It turns out Jeffrey Wright’s career includes a lot more than just scientist roles

Hardesty explains that while most character actors start their careers getting cast as a specific type before expanding into a wider range of roles, Wright has taken the opposite approach. Though he’s well known for his scientist persona now, his early career featured all kinds of different roles. From a free-spirited artist in Basquiat to a gay nurse in Angels In America to Martin Luther King Jr. in Boycott to Colin Powell in W., Wright has a chameleonic ability to disappear into roles. And while those performances have curiously been wiped from our collective memories as of late (“That doesn’t look like anything to me”), it turns out Wright deserves even more praise than we’ve already been giving him.