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Bokeem Woodbine Was Stuck In Eastern Europe Acting in Shlock. Then He FoundFargo.
He worked with Spike Lee and hung out with Tupac, before his career stalled. Here’s how he saved it.
By AMOS BARSHAD
Courtesy of FX
Bokeem Woodbine wasn’t much interested in acting. What he was interested in was a tattoo: the continent of Africa, on his right bicep. But he was just shy of 18, only intermittently employed, and he didn’t have the money. So Woodbine dreamt up a one-time hustle on how to get the cash: he’d do some work as an extra. He found a casting magazine, Backstage, and an open audition for a movie shooting in his neighborhood, Harlem, New York. The year was 1992; the movie was a soon-to-be street-classic called Juice. He showed up and got the gig, the money, and — shortly after — the tattoo of Africa.
It was the inauspicious seed of a singular, wayward career. Woodbine rocketed through the ’90s, working with auteurs like Spike Lee and the Hughes Brothers, popping up in Tupac videos, and hamming it up in big-budget action-comedies with Mark Wahlberg. And then he disappeared. For over a decade starting in the early 2000s, he had no true roles of note. More than likely, you hadn’t thought of the name “Bokeem Woodbine” for years. That is, until Fargo.
At this Sunday’s Emmy Awards, Woodbine may win for his work on the second season of Fargo, FX’s elite crime series, as the bizarrely droll Kansas City crime-syndicate tough Mike Milligan. It’s a longshot — he’s nominated in the Outstanding Actor, Limited Series category, up against bigger names like The People Vs. OJ Simpson’s David Schwimmer and John Travolta. But if he does nab the statuette, it’d be richly deserved.
Woodbine’s performance is simultaneously understated and expansive; pacing his words, enunciating every crisp syllable, he effortlessly fills the room. The character of Milligan is a violent and dastardly man who is at peace with that fact: caught in a professional maelstrom, flanked by mute twin goons, he’s as calm as you like. Milligan moves as if every new bit of disaster has always somehow been a part of his plan.
It’s one of the strangest, most compelling TV characters in years. And that it’s the first time we’ve really paid attention to Woodbine in over a decade only makes it all the more strange. How, exactly, did Bokeem Woodbine end up saving his career in Fargo, North Dakota?
Courtesy of HBO
Growing up in Harlem, Woodbine had always loved two things: movies, and rock n’ roll. His favorite theater was a Loews on the Upper West Side, a quick ride down on the 1 train. “I wasn’t really thinking about studying forms,” he said on the phone from Atlanta. “It was purely whatever had my interest at the time. I would see something like The Last Emperor” — Bernardo Bertolucci’s epic 1987 Best Picture Winner — “and Gremlins” — 1984’s loopy horror-comedy — “and I would get different feelings. I used to go purely for the reason most people go: to be entertained, to escape.”
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But the idea of an acting career was not something he entertained: “Not even in the slightest, man. Not even in the slightest.” The plan was music. He was a guitarist and a singer obsessed with the dinosaurs of ’70s cock-rock, in love with everything from Bad Brains to Guns N' Roses. Zeppelin kids in late ’80s Harlem weren’t exactly a dime a dozen, but Woodbine managed to find enough fellow travelers throughout the city to put together a few bands. He was going to be a rockstar.
He was never actually seen on screen in Juice: he ended up as a stand-in. Still, the film’s casting director asked for his contact information. “I remember feeling right then and there that maybe she was seeing something in me,” Woodbine recalled. “She wasn’t asking everybody [for phone numbers]. I thought, ‘Wow. Maybe something will happen.’” Ten minutes later, he forgot all about it. About a year and a half after his little brush with the movie business, completely out of the blue, he got a phone call.
The casting director’s name was Jaki Brown-Karman, and she’s something of a legend in the game. She was a key figure in the classic ’90s hood movie run (she discovered Cuba Gooding Jr. while casting for Boyz N The Hood); over the next few decades, she’d work with names like Quentin Tarantino, Ice Cube, and David Simon. Whatever Woodbine had flashed in his initial Juice audition intrigued her enough. Maybe it was his crooked grin. Or maybe it was the roiling spikes of intensity that seem to come to him easily.
She called him in to a crowded casting office for her new project, an HBO TV movie called Strapped. It was a street morality tale in the vein of Boyzand Menace II Society. It was also a then 32-year-old Forest Whitaker’s directing debut. She handed him a script, told him to start reading; fifteen minutes later, she came back. “We went down a long hall,” Woodbine recalls, “and we opened the door and there was Forest. That was the first time I saw him.”
Just as Brown-Karman anticipated, Whitaker was taken with Woodbine. Auditions continued for a month: Woodbine remembers endlessly repeating his performance from that first day with producers and other unidentified decision-makers watching from the back of the room. “I’d always be like, ‘Who’s this guy?!’ And Forest would be like: ‘Don’t worry about it. Just do what you did last week.’” By the end of the month Woodbine was cast as Strapped's lead, Diquan, a troubled young man mixed up with the police.
Diquan’s sidekick, Bamboo, was played by Fredro Starr of the Queens rap duo Onyx. It was also Starr’s first real movie role, and the two newbies, embraced by Whitaker’s kindly directing style, began to bond. At the time Onyx was recording its 1993 debut Bacdafucup, and Woodbine would tag along to the famous Chung King Studios where Run-DMC, Beastie Boys, and LL Cool J have all worked. “He had the bald head and he kind of looked like Stick a little,” Starr said, referencing his Onyx partner (and fellow actor) Sticky Fingaz. “People thought he was part of Onyx!”
Though he was “hip hop literate,” Starr said, Woodbine was always on a different wave. “He would bring his guitar to set. For me, coming from the hood, you didn’t really see a lot of black guys doing the rock n’ roll thing.” Starr remembers Woodbine on set in between takes wearing big boots and tight pants with no underwear. “I was like, ‘Yo dawg, where your underwear?’ He like ‘Nah man — commando!’ That was Bokeem. That rock n’ roll mentality.”
Strapped premiered on HBO in the late summer of 1993, got some nice reviews, and then was mostly forgotten. But Woodbine’s career took off. His next project was Crooklyn with Spike Lee, who was fresh off directing the monumental Malcolm X. Then he did Jason’s Lyric, a tough romantic drama that eventually won cult status. That he’d never aspired to act seemed beside the point; he was excelling. “It started to feel naturally pretty early man,” he says now. “It started to feel like a place where I belonged pretty quickly.”
In 1996, just before the legend’s death, he acted in the video for Tupac’s “I Ain’t Mad At Cha.” On set, ‘Pac confided in Woodbine: he was planning to release a unity record featuring himself and fellow West Coast artists alongside Biggie, Mobb Deep, and other East Coast MCs. “He had a plan to put everybody together on one record and just squash the beef,” Woodbine said. “He wanted to take the power away from the labels that were exploiting the situation. It angered him that they were profiting; he wanted to stop the cash flow. It wasn’t something I was supposed to tell people about, you know what I’m saying? I honored that, and I just waited for that record to come out. But unfortunately, as you know, it never did.”
https://www.tumblr.com/embed/clickt...om/2016/09/13/bokeem-woodbine-fargo-fx-shlock
He worked with Spike Lee and hung out with Tupac, before his career stalled. Here’s how he saved it.
By AMOS BARSHAD
Bokeem Woodbine wasn’t much interested in acting. What he was interested in was a tattoo: the continent of Africa, on his right bicep. But he was just shy of 18, only intermittently employed, and he didn’t have the money. So Woodbine dreamt up a one-time hustle on how to get the cash: he’d do some work as an extra. He found a casting magazine, Backstage, and an open audition for a movie shooting in his neighborhood, Harlem, New York. The year was 1992; the movie was a soon-to-be street-classic called Juice. He showed up and got the gig, the money, and — shortly after — the tattoo of Africa.
It was the inauspicious seed of a singular, wayward career. Woodbine rocketed through the ’90s, working with auteurs like Spike Lee and the Hughes Brothers, popping up in Tupac videos, and hamming it up in big-budget action-comedies with Mark Wahlberg. And then he disappeared. For over a decade starting in the early 2000s, he had no true roles of note. More than likely, you hadn’t thought of the name “Bokeem Woodbine” for years. That is, until Fargo.
At this Sunday’s Emmy Awards, Woodbine may win for his work on the second season of Fargo, FX’s elite crime series, as the bizarrely droll Kansas City crime-syndicate tough Mike Milligan. It’s a longshot — he’s nominated in the Outstanding Actor, Limited Series category, up against bigger names like The People Vs. OJ Simpson’s David Schwimmer and John Travolta. But if he does nab the statuette, it’d be richly deserved.
Woodbine’s performance is simultaneously understated and expansive; pacing his words, enunciating every crisp syllable, he effortlessly fills the room. The character of Milligan is a violent and dastardly man who is at peace with that fact: caught in a professional maelstrom, flanked by mute twin goons, he’s as calm as you like. Milligan moves as if every new bit of disaster has always somehow been a part of his plan.
It’s one of the strangest, most compelling TV characters in years. And that it’s the first time we’ve really paid attention to Woodbine in over a decade only makes it all the more strange. How, exactly, did Bokeem Woodbine end up saving his career in Fargo, North Dakota?
Growing up in Harlem, Woodbine had always loved two things: movies, and rock n’ roll. His favorite theater was a Loews on the Upper West Side, a quick ride down on the 1 train. “I wasn’t really thinking about studying forms,” he said on the phone from Atlanta. “It was purely whatever had my interest at the time. I would see something like The Last Emperor” — Bernardo Bertolucci’s epic 1987 Best Picture Winner — “and Gremlins” — 1984’s loopy horror-comedy — “and I would get different feelings. I used to go purely for the reason most people go: to be entertained, to escape.”
ADVERTISEMENT
But the idea of an acting career was not something he entertained: “Not even in the slightest, man. Not even in the slightest.” The plan was music. He was a guitarist and a singer obsessed with the dinosaurs of ’70s cock-rock, in love with everything from Bad Brains to Guns N' Roses. Zeppelin kids in late ’80s Harlem weren’t exactly a dime a dozen, but Woodbine managed to find enough fellow travelers throughout the city to put together a few bands. He was going to be a rockstar.
He was never actually seen on screen in Juice: he ended up as a stand-in. Still, the film’s casting director asked for his contact information. “I remember feeling right then and there that maybe she was seeing something in me,” Woodbine recalled. “She wasn’t asking everybody [for phone numbers]. I thought, ‘Wow. Maybe something will happen.’” Ten minutes later, he forgot all about it. About a year and a half after his little brush with the movie business, completely out of the blue, he got a phone call.
The casting director’s name was Jaki Brown-Karman, and she’s something of a legend in the game. She was a key figure in the classic ’90s hood movie run (she discovered Cuba Gooding Jr. while casting for Boyz N The Hood); over the next few decades, she’d work with names like Quentin Tarantino, Ice Cube, and David Simon. Whatever Woodbine had flashed in his initial Juice audition intrigued her enough. Maybe it was his crooked grin. Or maybe it was the roiling spikes of intensity that seem to come to him easily.
She called him in to a crowded casting office for her new project, an HBO TV movie called Strapped. It was a street morality tale in the vein of Boyzand Menace II Society. It was also a then 32-year-old Forest Whitaker’s directing debut. She handed him a script, told him to start reading; fifteen minutes later, she came back. “We went down a long hall,” Woodbine recalls, “and we opened the door and there was Forest. That was the first time I saw him.”
Just as Brown-Karman anticipated, Whitaker was taken with Woodbine. Auditions continued for a month: Woodbine remembers endlessly repeating his performance from that first day with producers and other unidentified decision-makers watching from the back of the room. “I’d always be like, ‘Who’s this guy?!’ And Forest would be like: ‘Don’t worry about it. Just do what you did last week.’” By the end of the month Woodbine was cast as Strapped's lead, Diquan, a troubled young man mixed up with the police.
Diquan’s sidekick, Bamboo, was played by Fredro Starr of the Queens rap duo Onyx. It was also Starr’s first real movie role, and the two newbies, embraced by Whitaker’s kindly directing style, began to bond. At the time Onyx was recording its 1993 debut Bacdafucup, and Woodbine would tag along to the famous Chung King Studios where Run-DMC, Beastie Boys, and LL Cool J have all worked. “He had the bald head and he kind of looked like Stick a little,” Starr said, referencing his Onyx partner (and fellow actor) Sticky Fingaz. “People thought he was part of Onyx!”
Though he was “hip hop literate,” Starr said, Woodbine was always on a different wave. “He would bring his guitar to set. For me, coming from the hood, you didn’t really see a lot of black guys doing the rock n’ roll thing.” Starr remembers Woodbine on set in between takes wearing big boots and tight pants with no underwear. “I was like, ‘Yo dawg, where your underwear?’ He like ‘Nah man — commando!’ That was Bokeem. That rock n’ roll mentality.”
Strapped premiered on HBO in the late summer of 1993, got some nice reviews, and then was mostly forgotten. But Woodbine’s career took off. His next project was Crooklyn with Spike Lee, who was fresh off directing the monumental Malcolm X. Then he did Jason’s Lyric, a tough romantic drama that eventually won cult status. That he’d never aspired to act seemed beside the point; he was excelling. “It started to feel naturally pretty early man,” he says now. “It started to feel like a place where I belonged pretty quickly.”
In 1996, just before the legend’s death, he acted in the video for Tupac’s “I Ain’t Mad At Cha.” On set, ‘Pac confided in Woodbine: he was planning to release a unity record featuring himself and fellow West Coast artists alongside Biggie, Mobb Deep, and other East Coast MCs. “He had a plan to put everybody together on one record and just squash the beef,” Woodbine said. “He wanted to take the power away from the labels that were exploiting the situation. It angered him that they were profiting; he wanted to stop the cash flow. It wasn’t something I was supposed to tell people about, you know what I’m saying? I honored that, and I just waited for that record to come out. But unfortunately, as you know, it never did.”
https://www.tumblr.com/embed/clickt...om/2016/09/13/bokeem-woodbine-fargo-fx-shlock
