Delroy Lindo has appeared in dozens of films over the years. Currently, he’s directing Tanya Barfield’s Blue Door at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Lindo, who played Herald Loomis in the Broadway run of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, has only recently returned to the stage. He brings the intensity and drive that comes through on the screen to his directorial work – this is the first time he’s directed in the Bay Area – and to his conversation. Tommy Amano-Tompkins recently spoke with him.
Delroy Lindo
Guardian: There’s a scene in Blue Door in which the protagonist, Lewis, the only black man at a faculty party, looks at his hands and feels a kind of cosmic dislocation – misunderstood and out of place. You’re nearly six feet four inches tall – did you ever wish you were a few inches shorter?
Delroy Lindo: You mean as a black man? Did I ever wish I stood out less because of how people react to me? No, never. Would I prefer because of my size that I not be responded to the way I am? Certainly. Because often people don’t respond to the way a person is but to the way they think a person is. That’s the problem. And that’s exactly one of the things that the play is examining.