00:00I've had a casting director tell me,
00:02can I be more black?
00:03I've written something and someone's like,
00:05can you put a church in there?
00:06Like, I feel like it needs to be like,
00:08somebody gets shot.
00:22Don't let them put you in a box.
00:23And don't continue to feed into a narrative
00:27that's this small.
00:28You know what I'm saying?
00:29Society looks at me like this,
00:31this is all I can be.
00:32Let me lean into it and let me rebel
00:34and let me get pissed off when I'm confronted
00:36with the same old narrative
00:38because this is what they expect us to be,
00:40which is violence and all these things.
00:53I got introduced into this industry
00:56not being, you know, put in a box
00:59and being the only black actor in the room
01:01and the white kids are like,
01:01what you going for?
01:02I'm like, I'm going for Larry.
01:03And they're like, just confused.
01:05Like, all the time.
01:08And my agent at the time, he was like,
01:09would just pitch me.
01:10He's like, this kid could be black.
01:11He doesn't have to be white.
01:13And so as I started to get older,
01:14I started realizing that a lot of content
01:16as I get older as a man,
01:17I was having to be, can you be more black?
01:19Can you be more rough?
01:20And I look at my audition lines and I was like,
01:21everything is stemmed in trauma.
01:23For some reason, music has evolved.
01:26Fashion's evolved when it comes to us.
01:29But with film and the narrative places,
01:32we kind of haven't expanded from that.
01:42I'll never forget, I went to audition
01:44and I'm going to audition.
01:44I'm with like Derek Luke and I'm looking at me
01:46and I'm like, we go for the same role?
01:48Like, and we're completely different
01:51or, and it's one role.
01:52And that's why I started writing.
01:53Cause I was going in a room with just,
01:55there's one role for black guy.
01:57And I'm like, and we all look different.
01:59I'm like, why can't it be five?
02:14Our generation is really about that life.
02:16It's understanding like how just powerful
02:21and how much we feel.
02:23When I'm seeing men that look like me on screen,
02:25it's very dealt in an arena of pain, oppression, violent.
02:32And I was very deliberate to do something
02:34a little bit softer to show, you know,
02:37a black man, man of color,
02:39that wasn't going to allow society to shift them off,
02:43like expose a certain vulnerability
02:45that we rarely see on screen.
02:46It's simple.
02:47It's like, how do you heal?
02:49And how do you get to where you want to go in life?
02:51And when everyone's trying to put you in a box,
02:53you know, that liberation,
02:55that black boy liberation is definitely like intentional.
02:58For me, it's very deliberate to open up the door
03:01and like expand what, you know,
03:03people have told us we should be as black men
03:05or what media shows the world.
03:06Cause there's some people that never even meet black people.
03:08You know what I'm saying?
03:09Like they just see the news and they hear rap
03:13and they're like, that's black.
03:15You know what I'm saying?
03:15We can't wait for permission to be our authentic selves.
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