He calls himself Mike Rap. But Michael Rapaport is one white boy who’s earned the right to represent like that.
At 30, the New York actor has proven himself a persuasive portrayer of many kinds of everyman, from hoods to honkies to the sweet, stupid lunks, but Rapaport has made an extra effort to appear in films that address the United States’s ever-evolving racial conflicts in all of their snarled complexity.
Spike Lee’s Bamboozled is the latest example. Rapaport plays Dunwitty, the head of a struggling TV network who thinks he’s blacker than his token African-American writer. When Dunwitty browbeats the Ivy League-educated creative, played by Damon Wayans, into dreaming up a saleable urban comedy, the angry writer comes back with a 21st-century minstrel show that he hopes will be so intolerable it will get him kicked out of his contract – but which, due to Dunwitty’s densely enthusiastic backing, becomes a huge hit.
Some think that Spike doesn’t like white people. Apparently, you beg to differ.
He whipped me a couple of times, beat me. No, he’s cool. I don’t know where that impression came from. Maybe the people who say that get offended by things they see in his films.
Aren’t you worried that black people who see this are not going to like you for playing such an insensitive wannabe?
No. I loved the fact that the character was so uncensored, and that he thought he had his finger on the pulse of black culture. I never was concerned with offending the other actors or the crew. When I did Higher Learning about five years ago, it was the same thing. I kept asking John Singleton if it was too offensive. But Spike wrote this part and he knew what he wanted me to do.
We saw you in another movie about racism, Men of Honor. Why are you attracted to this subject?
It has a lot to do with the way I grew up and the friends I had. I have a lot of views and experience with different kinds of people. I’m very comfortable talking about it, and I’m really proud of the fact that I’ve done racially charged movies.
Tell us more about your upbringing.
When I grew up, [most] of my friends were black, so it’s not unfamiliar territory. I’m from Manhattan, I went to school in Brooklyn and was the only white kid in my high school and I didn’t think twice about it, it was never uncomfortable at all. My father ran a radio station that was actually the first station in the country to play disco.
I hope Dunwitty wasn’t based on him.
No. He’s based on a record executive I’ve met a few times, and a couple of film directors that I know.
Who might they be?
I can’t say. [laughs] But you’ve interviewed them, for sure. They’re like, ‘I’ve got a black girlfriend, I’ve got a picture of Muhammad Ali on my wall and I know wassup.’
Is that just affectation or an indication that pop culture colour-lines are increasingly blurring?
I think, because of the integration of hip-hop music into white culture so much these days, there are people walking around using the language and behaving like that. And it’s good, in one sense, that kids are all listening to the same kind of music. But it’s bad in the sense that everybody, black and white, is taking on some of the negative, stereotypical ways from that stuff.