“I’ve been a fan of Malcolm’s work since I can remember, after seeing his shorts and music videos,” John David says. “I’ve been wanting him to go. Like, when? It was like ‘Exhibit C.’ ”Malcolm swoops in with Jay Electronica’s verse, “[Nas] hit me up on the phone, said ‘What you waitin’ on?’ ”—the first of many rap allusions they’d make throughout the conversation.
Confronting legacy, Malcolm’s film argues, is inevitable. It can also be a spiritual experience, which is how he found himself drawn to working on a film produced by his father. But to hear Malcolm tell it, the call to make this project was coming from well beyond the house. Having honed his craft with various shorts, Malcolm tells me, he hadn’t been “fishing” around for stories, but when he read The Piano Lesson, Wilson’s text took up permanent residence. “I just immediately was engaging with the ideas in it, and they were really big. Big not from a production standpoint—the ideas in there were so big and existential that I felt like I had to deal with that, engage in it, for myself, just for my own spirit.”
John David jumps in with a sports analogy, a common turn for the former college running back. “I didn’t approach it as working with my brother,” he explains. “I liken it to a player running through a brick wall for his coach. He says, ‘Jump,’ I ask, ‘How high?’ I was so excited about his approach and his perspective to this story.”
This is extraordinarily high praise coming from John David, who has established himself as a formidable performer in films like Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman and Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. From his breakthrough role on HBO’s Ballers—he did not mention his Hollywood pedigree during his audition—to The Creator, his last big movie, a heady sci-fi action film from Gareth Edwards, he’s mostly eschewed familial collaborations. It’s an approach he wrestled with at Morehouse too.
Even then, John David wanted to defuse notions of nepotism—and forge his own identity apart from his family. “That was the arrow, that was the battery, that was the engine,” John David recalls. “So I’m going to sustain these six concussions and broken collarbones and torn Achilles in the name of independence. And I had an added bonus of the helmet syndrome: They don’t even know what I look like. I can just run the ball out, and they’d be like, ‘Who was that kid?’ ”
