DON
CHEADLE

Don Cheadle was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on 29 November 1964 and graduated from CalArts with a theater BFA in 1986. His screen work includes Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), Boogie Nights (1997) and collaborations with Steven Soderbergh. For FLM.RED, an ensemble is a useful place to begin watching him: a reply can introduce a different tempo, and a listener’s reaction can quietly change which person seems to control the scene.

Hotel Rwanda (2004) brought an Academy Award nomination for actor in a leading role at the 2005 ceremony. That recognition sits within a career that also makes room for television comedy. He received Golden Globes for The Rat Pack at the 1999 ceremony and House of Lies in 2013. The latter offers a different use of verbal agility. FLM.RED reads the quick exchanges through the negotiations inside them: charm, calculation and impatience can occupy the same sentence.

Miles Ahead was his feature directorial debut, with Cheadle also co-writing the screenplay and playing Miles Davis. Sony Pictures Classics announced the film’s selection as the closing-night presentation of the 2015 New York Film Festival. Its distributor describes the project as an impressionistic portrait inspired by events in Davis’s life. That is useful context for a viewer: the film approaches a musician through a chosen dramatic form, rather than promising a complete chronological account of his life.

James Rhodes, or War Machine, became another recurring role beginning with Iron Man 2 (2010). For viewers arriving through Marvel, the earlier films and television work offer several directions to explore. FLM.RED is interested in the adjustment of scale: a superhero ensemble, a fast-moving comedy and a musician’s portrait ask for different relationships between speech, gesture and the people sharing the frame. The films below are those currently linked to Cheadle in FLM.RED, not a complete filmography.