The word ‘character-actor' is one often used to describe people who aren't the lead in the film. But when it comes to Carl Lumbly, it can mean an actor who changes himself to suit each character he plays. The prolific actor might be best known to audiences know for taking over from Scatman Crothers as Dick Halloran in Mike Flanagan's Doctor Sleep, or for his role as forgotten super-soldier Isiah Bradley in Marvel's The Falcon and the Winter Soldier; a role he is due to reprise in next year's Captain America: Brave New World.

But, in the fact-based crime drama I'm Charlie Walker, he disappears into concerned colleague Willie, who sees the rise of Charlie Walker (Mike Colter) from trucker to business leader amid racism and oil misuse in 1971. FILMHOUNDS had a chat with Lumbly about this timely story that feels all the more prescient now.

It's been a twenty-four hours [with the US election results].

I think of it more as a decade. It's kind of like living on a coastline, where there's a vast fishing enterprise where at certain times of the day that odour wafts perhaps out to sea, and perhaps it wafts back. So you understand that maybe that's the nature of the way things are. You have to accept it, it's not your choice but, I'm a citizen and this is the country in which I live. We have a two-party system. Sometimes one party wins, and sometimes the other party wins. Sometimes the other time the other team exhausts and sometimes it goes the other way.

I am unhappy. I'm a little worried and concerned. It was one thing when we didn't know what was coming, and technically we don't know what is coming. But, my experience of this individual, the first time, I was quite underwhelmed by directions.

I can't say I'm surprised.

So, I'm going to hope for the best, going to hope for the individuals, not only around, but the individuals around the opposition, that perhaps there is a way to ameliorate some of the ideas. Perhaps presenting some kind of way that is going to be different to the way he chooses to govern. But, there are some things that remains fixed. I don't have as much faith in his cognitive abilities, I don't have much faith in him having a spirit that is harmonious with mine, but also with a broad cross-section of people. I think he has limited interests, and a limited emotional vocabulary. So I have doubts, but I'm here for my family, my fellow citizens, and I guess the upside is it really is a brave new world.

There it is!

You have to carry that inside of you.

What you're speaking of there, speaks to the film we're here to talk about. I'm Charlie Walker is set over fifty years ago, and yet feels like a story that could happen today. For you is that a necessary thing — to tell stories that are set in the past but feel prescient today?

Yes, and with the caveat, I feel like the stories I've gotten to be a part of have not always been my choosing. They come to me, and I feel very fortunate to be a part of. I've not been one of those actors who has read things and thrown them at my agent or my management and said “No no no, not this!” I think there's a possibility that every script, every project I've been a part of has been a petal and at the end you'll have a bloom. That's my charge. If I see something that I think I can contribute to — and I think is worth contributing to — I want to be there. Sometimes those things are given to me, literally, handed to me. Sometimes you have to fight and audition for them. I prefer to fight and audition for them, in many ways because I think your first instinct about a character, if you can put those into play, to the truest iteration of it. If that comes through in an audition and a producer or director sees that, then that becomes the starting point.

Sometimes if you have a reputation or you're known for something, or you're at the right price point, and you get handed something, I think their identification with you is more as the actor and less with anything you did to convince them as the character. So I think your job becomes a little harder. Sometimes there's a resistance if they think “We cast you because we think the character is like you”, and my work is about not being like me. But, I've been fortunate, and I do believe, that the happy accident that acting has been for me is that it gives me the opportunity to express things that I feel deeply without it necessarily being my words. That I can give myself to someone who does not necessarily think the way that I do, or operate the way I do, but if I can give them that truth then I feel like I've contributed.

That's what Willie was for me. He's in some ways a smaller character, but a necessary ingredient. He was not Charlie Walker. Charlie Walker was heroic. Charlie Walker was impetuous. Charlie Walker was reckless. Charlie Walker was innovative, he was unstoppable. For a man like Willie, a black man like him, who grew up without much education, just making his way, finding his way and learning that for him, survival was about keeping your head down. Not doing anything that would single you out as a potential problem.

So he looks at someone like Charlie Walker and he's frightened, but he's also in awe. He thinks “I can attach myself to someone like this and I can ride on this” until it gets too real, and he realises he can't pull himself up to this level, he doesn't have enough in himself to give it away. Charlie Walker is such a big, capable, confident, angry figure. He's giving it all away, because he believes that's what he's there for. He believes he should have what everyone else can have, and his people should have that same feeling about themselves.

When you're dealing with a real person, is there a pressure to get it right in the correct way, or do you have to put that away and go by the script?

I think it's both. You definitely feel a responsibility for someone's life, it's a pressure [to] play someone who actually lived it, which is why I have such respect for what Mike Colter did. I met Charlie Walker as did Mike, and he was larger than life, a force of nature.

He seems it from the film's closing clip.

Oh boy! He was something else. Especially at that time, in that context, doing something that no one really wanted him to do, at least no one in the corporate world at Standard Oil wanted to give this contract to a Black man, to clean up a beach. As it happened when the initial incident occurred and the beaches we befouled, truckers unions were brought in to play. There was a white truckers union, and a black truckers union, and the black truckers union was shut out of these lucrative clean-up contracts, and Charlie Walker had a trucking business. He didn't understand why as a member of the black union he wasn't allowed to be a part of this, so there was a small beach that had not yet been affected, and he was shuttled off to go clean that up. And the winds shifted, the tides shifted, and fate intervened and massive amounts of tar came to this little beach. Charlie Walker's beach! And he took full advantage of this, he was innovative, he was thinking about it. He was consumed with this. Wondering how can he contribute, and his way the most successful clean-up. So he was now given the opportunity to participate in the greater clean-up, and it is arguable that he took full advantage than perhaps was fair or right or legal, but he was playing a dirty game. That's not a pun of tar! 

He was playing a dirty game and sometimes for better or worse than encourages dirty play. So, I have a tremendous amount of respect for what he was able to accomplish. I also have ambivalent feelings about the way he achieved it, but he was exemplary at a time when men like Willie who had been constantly told how inadequate they were, how inappropriate they were, how out of place they were, that there wasn't a place for them and if they would simply go stay there and be there, then there would be no trouble. But if you lift your head, if you speak too loudly, and lord help you if you demand fairness, it can be a hard go. So, Charlie Walker didn't do what he did because he wasn't aware of these challenges, and he wasn't aware of this thinking. He did what he did because he felt it was right, it was fair, and it was something he could do to help his community, and my hats off to him.

Not to bring it back to the seriousness we started with, how do you think the America now, with a Donald Trump in the White House once again, how are they going to react to a Black Captain America when the new film comes out? Do you think they're ready for it, or could there be controversy?

I think they are ready for it. I think there's already controversy in the minds of certain people, but those are smaller minds. I think it's exciting, when we did Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which was sort of the first iteration of this notion that there would be a Black Captain America, there was resistance. I'm sure there are probably some people for whom “He will never be my Captain America!” But, that is the beauty of this country, and even on a day like today when I think that beauty has been tarnished, and I worry for the rest of the world and how what we're doing here — which we now have to accept — we are part of a world community. I don't think this notion of exceptionalism is either accurate or necessary. To be part of a community you have to be most interested in the connection, and you contribute. You may feel your contribution is vital but it's only as important as you feel it's vital to connect it. I hope.

Hope is all we have. 

That's right. 

You'll come out on top if you do.

I think we'll continue to work towards it, and as long as we're continuing to work towards it. I forgive the country for falling short from time to time. 

I'm Charlie Walker is out now on Digital.

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