Delroy Lindo: The Sinners Oscar Nominee Who Could Make Spike Lee’s British Secret Weapon Less Secret | film

IOn the heels of Oscar nominations, Wunmi Mosaku has been announced as Britain’s savior after winning Best Supporting Actress at Hollywood’s most prestigious awards. UK was having its first year without a nomination in the acting categories since 1986.

But the Sinners star has been joined by fellow cast member, Lewisham-born Delroy Lindo, who will also represent Britain on the big night on March 15.

The actor, who was born in south London in 1952, was a surprise pick in the best supporting actor category, beating supposed sure thing Paul Mescal and helping lift Sinners to a record 16 nods.

Lindo was reportedly as surprised as the rest of the industry. In bed in Los Angeles on Thursday morning, his son called him with the news. “Really? Are you for real?” He asked before looking at his phone and finding 179 messages confirming this.

In Ryan Coogler’s box office hit, Lindo plays Delta Slim, a bluesman who ends up holed up in a Mississippi band fighting vampires while dealing with the looming specter of Jim Crow racism. For many, he represented the ideal role of an African-American cultural figure, but the reality is more nuanced: Lindo is a child of the black Atlantic.

Unlike Mosaku who can still quote Greggs List and has a strong Mancunian accent, Lindo had no hint of a London accent after leaving the capital for the United States as a teenager.

His first film role was as an Army sergeant in the follow-up to American Graffiti, a film titled More American Graffiti that was filmed while he was still in acting school.

But it was his first ever acting role as one of the Three Kings in a south London primary school nativity play that gave him his acting talent. One teacher praised Lindo, who was the only black child in his school, and asked the others in the cast to “do it like Delroy does.”

This is one of the few positive memories Lindow has of a country that, when he left, was dealing with growing support for far-right groups including the National Front and the openly racist political stances of Enoch Powell, whose 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech was directed at families like the Lindows.

He recalls that when he heard about Stephen Lawrence’s murder in 1993, he said, “It didn’t surprise me.” “Given the accidents I had there.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, Lindo often describes his relationship with the UK as “complicated”. His Jamaican parents emigrated as part of the Windrush Generation, but after leaving Britain as a teenager, he learned about the history of black Britons through books such as Peter Fryer’s history Staying Power and the work of academics, including Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy.

He was disturbed by the Windrush scandal, calling it “disgusting and outrageous”, adding that “British racism is every bit as insidious and violent as American racism”. Speaking to The Guardian in 2020, Lindo said he had become aware of the fact that there were many components of the black British experience that had yet to be explored. “I’m curious to uncover those stories,” he said. “I have a great interest in the Windrush period, because my mother was part of that period.”

His research had a purpose: he also crafted a screenplay based on his mother’s time in England, although he does not have the most rosy memory of his time in the UK. “Everything I have achieved in my life has come as a result of leaving England,” he said. “Never in a trillion years would I have had this career in England. Never.”

Look at his resume and it’s fair to say he has a point. Lindo’s filmography is filled with the kind of roles that black British actors plying their trade in the UK could only dream of in the 1980s and 1990s.

An accomplished stage actor, Lindo made his Broadway debut alongside Danny Glover in the apartheid-era drama Master Harold…and the Boys. He got the opportunity because James Earl Jones, who he was studying at, had to go to Hollywood to finish some voice work for Star Wars.

Lindo was able to marry a theatrical career that yielded mainstream successes, such as roles in the Elmore Leonard film adaptation Get Shorty and the action film Gone in 60 Seconds, in which he starred alongside Nicolas Cage and Vinnie Jones.

But it is his relationship with Spike Lee that he is best known for. He has been described as Lee’s “secret weapon” and the relationship with the director “elevated him from a memorable face to a late leading man”, in the opinion of one critic, who argued that he creates “characters that no one else in Lee’s orbit would have been fit to play”.

He was a strong Oscar contender in 2020, for his performance in Lee’s Da 5 Bloods, in which he played an African-American soldier in Vietnam who returns to the country to put old ghosts to rest. But it was eventually shelved (Confession of Sinners was its first Oscar nomination).

This was his fourth collaboration with Lee, and this relationship produced his best—or certainly his most praised—work. Da 5 Bloods follows the three films he made in the 1990s. He played a dangerous criminal informant in Malcolm

When The Guardian interviewed Lindo in 2000 to celebrate the release of Gone in 60 Seconds, Lindo was asked what bothered him most about Hollywood. “I wish there was more commitment to one’s body of work,” he said. “I always feel like people only remember the last thing I did, which is unfortunate.”

Perhaps on Sunday, March 15, when Hollywood honors its stars, Lindo hopes voters will focus on the latest thing he did and take the opportunity to award an Oscar to one of the industry’s most enduring talents.