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Keith the voice of David leads him. Deep and beautiful, with a soulful voice that recalls his boy-choir days, he has spent years being warriors, gods, pirates, fathers and art lovers. Before David appears on the Zoom screen from his Los Angeles office, his voice echoes through my laptop’s tiny speakers like a foghorn. “Can you see me now?” they blow when our connection is set up after it completes and starts. “Okay. Outside of technology, you know I’m… OK.”
He’s focused on a project he just wrapped: a comedy about a black friend called My Friend Jim, starring Rob Lowe. It’s the latest foray into the many things that have kept him busy since the late 1970s, from The Thing to Platoon to There’s Something About Mary to Nope.
David, who usually avoids watching the screen when it is given to him. “I go to fitness shows, and it’s usually the first and last time I see something. Every now and then I do something that comes on TV that I haven’t seen in a while, I watch it. Sometimes I look back at my choices and go, What the hell was I thinking…?”
In an age where people value fame, David has made a career more famous than fame, a no-nonsense actor. The last fifty years have seen him collect more than 400 coins – enough to make him a ubiquitous presence in popular culture, even if most people could not put a name behind a word or a well-known history – glasses, a big carry and a dirty laugh. His CV ranges from cinema to animation, Shakespeare to sitcoms; from the Ken Burns novels to the Call of Duty video game.
At the age of 70, David is still in demand as before, appearing in such events as Ethan Hawke-directed The Lowdown and Will Ferrell’s golf The Hawk while his velvet baritone fits everywhere from the Rick and Morty universe to the straight notes in the Gettysburg Address. He caught up with The Guardian shortly after leaving for San Diego Comic-Con to promote President Curtis, the Rick and Morty spinoff that marks the first stand-up role of his incredible career.
He no longer wants to delay, despite recent evidence to the contrary. At his induction into the Hollywood Walk of Fame in June – on his birthday, incidentally – David was photographed with his right hand in a sling, the result of the exercise gone sideways. “I was in the gym struggling with a Bosu ball,” he says of the muscle injury – a line that could have been lifted from one of his cartoons. But I’m getting ready, I’m starting a little exercise right now.
Work is what gets him up every morning, thankful that he’s been able to stay in the game this long. If family history is any guide, he figures he has a few good years ahead of him. He said: “My grandmother lived into her 80s and 90s. “My father is about to turn 90. I feel like I’m in good company. There was a time in my life when the men in our family did not live that long. I was afraid of that in my mind – but, you know, you shorten your life, worrying about how long it will be instead of living a good life.”
David knew he wanted to influence people before he knew how or where to do it. The Harlem native might have become a preacher if he hadn’t quickly moved to a citywide boys’ choir, where those words set him apart. By the 1970s and started at the High School of Performing Arts – true. Xavier Institute for theater kids in New York City, where David joined Ben Vereen, Glynn Turman and others – a professional life seemed inevitable.
From there it’s on to Juilliard, where he turned the school’s production of Romeo and Juliet into an interactive play, competing against Tony winner Boyd Gaines. This battle was not as exciting as David’s the most difficult background argument and Rowdy Roddy Piper in the 1988 cult hit They Live — but it earned him and Gaines a licensing battle. Two years after he took the world by storm with John Houseman in the productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Waiting for Godot, David found himself in his first film role – a sci-fi thriller starring Kurt Russell.
The role was between David and another black actor named Roger Mosley, who ended up booking Magnum, P.I. The Thing, of course, is sci-fi canon now, a film that has become more popular over time. But when John Carpenter’s film arrived in 1982, David remembers, “it didn’t get a popular vote. It was overshadowed by ET and Poltergeist. The critics didn’t like it. I thought, well, I got an honorable mention (in the reviews). Maybe I won’t live in the movies.
Four years passed before Hollywood returned to David. In between auditions, acting company gigs and a side hustle as a vocal coach, he worked as a shiatsu masseur, charging fellow members $30 a session. “The thing about shingle removal is you have to work for anyone in their 30s,” he says. “And I didn’t really want to do that, because it took me a long time to learn how to use the power of people without using it myself.
In retrospect, those lean years taught David a discipline that has helped him a lot in his career: choice.
This is why David left Hollywood’s ultimate art: a career defined by its quantity and quality. As a young black actor moving around in Hollywood in the 80s and 90s, David understood how easily he could be pigeonholed – into a criminal, a soldier, a sidekick, a stereotype. His answer was not to avoid those roles, but to find humanity within them. He said: “I’ve done things like pimps and the like. “My bottom line is, I need to know why they made those choices so that the audience can understand the person. I want you to understand Black people as whole people. I try to do that as much as I can.”
David has a way of lending every character a measure of gravity, as if the opposites are interfering with his story. It doesn’t matter if he plays the chairman of the general staff in Armageddon, and the shadow DC alderman in Chris Rock’s comedy The head of the government or the country-weary Vietnam soldier King Platoon – it’s Oliver Stone’s film that broke the fall of David four years and put him on the path of near-permanent work. But even Platoon could have relegated him to a footnote in a much larger story.
Charlie Sheen appreciates David and to save his life in a near-fatal helicopter incident. It is a rare story that David refused to spice up. He said: “We circle back to where we set up, and the chopper is slightly tilted than before.” I just noticed that, unconsciously, he was sliding towards the open door. He didn’t see himself, but I was looking at him an inch towards the door and I grabbed him instinctively – or maybe out of selfishness, I didn’t want to do anything. for the rest of my life!
Interviewing David is like trying to visit the Smithsonian on your lunch break. Nothing about anything, just looking at all the pictures. But who would skip Brother Rogers’ Neighborhood? After The Thing, David booked nine episodes of the children’s program as Keith, a local carpenter. The event – a masterful performance by a Presbyterian minister – is one that David still remembers fondly.
“One of the women in the group, I believe, now you can say that her son had autism,” says David. “He was a wonderful kid, but, you know, he could be anywhere. When he settled down, they had a living room where the TV was. And when Mr. Rogers arrived, Brian was sitting in front of the television, complaining. He would kick you out if you came into the room and made noise. It was really something to see the effect he had on the kids, on the people. It was moving.
Not every stop on a journey leaves a lasting mark. The Big House — the 2004 bad-ass sitcom that parlayed The Fresh Prince’s take on wealth and featured Kevin Hart and Leslie Odom Jr in their first screen roles — didn’t sign up again. David doesn’t spend much time thinking about those mistakes. The best thing he can remember is to tell himself, “Something will come.” And something else was the 2000 sci-fi sleeper hit Pitch Black.
His commercial followers were people like Orson Welles, James Earl Jones and Ossie Davis – actors whose voices were instruments unto themselves. David said: “What he was able to do with the sound of the voice really impressed me. I also wanted to be able to do that, with the voice, and take you on a journey.”
Little did David know where that journey would lead him when he landed a job on the sitcom Community. Dan Harmon, creator and showrunner, invited him to tell a story in his Ken Burns style and was struck by the comic potential in David’s gravitas and his ability to create defensive, deadpan performances at the same time. He said: “We enjoyed it very much.
David was game to play on camera as Elroy Patashnik, the Community’s resident IT guy. When that job ended, David quickly found another on Greenleaf, a popular drama about a Black church in Memphis. More than a well-known role as Bishop James Greenleaf, his first impressive show in the middle of the series, it was a great opportunity on Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network where he shared the screen with Winfrey, who played his barmaid sister.
Did he feel pressured? “You know, you always know that’s true,” says David. But if he’s sitting at the table reading or we’re in the room, he’s not my boss.
But Harmon wasn’t finished with David. Time the most popular stop from the CommunityHarmon created Rick and Morty, a series of cartoons about a mad scientist and his grandson who warp through time and events. He brought in David almost immediately – first on a single job as a giraffe; then like President Curtis, whose access to deep government secrets puts him on the same level as Rick Sanchez himself.
Together, Harmon and David find one person in the Rick and Morty arena, where pop culture and deranged mythology collide: a well-known character. “One thing about working with Dan is that it can be silly and crazy, but always wise. It’s the kind of stuff you’ll laugh at for days after seeing it. Whenever you think about a certain moment, you can only laugh. It also works on a different level. “
President Curtis doesn’t just add to the humor. It unleashes all of David’s voices: speaking through White House press room addresses, singing in the shower, settling into battlegrounds. It’s the first step forward, where he manages to bring the pieces of every role he’s played along the way into one person. Above all, it is a great reward for trusting his word. “You never know in this business. It’s a very funny business. But you have to stay in it. One thing I always say is: don’t give up on blessings. You never know what it’s going to take, or what’s ahead of you.”
