isn't an artist to be involved with someone who is. The real story is how difficult it is to balance the love of your art--something that really is who you are, your essence--with someone that you've fallen in love with. And for that person to suggest that you give up your art, well that's suicide. It's like your blood, your skin. You can't divorce it. To not do it means you're dead. . . . And then you have all the other things: long separations, other women coming in trying to manipulate."

When he and his wife first separated, Wesley says, his pain was relentless. He would leave of the set where he was shooting King of New York, hop into his Acura Legend and drive for hours, sometimes all night, stopping only to refill the tank, or watch the sun come up. "When I left the house, I lived out of my car," he remembers. "I was a vagabond. I'd crash here, crash there, sleep in the car some nights. I'd take the car and fill it up with gas and just drive. The saving grace was that I was working. I dind't want to leave the set. I hated it when the day was over. I'd fill the car up two or three times and just keep driving. I had a car phone and I'd call people and just drive and talk, drive and talk. . . . The situation was so messed up, the worst. There wasn't nothing sweet about that at all."

Did he turn to other women when it was over to take the edge off the pain? Long pause." Once or twice," he confesses. "Until they'd say, 'Are we going to have a relationship? Hell no. I was always honest to the core."

These days, Snipes says there is no special lady in his life, though he'd marry again "when I understand more about me and the things I need to improve about myself and the type of woman that will work best with who I am."

This much he already knows. "I like a woman who is aware of her womaness in its universal form; a woman who isn't defined by what she's been told, or what she's been dictated to believe she's supposed to be. Those are the women who attract me. Women who allow that to embody them . . . and at the same time they're not in conflict with you because you're a man. They see the interconnectedness and the necessity of having a man--not a boy or male but a man--in their life. A woman who has that going on, she will grab my attention every time."

And, unlike the object of his onscreen character's desire, she probably won't be White. Though he allows, "If two people love one another that should be all that matters," offscreen, Wesley Snipes definitely doesn't have jungle fever.

"It's more important to me to try and develop a good . . . relationship between a Black man and a Black woman," he says. 'That's the agenda right now and that's totally where my head is -- to redefine the image of Black male/female relationships and how important and valuable they are. We have to work on that tip. Once we work on that and relate to one another on a personal, professional, sexual and social sense, then we can venture out. Until then, we ain't ready for it."

It's that kind of brutal honesty, that gritty, raw tell-it-like-is-even-when-it-cuts-deeply quality that makes Snipe's performances so riveting, so real. To research his role as a paralplegic in the soon-to-be-released film Waterdance, he traveled to rehabilitation centers to interview patients so he could come to understand the limitations of their lives. He even videotaped them, thinking he'd have great difficulty mastering the physical challeges of the role and was shocked when he managed them with relative ease. And then something his manager, Dolores Robinson, a Black woman, said made it all clear.

"My manager said to me it was probably easy because . . . you are a young Black male in society and, like this character, you've always been perceived as an outcast. I said, 'Oh, that's deep.' And I can relate. That's what happens to paraplegics. They're not accepted by society. It's same thing that's happened to me all my life."

And continues to happen despite his celebrity. While shooting The Waterdance, he was manhandled by members of the Los Angeles Police Department who, because of a rental company's mistake, suspected him of driving a stolen car. Arrested at gunpoint ("They came over, threw my hands in a wrist lock, cuffed me, then [one] put his knee on my neck, then put the 9mm to my head"), Snipes says he was handcuffed to a bench and held for hours at the station despite numerous third party attempts to explain the error. "Everybody was coming out looking at me like a monkey in a cage," he says disgustedly of the police. "Walking past me smiling and snickering and shaking their heads like, 'Ump, umph, umph. You see that. A nigger is a nigger. You know you can't give the niggers nothing. He's gonna steal a car and he makes movies.'"

But if the actor is angry, he is hardly resigned. If Wesley Snipes is sure of anything, it is his Blackness. "You will never hear me say I don't see myself as a Black actor but just an actor who happens to be Black. Every chance I get I'm going to tell you I'm an African-American man who is acting. I'm going to let you know andI will not allow anybody to say otherwise. . . . I have a passionate love for African people and [African] culture. That's the bottom line. And I'mnot going to compromise on it under any circumstances," says Snipes with the certainty of a man whose life is better than his dreams.

COPYRIGHT 1991 Johnson Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group