RACE directed by Stephen Hopkins, written by Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse, with Stephan James, Jason Sudeikis, Jeremy Irons and Carice van Houten. An Entertainment One release. 130 minutes. Some subtitles. Opens Friday (February 19). See listings.
Stephan James played civil rights hero John Lewis as a young man in Selma, and now he stars in Stephen Hopkins’s biopic Race as a different sort of African-American trailblazer: Jesse Owens, the Ohio State track and field champion whose four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics were a thumb in the eye to the Nazi ideal of Aryan supremacy.
Back in his hometown of Toronto for the movie’s press day, James tells me he realized a movie like Race was necessary when he started researching the role: while there’s plenty of information about what Owens did, there’s almost nothing on the record about who he was.
“I could certainly find clips of him running and stuff like that,” James says, “but there’s very little about the man he was, the father he was, the husband he was. I had to find some sort of personal perspective on this man – to bring a face to the hero, if you will.”
So he went to the Owens family.
“His daughters were very, very helpful,” James says. “They shared so many things and spoke about their father. I really felt I was very privileged to be around them. To them he was just Daddy they really didn’t know he was famous until they were well into their teenage lives. You know, [Berlin] wasn’t something he spoke about. He just focused on his family and raising them. He didn’t talk about those Games and what he’d done.”
Race is both the story of one man and the story of a moment in history, when an African-American athlete broke through racial barriers at home and on the world stage. It’s also a prestige project that’s arriving in the middle of the Oscars So White controversy, and I have to ask whether James has been feeling any pressure to discuss whether this movie could nudge diversity in Hollywood a little further along.
“It’s great to see diversity in films,” he says. “Hopefully that trickles down and creates more opportunities for other people outside of myself. But really, it’s bigger than me.”
And whatever happens next, James’s fans shouldn’t expect the actor to devote himself entirely to historical dramas.
“I’m personally interested in telling a whole bunch of different types of stories,” he says. “I don’t only want to tell stories about race relations or historical stories or biopics. I want to do it all. I want to play Spider-Man next!
“I wanna be in action films, thrillers, sci-fi,” he says with a laugh. “I really want to do it all.”
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
