Detroit's David Alan Grier has a provocative new film, 'American Society of Magical Negroes'
David Alan Grier is enjoying this period of his career. He has a new movie and an upcoming TV series. On Sunday night, he was the voice of the Oscars as the announcer of the 2024 Academy Awards broadcast.
At 67, Grier is defying the entertainment industry’s ageism by being busier than ever.
“At this point, I feel like I’ve put in my 10,000 hours. I am ready. My knees are still relatively good. Put me in, coach, put me in. I can give you seven innings,” says the native Detroiter during a recent Zoom interview.
Grier’s latest film is sure to prompt a lot of conversation. “The American Society of Magical Negroes,” which opens Friday, is a satire that takes a fantastical look at the cinematic stereotype of Black characters who exist only to further the journey of white characters.
Written and directed Kobi Libii, it offers a provocative twist on movies like 1999’s “The Green Mile,” where the prisoner played by Michael Clarke Duncan used his inexplicable healing powers to help prison guard Tom Hanks, and 2000’s “The Legend of Bagger Vance,” where the mysterious golf caddie portrayed by Will Smith appears out of the mist to aid the golfer played by Matt Damon.
According to Grier, such characters are “the all-knowing, all-wise, kind of placating Black spirit. You never really saw where they lived, where their private life was. But literally everything you ask them … ‘Should I buy a lottery ticket?’ … ’I think you should.’ They just knew everything.”
“The American Society of Magical Negroes,” which premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, follows a young artist named Aren (Justice Smith) who is invited to join a secret collective of Black people with supernatural abilities whose mission is to make white people’s lives easier.
Grier plays Roger, a veteran of the society who believes in its quest and recruits Aren as a member. As Grier puts it, “If someone were to say, ‘Well, if magical negroes are doing so much, look at the world. There’s so much suffering, so much racial strife. You guys aren’t doing anything!’… I think my character’s response would be, ‘Oh, we’re doing a lot. Imagine if we weren’t here.'"
The movie uses humor to make a serious statement about how Black people have had to monitor their behavior around white people as a survival tactic. As Roger tells Aren during a scene where they calm a nervous white police officer, “the happier they are, the safer we are.”
It also weaves a love story into a narrative when Aren falls for a woman who works at the same high-tech company as the white man who becomes Aren's first assignment.
Asked whether he ever played the sorts of parts that Libii is satirizing here, Grier says with a laugh: “Trust me, I auditioned for a bunch of those magical Negro roles. I never got them because I wasn’t giving that vibe off. They were like, ’Thank you, David, no.'"
Grier grew up in Detroit’s historic Boston-Edison neighborhood and went to Cass Technical High School. “I thought Detroit was the center of the world,” he says. “We had the auto industry. I went to the Motown Revue. I remember marching with my family with Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963 before his March on Washington. I thought Detroit was pretty hip and cool.”
After graduating in 1978 from the University of Michigan, Grier earned a master’s degree at the Yale School of Drama and found early success onstage in New York City. He starred as Jackie Robinson on Broadway in “The First,” a musical about the baseball superstar who integrated the sport. It earned Grier his first Tony nomination.
He also appeared as Cpl. Cobb in “A Soldier’s Play,” and, later, in its 1984 film adaptation, “A Soldier’s Story.” He made his movie debut in 1983's "Streamers," a searing Vietnam-era drama directed by Robert Altman.
Grier emerged on television as a comedy star through the early 1990s Fox sketch comedy hit “In Living Color.” Alongside castmates like Jim Carrey and Damon Wayans, Grier played a wide range of popular characters like blues singer Calhoun Tubbs, who was based on longtime Ann Arbor street musician Shakey Jake.
After “In Living Color,” Grier worked consistently on big and small screens in a range of guest spots and supporting roles. In the early 2000s, he starred in an NBC sitcom named for him, “DAG,” and co-starred with Bonnie Hunt in another sitcom, “Life With Bonnie.”
As the years passed, he got more opportunities to demonstrate his range and his ability to make any project, whether a drama or comedy, better with his presence. His recent highlights include playing the Cowardly Lion in NBC’s “The Wiz Live!” (2015), Jerrod Carmichael’s dad in NBC’s “The Carmichael Show” (2015-17) and Steve Carell’s therapist on FX’s “The Patient” (2022). In 2023, he was Reverend Avery in the film adaptation of “The Color Purple” musical and had a cameo as Santa in Eddie Murphy’s holiday comedy “Candy Cane Lane.”
Grier’s return to Broadway brought him three more Tony nominations and one win. In 2009, he starred with Kerry Washington and James Spader in the David Mamet play “Race" and played Sporting Life in an acclaimed 2012 revival of “Porgy and Bess.” He finally took home the Tony for best featured actor in a play in 2021 for his riveting turn in a revival of “A Soldier’s Play," this time as the embittered Sgt. Waters.
Next up for Grier is “St. Denis Medical,” an NBC mockumentary-style comedy from Justin Spitzer (“American Auto,” “Superstore”) and Eric Ledgin about an underfunded hospital. Its premiere date hasn’t been announced yet.
“My manager called it Saunt De-nee,” jokes Grier in an exaggerated French accent. He says his character, Dr. Ron, is “the oldest physician on this staff at the hospital. He is described as being, when he was young, gung-ho, (a) rebel, stormed the Bastille. He’s given up at this point. He’s very much, ‘OK, whatever you guys want to do.’”
It’s an attitude that is the opposite of Grier’s, who admits he didn’t he didn’t expect that this portion of his life “would be the richest, for a variety of reasons." One of them is the self-knowledge and self-confidence that has come. with experience.
“I’ve been acting for 40 years. So what does that mean? That allows me to be more relaxed, which means I’m going to give a better performance. I don’t have to push. I’m just in a groove,” says Grier. “When everything’s good, I feel like a jazz musician, where you have all this knowledge, so when you’re playing a song, when it’s my turn to solo, I have a panoply of places I can go and I can just go there.”
That feeling is, well, great for Grier. “I’m just having a ball, man. This is gravy. This is all gravy. I really didn’t think it would be like this when I got this old, but here we go.”
Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at [email protected].
'The American Society of Magical Negroes'
Rated PG-13; language, suggestive content, thematic material
1 hour, 44 minutes
In theaters
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: David Alan Grier brings poignancy, humor to 'American Society of Magical Negroes'
