In the aftermath of the Oscar nominations, Wunmi Mosaku was heralded as Britain’s saviour after her best supporting actress nod at Hollywood’s most prestigious awards. The UK had been facing its first nomination-less year in the acting categories since 1986.
But the Sinners star was joined by a fellow cast member, Lewisham-born, Delroy Lindo, who will also be representing Britain on the big night on 15 March.
The actor, who was born in south London in 1952, was a surprise pick in the best supporting actor category, edging out supposed sure thing Paul Mescal and helping to take Sinners to a record 16-nod haul.
Lindo was reportedly as taken aback as the rest of the industry. In bed in Los Angeles on Thursday morning, he was rung by his son and told the news. “Really? Are you for real?” he asked, before looking at his phone and finding 179 messages confirming it.
In Ryan Coogler’s box office hit, Lindo plays Delta Slim, a blues man who ends up barricaded in a Mississippi juke joint fighting back vampires while dealing with the looming spectre of Jim Crow racism. For many, it represented the perfect role for an African American cultural grandee, but the reality is more nuanced: Lindo is a child of the Black Atlantic.
Unlike Mosaku who can still quote a Gregg’s menu and has a strong Mancunian twang, Lindo has no hint of a London accent after leaving the capital for the US as a teenager.
His first film role was as an army sergeant in the follow up to American Graffiti, 1979’s unimaginatively named and critically panned, More American Graffiti, shot while he was still in acting school.
But it was his first ever acting role as one of the three kings in a primary school nativity play in south London that gave him the acting bug. A teacher praised Lindo, who was the only black child in his school, telling others in the cast “to do it like Delroy does it”.
That is one of the few positive memories Lindo has of a country that, when he left, was getting to grips with rising support for far-right groups including the National Front and overtly racist political posturing from Enoch Powell, whose 1968 Rivers of Blood speech was directed at families like the Lindos.
He recalled when he heard about the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993, “it did not surprise me,” he said. “Given incidents that happened to me there.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lindo often describes his own relationship to the UK as “complicated”. His Jamaican parents emigrated as part of the Windrush generation but it was only after he left Britain as a teenager that he learned about Black British history via books such as Peter Fryer’s landmark history Staying Power and the work of academics, including Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy.
He was disturbed by the Windrush scandal, calling it “disgusting and enraging”, adding that “British racism is every bit as virulent and violent as American racism”. Speaking to the Guardian in 2020, Lindo said that he became conscious of the fact many components of the black British experience that have not been explored. “I’m curious to unpack those stories,” he said. “I have an intense interest in the Windrush period, because my mom was part of that.”
His research had a purpose: he’s also crafted a screenplay based on his mother’s time in England, although he doesn’t have a rose-tinted memory of his time in the UK. “Everything I have achieved in my life has come as a result of leaving England,” he said. “I could never in a trillion years have had this career in England. Never.”
A look at his CV and it’s fair to say he has a point. Lindo’s filmography is peppered with the kind of roles black British actors plying their trade in the UK could only dream of in the 1980s and 1990s.
An accomplished stage actor, Lindo made his Broadway debut alongside Danny Glover in apartheid-era drama Master Harold … and the Boys. He got the chance because James Earl Jones, for whom he was understudying, had to go to Hollywood to finish some voice work for Star Wars.
Lindo managed to marry a stage career with mainstream successes, such as roles in the Elmore Leonard adaptation Get Shorty and the action movie Gone in 60 Seconds, where he starred alongside Nicolas Cage and Vinnie Jones.
But it’s his relationship with Spike Lee that he is best known for. He has been described as Lee’s “secret weapon” and the relationship with the director has “levelled him up from memorable face to belated leading man,” in the opinion of one critic, who argued he creates “characters no one else in the Lee orbit would have been right to play”.
He was a strong contender for an Oscar nod in 2020, for his performance in Lee’s Da 5 Bloods, where he played an African American Vietnam veteran who returns to the country to lay old ghosts to rest. But he was ultimately frozen out (the Sinners recognition is his first Oscar nomination).
That was his fourth collaboration with Lee, and the relationship has arguably produced his best – or certainly most critically lauded – work. Da 5 Bloods followed the trio of films he made in the 90s. He played a menacing criminal mentor in Malcolm X, then followed that with a performance as a struggling father in Crooklyn, before playing another bellicose drug boss in Lee’s haunting adaptation of Richard Price’s Clockers.
When the Guardian interviewed Lindo in 2000 to mark the release of Gone in 60 Seconds, Lindo was asked what irked him most about Hollywood. “I wish there were more adherence paid to the body of one’s work,” he said. “I always feel that people only remember the last thing that I did, and that’s unfortunate.”
Perhaps on Sunday 15 March when Hollywood pays homage to its stars, Lindo will hope the voters do focus on the last thing he did and take the chance to give an Oscar to one of the industry’s most consistent talents.
