FromBlack PanthertoUs, everything the 32-year-old actor touches seems to blow up.
Its not a new feeling.
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Finally he realized what was going on.
Duke, an immigrant from the Caribbean by way of Brooklyn, had a growth spurt at 13.
He is 6 5, with a wrestlers physique, and unlikemany tall men, he stands up straight.
A conversation with him often returns to the subject of his body.
My body takes up a lot of space.
My body is politicized.
My body is so many different things, he tells me.
In a sense, Duke is something like the John Cazale of modern blockbuster cinema.
Hes aware of this: Everything I do blows up.
Duke was right; hes not a close talker.
(Its a gray plaid tracksuit from Rag & Bone comfy, but make it fashion.)
He has, as anyone whos seenBlack Pantherknows, a fantastic laugh.
He was raised by a single mother, and spent much his childhood watching TV everything fromFresh PrincetoGolden Girls.
I dont think Americans understand how big their exports are, he says.
American culture, the American Dream, is this huge export.
They landed in Crown Heights, back when the neighborhood was stillalmost entirely black.
It was wealth and comfort, comfort and safety, he says.
And the part of Brooklyn we settled in didnt look like any of that.
The gap between the American dream and the American reality has been on Dukes mind thanks toUs.
In the movie, households across the country are terrorized by their jumpsuit-clad doubles, known as the Tethered.
What looks to us like a homicidal rampage is for them an attempt at liberation.
That Jordan Peele fear is a deep fear, says Duke.
Its a fear of the tidal wave.
To play buppie patriarch Gabe Wilson, Duke based his performance on the sitcoms dads of his youth.
(Though the characters voice, nasal and West Coast, was inspired byPeele himself.)
As Gabe, Duke was tasked with embodying the soft underbelly of the lifestyle hed seen on TV.
The status, the house, the trophy family, he says.
He is the perfect example of comfort and privilege, so much so that its crippling.
At Peeles direction he stopped working out; his body became round and congenial.
He moved differently, too.
Once its clear theyre not the neighbors, Gabe retreats into an imagined idea of blackness.
He adopts the big black man voice that youre taught not to use because its intimidating.
It doesnt scare them away, Duke says.
Its useless because its not real.
Duke sees Peeles social thrillers as an ideal form for interrogating these lizard-brain assumptions.
What if the black guydoesntdie?
What else dies instead?
Maybe its the construct of racism.
Not of all Dukes acting opportunities have afforded such vision.
He was conscious of how both his race and size played into casting.
Shorter actors are easier to frame, so tall men face a disadvantage onscreen.
As Duke toldDeadlinesNew Hollywoodpodcastlast year, he dealt with the problem by shaving an inch off his listed height.
He was shrinking himself on paper, something he couldnt do on set.
My thing was really getting outside of how to use the body, he says of this period.
It was hard working through that until I got to a place where I could.
In the meantime, regional theater helped keep his creative spark alive.
(The pair have appeared together in half of Dukes films, which is to say, two.)
They met when Duke was an aspiring applicant and Nyongo was a first-year assigned to show him around.
It was the start of a decade-long friendship that retains a trace of big sister/little brother vibes.
He was very focused, Nyongo says of Duke as an student.
His gaze seemed to go way beyond the horizon.
Stage work provided a similar opportunity to explore without preconceptions.
Every Yale Drama student must take a clown class, where they are assigned a clown name.
Dukes was Loose Zeus the Third, But I Wish It Was Joseph Levine, No Relation, a.k.a.
(Lupitas was Fatty.)
Clowns are the most innocent aspect of who you are, he says.
All things are possible because imagination governs them.
Thats why its a totally ambitious name.
Its me wanting to be more than the world conditioned me to want to be.
Talk to anyone who overlapped with Duke in New Haven, and they all mention the same role.
In acommedia dellarteproject, Duke got the part of Il Capitano, a swaggering mercenary prone to outlandish promises.
Where Little Sammy Cupcakes was small, Il Capitano was absolutely gigantic.
Truth has no size, Duke says.
you’ve got the option to do anything as long as its grounded in the circumstance.
Its a lesson that has served him well in his subsequent rise.
Winston takes up space and hes not afraid to take up space, says Mateen.
Not just with his physical size, but with his intellect and his personality.
Nyongo recalls that, even among all the heavyweights in theBlack Panthercast, Duke stood out.
A firm believer in the power of over-preparation, he had arrived on set with his MBaku perfectly formed.
Lupita Nyongo is not often wrong.
In less than six minutes of screentime, Dukes MBaku was a revelation.
InBlack Pantherits something else a young actor staking his territory.This may be your movie, but its my scene.
Theres a weird confidence, and a kind of pleasure.
The actors I love the most are the ones who are thinking,Watch me do this.
The pleasure of the performance is really part of what Winstons bringing right now.
How exciting that was.
When it comes to stars born in 2018, Winston Duke beatAlly Campanaby a good eight months.
They also loved his thighs.
It was a kind of character viewers hadnt seen before, and the subsequent thirstpowered the blogosphere for months.
When I ask Duke how he feels about this, he slows down and repeats himself.
He wants to ensure he wont be misquoted, that the nuance wont be lost.
But the whole thing also got him thinking about how lucky he was.
Its still pretty new, Duke says, but as hes answering the question, he realizes it isnt.
He starts to riff.
It goes back to the conversation about size, he says.
Ive been aware that almost everything I do blows up.
If Im disagreeable, Im angry.
If Im angry, Im belligerent.
If I ever get to furious, its, Hes out of control!
The positives are now as large and as far-reaching as the negatives, for once in my life.
