In contrast with Spike Lee’s former reputation as a firebrand rabble-rouser, his movie sets must be inviting places to work, because the list of actors who have appeared in more than two of Lee’s features is long and varied. Lee’s most frequent big-name collaborator is John Turturro, who has featured in nine of Lee’s films (Turturro’s little brother Nicholas boasts six appearances). Lee’s highest-profile major collaborator is Denzel Washington, who has played the director’s unequivocal lead five times, including in Highest 2 Lowest, their first work together in almost 20 years. They’re all part of a deep unofficial repertory company encompassing big stars, literal family, and character actors alike; Isiah Whitlock Jr. even has a recurring character that appears across 25th Hour, She Hate Me, and Red Hook Summer. From that long list of regulars, though, Lee’s secret weapon may very well be Delroy Lindo. Lindo hasn’t appeared quite as often as Washington or Samuel L. Jackson, but his work in four of Lee’s films has gradually leveled him up from memorable face to belated leading man, while exploring characters no one else in the Lee orbit would have been right to play.
Also, to get a little more technical, Washington and Jackson have already been covered for this column. Given that those pieces tackle their work with white directors, there was something appealing about Lee’s creative relationship with Turturro. Yet delightful as Turturro is, Lee employs him as a traditional scene-stealer. He’s memorable as a callous cop in Clockers, but it’s easy enough to picture the movie without him. Lindo, however, is absolutely indelible in the same film. Lindo doesn’t play an outright lead for Lee until 2020’s Da Five Bloods, but by the time he does, Lee has carved out such a clear place for him that it seems overdue.
Delroy Lindo first appeared in a Lee movie that was, to that point, arguably Lee’s most conventional. But Lee’s stately, less incendiary Malcolm X (which many didn’t expect in 1992) is nonetheless both rigorous and entertaining, a 200-minute epic built from one of Denzel Washington’s most accomplished performances. Lindo plays West Indian Archie, a Harlem gangster and master of numbers rackets who guides Malcolm as a young man. Lee directs some early sequences of Malcolm X like a musical, and Lindo enters the picture as it briefly morphs into a gangster movie. On paper, the part isn’t especially complicated: Archie is a mentor to this brash young guy, until they have what seems like an entirely avoidable falling-out over Malcolm insisting he hit a major winning number, while Archie believes he’s lying. It’s Lindo’s firm yet restrained authority on either side of this schism that makes this bit of the movie play so well. Another director might well have elided much of this material to shave the movie down under the three-hour mark; Lee’s attention to the Lindo character signals the actor’s importance, and Lindo doesn’t squander his moment.
The core of the Lindo/Lee collaboration, though, comes through in Lee’s Malcolm X follow-ups. The Brooklyn-set Crooklyn (1994) and Clockers (1995)—something of a homecoming after the location-hopping epic that preceded them—weren’t received all that rapturously in their day, despite the way they develop Lee’s talent for zooming in on New York neighborhoods as a means of exploring Black communities and social dynamics. Lindo plays a father figure in both movies, creating a compare-and-contrast exercise so vivid it borders on obvious. Maybe it escaped some notice at the time because Lindo simply wasn’t attracting as much attention as he deserved; at very least, Crooklyn may have arrived too early for viewers to understand how much range Lindo was showing in it. In the greater context of his career, where he’s since become more familiar playing men of authority or menace, his warmth as the father to five kids growing up in 1970s Bedford-Stuyvesant feels revelatory.
Lindo’s Woody is first seen calling his kids in for dinner, and like most of the characters in Crooklyn, he flits in and out of the narrative as the movie builds its episodes and anecdotes into a well-rounded coming-of-age story—which eventually reveals its focus on Troy (Zelda Harris), Woody’s only daughter. The sterner authority figure in this family is Carolyn (Alfre Woodard), while Woody tends to be gentler and more permissive with the kids, maybe because, we eventually realize, he seeks some leeway from Carolyn, same as the kids do. Woody is a composer whose attempts at a more serious career have left his half of this two-income household coming up woefully short, leaving his wife to pull down a steady schoolteacher’s salary that nonetheless can’t cover a seven-person family on its own. Despite that major conflict (which at one point does result in Carolyn booting Woody out of their home), the couple’s most contentious fights lack the coiled power Lindo harnesses in his heavy roles. His anger feels more vulnerable and exposed, his self-image more fragile. Lindo performs the role with a looser, less controlled physicality, his billowy shirts hanging off his frame.
Woody has more musical discipline than the bluesman Lindo recently played in Sinners, whose genius only takes him as far as his passion for corn liquor allows. And towards the end of Crooklyn, Lindo has several wonderful little scenes opposite Harris, as he neither fully comforts nor scolds the 10-year-old as she stews in stoic grief after the loss of her mother. In Malcolm X and Clockers, Lindo expertly plays characters who use the appearance of warmth or camaraderie as a form of chilly manipulation. In Crooklyn, he makes that angle simply disappear without sacrificing his ability to hold the screen. Instead of a hidden menace, the movie has to balance out Woody’s genuine caring with the fact that, as the story comes to its conclusion, the task of stepping up after Carolyn dies falls to Troy more readily than it does to her father. It’s a realistic detail about the particular type of family Lee is chronicling here (inspired by his own) that could nonetheless come across as dispiriting, if Lindo didn’t convey so much depth with his performance.
The good vibes don’t last into Clockers, Lee’s immediate follow-up. Rodney Little (Lindo) isn’t actually the father of Strike (Mekhi Phifer), a young man in his employ as a “clocker,” a low-level drug dealer consigned to spending most of the day sitting outside the housing projects, facilitating sales and looking out for cops. But Strike’s real father isn’t in the picture, and Lee, working from Richard Price’s novel, quickly establishes how Rodney has filled that void throughout the neighborhood. Rodney speaks so calmly and evenly at first, operating out of a homey local shop, that it takes a little while to feel how powerful and dangerous he is. Even when he assigns Strike the task of killing another dealer, he takes the firmly supportive tone of an older relative (or at least a polite middle manager). As Rodney points out later, he technically doesn’t tell Strike to kill anyone. He just lays a strong implication about what needs to be done, like he’s giving broad advice about how to deal with a bully, or get ahead in business (which he is, in a self-serving way).
Later, when Strikes expresses frustration over Rodney’s denial of those orders, the older man drops his avuncular façade instantly, beating Strike, sticking a gun in his mouth, and suddenly acting every bit the cruel kingpin flexing his power. In a movie full of grim, mournful scenes about the aftermath of violence, this one sticks out for the ease with which Lindo pivots from insinuations to profane threats. Lee and cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed use high-contrast images throughout the film, and here their deep blacks make Rodney look like he’s perpetually emerging from shadows. It’s a scene where Lindo exposes how much of Rodney’s life and business is performance—whether performing the role of the neighborhood godfather offering young men opportunities, or of neighborhood gangster forcing his minions back in line. Plenty of Lee’s movies have these whiplash switches in tone. Lindo makes that shift feel not just natural, but inevitable.
Like Washington, Lindo took a lengthy break from Spike Lee movies, and though he didn’t become a Denzel-level superstar during that time, his post-Clockers career racked up an impressive roster of supporting parts as various forms of lawmen in Hollywood blockbusters (Ransom; Gone In 60 Seconds; Broken Arrow) alongside some juicier parts in weirder movies (doing excellent Mamet in Heist; trying post-Tarantino screwball in A Life Less Ordinary). His voice possesses the kind of well-worn authority and his face the kind of flinty, unsmiling stare that makes producers immediately ask: Cop or criminal? He’s one of the two.
Lee doesn’t see Lindo that way. There are plenty of actors Lee has repeatedly cast in law-enforcement and/or gangster roles, and there’s no shortage of them in movies like Summer Of Sam, 25th Hour, and Inside Man, among others. Lindo doesn’t play any of those parts. The criminal Lindo plays in Clockers interests Lee more as a surrogate father (and negative influence) in a broader social context. Then, in their eventual reunion Da 5 Bloods (2020), Lindo again plays a far more ambitious construction than his big-studio stock parts: an older man poised to rediscover and forgive himself to ease his long-simmering mixture of guilt and trauma. With overtones of classical tragedy, he can’t quite fulfill that necessary character arc. He’s both stronger and weaker than he needs to be, like his characters in Clockers and Crooklyn have been forced into an impossible reconciliation.
As Paul, a veteran returning to Vietnam with his old squad to locate the remains of their fallen leader (and maybe find a stash of long-lost gold bars), Lindo must turn on a dime with more danger than Woody in Crooklyn and less calculation than Rodney in Clockers. In one long mid-movie sequence, Paul’s son David (Jonathan Majors), who accompanies the group on their mission and has a contentious relationship with his erratic father, steps on an old land mine in the jungle. Paul springs into action, recalling an old battlefield move from the group’s war days, and miraculously pulls his son from harm’s way. Lee’s shot of Paul holding David close in tender gratitude, comforting his rattled grown child in the light of day is particularly cathartic when recalling how, just a few scenes earlier, Paul visibly struggled to convey his love, using the third-person and the cover of darkness to share a brief imitation of a tender moment. Then Paul pulls a gun on the small group of outsiders who has just helped with the effort, immediately re-fraying his relationship with his son and his friends.
The loose model for Da 5 Bloods is The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, where greed is the characters’ undoing; the movie’s famous “stinking badges” line gets a direct shout-out. But while the desperation of needing or wanting a change in financial circumstances plays into the drama, Lee and his co-writers make it clear that this isn’t a simple story of money’s corrupting sway. Initially, the conceit that Paul, whose friends speak about Black liberation, is a proud red-hat Trump voter feels like a classic Lee current-events insert, especially given that the movie was released in 2020 during the run-up to the presidential election. But as the movie goes on, it becomes clear that Paul’s MAGA affinity is just one more attempt to protect himself, another failed solution to the war he’s still waging inside his head.
The audience gets prolonged exposure to Paul’s true state of mind during a three-minute monologue delivered directly to the camera in an unbroken take, as he hacks his way through the jungle after striking out on his own with his share of the gold. In terms of pure positioning—the camera tracking backwards as the character moves forward, looking at the audience—the shot recalls the signature “double dolly” move used in almost all of Lee’s movies, which creates the illusion that a character is floating through their surroundings. Here, the camera is obviously handheld, the movements intentionally ragged, as Lindo holds its gaze for far longer than the typical length of Lee’s signature shots. Lindo isn’t quite as feral as when Paul is disarmed by his traveling group a few minutes earlier; instead, he’s locked into a vaguely Shakespearean soliloquy/rant about his mortality. Even more than his growling and hissing earlier in the film, it’s here that he’s guiding himself past the point of no return.
That’s not the end of Paul, or the movie. Lee returns to him several more times as he continues to talk to himself, wanders through the jungle, and eventually shares a scene with the spirit of his fallen commander (Chadwick Boseman), confronting his grief over his role in the man’s death. He also sings a little Marvin Gaye, praises God, and gets machine-gunned to death. Which is to say that the range of what Lindo must encompass over the course of Da 5 Bloods is almost too much. Not for his considerable abilities, but for any performer to tackle without succumbing to self-consciousness or just plain overacting. What becomes weirdly transcendent is the clarity with which Lindo expresses Lee’s expansive, grandiose vision. Paul, either through the screenplay or Lindo’s performance, repeats some of his lines two or three times, like he’s turning them into mantras while waiting for his next cue—a man trying to be sure of himself but just barely hanging on. Following the calculated shifts of Clockers and the wavering stability of Crooklyn, Lindo plays a man who could scarcely be at looser ends.
The effect is decidedly different from what Lee brings out of later-period Denzel Washington. In Highest 2 Lowest, Washington does have moments of frazzled eccentricity as his wealthy character loses his grip. They play differently, however, given his regal bearing—one that would be difficult for Lee to duplicate with a less famous, less venerated actor. Still, there’s something bittersweet about seeing Washington age into the kind of older-man part that Delroy Lindo has made such a specialty for Lee. The irony is, Washington and Lindo are only two years apart. The true gap is the one between movie star and working actor—and not all of Lee’s work requires or makes sense with a major face at its center. Lindo has magnetism to spare; he draws the eye and the ear. But Lee smartly undercuts his larger-than-life qualities to a greater extent than is probably possible for Washington; it’s not a coincidence that the latter’s roles for Lee focus less on communities and more on outsiders or individuals. Charismatic as he is, Lindo plays the characters who can’t survive quite so readily on their own, for good or for ill. He’s not floating through a double-dolly shot. He’s there, feet on the ground—wandering through a fog of forever war, regimenting the predatory clockers, or, we can hope, calling the kids in for dinner.
