actor and producer
New Zealand actor and producer; star of The Dark Horse
PROFILE
Cliff Curtis
Guest
FROM Cliff Curtis
The Business
Cliff Curtis on 'The Dark Horse' Actor Cliff Curtis has played a wide range of ethnicities in his career -- everything from an African American drug dealer in Bringing Out the Dead, to an Iraqi rebel in Three Kings, to the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar in Blow. In reality, Curtis is Maori -- as in, the Maori who are the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand. After decades of playing terrorists and gang members, Curtis is at last finding more complex and nuanced roles. Recently he even played Jesus in Sony's movie Risen. And now there are two leading-man projects where he gets to play his own ethnicity. In the AMC drama Fear the Walking Dead, he appears as Maori-American high school teacher Travis Manawa. In the new bio-pic The Dark Horse , he portrays the late Maori speed chess champion and teacher Genesis Potini, who triumphed despite extreme bouts of bipolar disorder. When Curtis sat down with KCRW's Matt Holzman, he said that while he's spent much of his career avoiding roles that were ethnic stereotypes, opportunities for non-white actors in Hollywood have been getting better.
Recommended
Bookworm
Morgan Parker: There Are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé Morgan Parker says that the poems in her book There Are Things More Beautiful than Beyoncé take a stand against the clichés of the dominant culture.
Press Play with Madeleine Brand
Previewing James Comey's blockbuster testimony Former FBI director James Comey testifies Thursday in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee, but his opening statement has been released. In it, he says he felt pressured by Donald Trump to declare loyalty to him and publicly clear him of any wrongdoing in the Russia investigation.
Bookworm
George Saunders: Lincoln in the Bardo (Part I) Lincoln in the Bardo dramatizes a grieving President Lincoln as he visits the grave of his beloved son Willie, who died at age eleven. In the novel, the buried dead believe they're not dead -- "they're sick and refer to their coffins as "sick boxes."