A WITHCONVERSATION DON CHEADLE CONVERSATIONWITH DON CHEADLE

When Don Cheadle ( t heater BF a 86) stepped from the stages of the Mod Theater and E400 to the sets of Hill Street Blues and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in the late 1980s, CalArts was a very different place—or was it? Recent graduate Jo Siri ( t heater BF a 22) talked to Cheadle for The Pool about his journey as an artist, his influences, and the ongoing legacy of the CalArts Halloween party.

Jo Siri: First of all, I’d love to hear about your journey. What brought you to theater?

Don Chea D le: What brought me to theater was just the expression of a latent performer who then became an actual performer. My family was very creative, with a lot of frustrated artists that had never done it for real. But everybody sang and everybody was funny, and we loved messing around and being playful with one another.

When I got to elementary school, I met a teacher named Barbara Althouse who was sort of our music teacher, but she would do all the play productions, choir, and all of the creative arts. We did a production of Charlotte’s Web, and I played Templeton the Rat.

It was the first time I had experienced theater in a formal setting. I felt the power of the stage and the power of performance and the ability to transform not only yourself, but to take the audience on a journey.

I was also very fortunate to have a great high school teacher, Kathy Davis. I just talked to her a couple days ago, actually. She introduced me to Uta Hagen and [Sanford] Meisner and great playwrights. She realized that I had an aptitude for it and said, “If this is something that you actually want to pursue, you should study it formally. And these are some of the schools where you can study it.” So she’s the one who introduced me to CalArts as well as Carnegie Mellon and NYU, places that had strong acting programs like Northwestern and Yale.

Jo Siri: So it was through your high school teacher that you came to CalArts. Tell us more about that.

Don Chea D le: I had an audition at CalArts, and it was a really bad audition. I think I did a Molière. I kind of forgot the monologue halfway through and then thought, “OK, I’ll just improv.”

I’m used to jazz [laughs]. The dean stopped me and she’s like, “I don’t know what that was. It’s a wrap, basically. We’re good.” And I said, “No, no, no, I have another piece. Let me do my other piece!” It was from The Shadow Box. And she was like, “OK, that was really good—because you were outta here after that Molière thing.” But somehow I got accepted, and I went to CalArts and spent four years there studying.

Do you have a favorite moment that you hold onto from your four years at CalArts? A special play, a workshop, a teacher?

I had an amazing time at CalArts. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. The friends I made there are still lifelong friends. Jesse Borrego ... his daughter is my goddaughter. She and my kids actually live together and are extremely close. Myself, Bruce Beatty, Geoff Thorne, Rhys Greene took the initiative and performed plays on our own in the Black Box Theater, no help from anybody. We just did ‘em. We did Fugard plays, ‘Master Harold’ ... and the Boys, and The Island, too. Everybody came. It was in one of those spaces above the Main Gallery … E400? Are they still up there? Yeah, they are. During my freshman year, there were amazing studentled projects in E400. Students got together and made beautiful work. Now usually they’re in the Coffee House, and it’s still the same thing. Really? That’s so wild. Yeah, those spaces were the space. Those were our main theater spaces. Those, and when you got to do something, obviously in The Mod, you’re like, “Whoa.” But most of our things were in those black-box spaces. CalArts hasn’t really changed much. I mean our Halloween party, my first year there, Los Lobos performed. And the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

No way. Are you serious?

Yeah, it was a great time. All of it. I loved Studio. I loved Tai Chi and took Tai Chi every year and learned the whole form. Sherry Tschernisch was one of my favorite teachers. Lou Florimonte, who was one of my favorite teachers. Wow. They do capoeira now. Where? That’s so wild.

It’s wild. They do it in the Main Gallery. I remember my freshman year, I was like, “Oh! OK, we’re serious. We’re getting down.” They would be straight up fighting in the Main Gallery.

Tai Chi really was something else that I took away from school that I love and still practice. When I got to school, I was 17. To have something like that, that was centering. That taught you how to just slow down and focus on one thing and tap into yourself. I thought it was a great addition to everything we were learning, and it was invaluable to me. I thought the program was very well constructed. It was hard, but it was really good.

I think my time at CalArts was all consuming. We were in the theater morning, noon, and night. When I attended CalArts, there wasn’t really an interdisciplinary program. On Wednesdays, our Critical Studies days, you had to take something in another métier, but actors weren’t doing movies for the most part, or doing voice-overs for animated shows. Some of us were doing that. But for the most part, we were doing Tai Chi, movement, speech, voice acting studios, script analysis, then crew; it was sunup to sundown.

Wednesday is still Critical Studies day for actors.

Which for us meant go to Ventura Beach and take mushrooms. But that’s off the record, right?

I mean, that’s still pretty similar. Yeah. OK. Then it’s on the record. What was your post-grad journey like in the acting industry?

Well, I think I had a pretty unique experience. I was very fortunate because when I graduated, I graduated with other actors, other young Black actors that were tight. We were the same type and we moved into LA kind of all together, kind of found places near each other. Some of us were roommates with each other and we would actually rush each other’s auditions. So if I had an audition,