so that his sister could attend medical school. When he was 9, Duke and his family moved to the U.S. “American culture, the American Dream, is this huge export.” In Tobago, young Winston was exposed to sitcom versions of places like Chicago, where a middle-class black family was tormented by their nerdy neighbor, and San Francisco, where a single father could raise his three daughters with help from two other adult men. “I don’t think Americans understand how big their exports are,” he says. ![]() He was raised by a single mother, and spent much his childhood watching TV - everything from Fresh Prince to Golden Girls. He has, as anyone who’s seen Black Panther knows, a fantastic laugh.ĭuke grew up on Tobago, a small island that sees roughly seven times as many tourists a year as it has residents. He speaks slowly and chooses his words carefully, but when he talks about past roles he often slips back into character. In conversation, he’s got a habit of making people feel comfortable by repeating the thing you’ve just said back to you, with great emphasis. (It’s a gray plaid tracksuit from Rag & Bone - comfy, but make it fashion.) His friends often talk of his size and his generosity as if they are one and the same - and sometimes, as in a story actor Mamoudou Athie tells me about Duke breaking an apple in half with his bare hands in order to share it, they are. In person he sits back languidly on a couch, though when I ask what he’s wearing, he helpfully leans forwards and turns the neck of his shirt up to show me the label. He’s aware of this: “Everything I do blows up.”ĭuke was right he’s not a close talker. In a sense, Duke is something like the John Cazale of modern blockbuster cinema. (Duke’s presence in the film isn’t exactly a spoiler: M’Baku survived the massive third-act dust-up in last year’s Infinity War.) Endgame is conservatively estimated to gross a gajillion dollars, while Us, the smallest film in his brief filmography, is close to crossing the $200 million mark. This week, he’ll pop up briefly in Avengers: Endgame, reprising the character of M’Baku, the leader of a breakaway Wakandan tribe, that he originated in Black Panther. ![]() ![]() We’re in the basement of the Whitby Hotel in Midtown, near the end of what seems to be a long day of press for Jordan Peele’s Us, in which the 32-year-old actor plays both a bougie NorCal dad and his murderous doppelgänger. His explosive career thus far has been an exercise in working through all this loaded meaning, and getting to a place where he can tell new stories about the way a man with his body can exist in the world. ![]() My body is so many different things,” he tells me. A conversation with him often returns to the subject of his body. His physical presence put people on high alert.įor Duke, acting has been a way to own his hyper-visibility, “to utilize it for my personal growth and edification rather than my destruction.” He is 6’ 5”, with a wrestler’s physique, and unlike many tall men, he stands up straight. He wasn’t just one of a few black students in a school that was 80 percent white, he was black and big. Duke, an immigrant from the Caribbean by way of Brooklyn, had a growth spurt at 13. When Winston Duke was a teenager in Brighton, New York, the kids at his high school started calling him a “close talker.” The term - plucked from a five-year-old episode of Seinfeld - unnerved him, since he felt like he was standing as close as anyone else would in conversation with people. Photo: Corey Nickols/Contour by Getty Images
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