‘Sinners’ star Delroy Lindo on ‘Da 5 Bloods’ Oscar snub, ‘Blade,’ ‘Anansi Boys,’ and more

Delroy Lindo makes a habit of knocking on wood. Sure, most of us say the superstitious phrase from time to time, and may even hunt for the closest wooden surface to lightly tap, but the star with a decades-spanning career performs the gesture quite often. You can hear Lindo knocking on the podcast desk during his March 31 episode of Marc Maron’s WTF, as well as in various video interviews on the awards circuit to promote Spike Lee’s film Da 5 Bloods back in 2020. 

The Sinners and Unprisoned actor, 72, does it multiple times again during an hourlong conversation with Entertainment Weekly over lunch in early April at La Pecora Bianca, an Italian spot in New York City’s Nomad district along his planned route to Sherri Shepherd’s daytime talk show. Lindo doesn’t know when he started incorporating the knocking-on-wood as part of his daily mannerisms, but it’s all about perspective. Perspective is important to him. 

Lindo, at 6 feet 4 inches, enters the restaurant on an overcast Wednesday afternoon, sporting aviator shades, a thin, grey beanie, and a colorful summer scarf of different orange, pink, and yellow hues. Underneath a brown, aged leather jacket is a simple white T-shirt that reads, “Learning As I Go,” which is the name of a clothing line (abbreviated LAIGO) his son, Damiri, co-launched with his business partner. “It’s very apt that I’m wearing it,” Lindo comments, “yes, as an advertisement for them, but it is an ethos that I subscribe to.” 

Lindo found himself embracing this mantra with greater frequency in recent years. Critics hailed his momentous performance in Da 5 Bloods, in which he played a Vietnam War veteran suffering from PTSD. He seemed like a shoo-in for the Oscars in 2021 and then didn’t even receive a nomination, something Lee himself called out on social media. Afterwards, he landed roles in Marvel’s Mahershala Ali-led Blade movie, which he eventually departed as the film remains in creative limbo; and Amazon’s Anansi Boys series, which was filmed with him in a lead part of the African trickster god Anansi but hasn’t been released in light of the sexual assault accusations against creator and author Neil Gaiman.

Even now, as Lindo promotes Sinners, director Ryan Coogler’s highly lauded vampire horror film set in Prohibition-era Mississippi with Michael B. Jordan twinning in dual roles, Lindo feels “f—ing fortunate.”

“I’ll tell you something,” he says. “To have been working as an actor for the length of time that I have been working — and certainly to have been through ups and downs in my career — the fact that one is still working, the fact that audiences still apparently find what I’m doing interesting, worthy of watching, that’s not a given. So that’s what it comes out of, that I don’t take any of it for granted.”

Offer only

One of the first movies Coogler, 38, ever saw with his dad was Malcolm X, Lee’s 1992 drama, which contains Lindo’s career-making turn as “West Indian” Archie, a Harlem gangster involved in a local numbers game. “He turns in an insane performance in that movie,” Coogler remarks separately to EW. “He’s always brilliant.”

Years later, Lindo remained on Coogler’s mind when looking to cast the Sinners role of Delta Slim, a Mississippi harmonica and piano player tapped by twins Smoke and Stack (Jordan) to perform at the launch of their juke joint, which becomes the target of a group of vampires. “To work with him and see what he brought every day, it’s an incredible performance,” the filmmaker adds. 

Lindo hasn’t auditioned for a role in decades. “Malcolm X was the last film,” he admits — and promptly knocks his knuckles against the lunch table. He begins to laugh. “I don’t mean to sound arrogant, laughing, but I think I’ve done enough. I’ve done a wide range of work as an actor. If you can take the time to look at some of the things that I’ve done that have demonstrated range and make a determination as to whether you want me to film, please do that.” 

However, Lindo didn’t audition even before he amassed such a vast body of work. He shares, “Around 1997, ’98, there were two well-known directors, and I’m not going to say their names. They requested that I come in and audition. And I… No. I’m sorry.”

He points to his role on The Good Fight. Lindo came aboard that CBS show, starting with 2017’s freshman season, playing attorney Adrian Boseman. When he met with producers Robert and Michelle King, a camera sat in the corner of the room, which he assumed they used to audition others. But with Lindo, it remained off. “Maybe they fooled me,” he says in jest. “They didn’t ask me to read from the script or anything. We were just talking. But my point is this: I could relax and I could be more immediate with them, and I could be more…I don’t know, organic.”

That’s ultimately why Lindo remains offer only. Auditions, he explains, aren’t a normal setting or always conducive to an actor demonstrating what they can do. Auditions conducted over Zoom, Lindo says, are “even more” unnatural. “It’s a funnel. Think about this…You and I are sitting here. You get a sense of me. I get a sense of you. It’s immediate, and it’s not filtered through any technological anything. It’s human. I don’t know how the young actors do it. It’s very unfair.” 

For Sinners, the conversation began with a message from the Black Panther and Creed filmmaker, who lives minutes away from Lindo in Los Angeles. “I think the first text was, ‘You play piano?'” the actor recalls. As it happens, he took lessons in preparation for 1994’s Crooklyn, another of Lindo’s greatest hits, where he played struggling musician and Carmichael family patriarch Woody. But the answer was, no, he didn’t technically play. A few texts later, Lindo finally asked Coogler directly, “What’s this about, man? What’s up?” That led to a Zoom meeting (not an audition!) with Coogler, as well as the director’s producer and wife, Zinzi Coogler. Lindo didn’t actually meet Coogler in person until the entire cast was on set for the film in New Orleans. 

Music plays an instrumental role in the story Coogler is telling. In many ways, the film is about music and its transcendent nature. In one significant scene, which feels like Coogler’s central thesis of Sinners, preacher boy Sammy (Miles Caton) begins to play a set at the juke joint. His voice and guitar strums spark a hallucinatory sequence in which different times collide. African tribal drummers and dancers, modern-day twerkers, hip-hop DJs, and even a ballerina appear before the dancing crowd, as if the music were calling to them from across time.

Music influences Lindo creatively, but he’s hard-pressed to articulate how, aside from the obvious “synapses firing off” ways. “There’s a spiritual aspect,” he remarks. Lindo remembers the time in 1993, just before he started shooting Crooklyn, when Lee invited him and his wife, Nashormeh N. R. Lindo, to see Prince perform at Radio City Music Hall. When “Purple Rain” came on, the crowd thrust their lighters in the air. “That was an entirely spiritual communication,” he says.

Linda had a brief monologue in Sinners that gets to the heart of this, though it was eventually cut short for the finished film. In the scene, Delta Slim speaks privately with Sammy before his big night. “I’m telling him it’s all connected: the way we preach, the way we convey our spirits, our spirituality is every bit as valid as what they do at the church.”

On snubs and derailments

Sinners comes amidst another upswing in Lindo’s career. Similar to his experience in the aftermath of Malcolm X, this one, he noticed, began with Da 5 Bloods. Lindo didn’t initially think of his promotional appearances and press interviews for that project as an awards campaign, though it quickly snowballed into one.

“Why I started thinking in those kinds of terms was because everybody else was talking about it,” Lindo says. The more interviews he did in support of Da 5 Bloods, the louder the awards talk became. “I try not to buy into that,” he continues. “That may seem very pious. I try not to buy into that because, frankly, if Da 5 Bloods experience taught me anything, it’s that no Academy Award nomination, no BAFTA nomination, no SAG nomination…There was another one. There were four of ’em that completely iced both the film and me…I had my own thoughts about what that was about…My point is, if so much of the press were saying, ‘This guy’s going to get nominated,’ and it didn’t happen, there’s probably a reason for that.”

Lindo feels content to let others disseminate exactly why he was snubbed, but admits, “I was profoundly disappointed, frankly.” The day after those Oscar nominations were released, Lee took to Instagram to share “a Delroy Lindo appreciation post.” The director wrote, “Derloy Lindo may not have received an Oscar nomination yesterday, but that does not take away from the impact of his work that spans decades.” Lee also separately launched a “WE WUZ ROBBED” poster sale.

Lindo and Lee spoke over the phone that morning of the Oscar nominations on March 15, 2021. “He had just gotten off a plane, and he called me. Said, ‘Man, I just heard.’ We were commiserating,” he recalls. “Where we ended up was agreeing, no matter what, one must keep working. What am I going to do? Take my marbles and go home and get in the fetal position? No, I’m not going to do that.” 

And he didn’t. The upswing continued for Lindo that year when he landed roles in Amazon’s Anansi Boys and Marvel’s Blade. The former project began principal photography in Scotland in 2022. Lindo played Mr. Nancy, a role first portrayed in the Starz series American Gods, based on Gaiman’s book. In this series adaptation, based on another Gaiman novel, Mr. Nancy is the African deity known as Anansi, the trickster god of stories. The plot follows his two sons, Charlie and Spider (both played by Malachi Kirby), who connect after their father’s death and get into some supernatural hijinks. 

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Whoopi Goldberg, L. Scott Caldwell, CCH Pounder, Fiona Shaw, and a host of other impressive talent also ranked among the cast. 

As of now, the entire series is completely filmed and still expected for release in 2025, but Amazon has not announced a premiere date. Gaiman was the subject of a New York Magazine cover story, published in January of this year, that chronicled multiple sexual assault and misconduct allegations. Anansi Boys, for which Gaiman served as writer and showrunner, was one of his many projects upended by these claims. In a statement, Gaiman denied engaging in “non-consensual sexual activity with anyone.”

Lindo doesn’t comment on the Gaiman accusations, but says of the series in general, “I don’t think that’ll ever see the light of day. It’s too bad on many levels, but I was really excited to do it.” When EW asked Lindo earlier in the conversation what he’s learned from derailed projects like this, he responded, “Don’t count your chickens, man. It’s a shame. I could be wrong about Anansi Boys. Maybe it’ll be released. This is another reason to knock on wood.” He performs the gesture again. “Because there are banana peels all over the landscape. No matter how experienced the level of talent that’s involved, one can always slip up, which brings me back to the knocking on wood thing. S— can happen, man. At any point.” 

Blade, a reimagining of the comic-book Daywalker vampire hunter, was another experience. A parade of filmmakers and writers filtered on and off that movie for Disney’s Marvel Studios, trying to make it work. In November 2023, Variety published a report about alleged creative disagreements contributing to the hangup. Marvel has since pulled the film entirely from its release calendar, and Lindo isn’t at present involved.

“When Marvel came to me, they seemed to be really interested in my input,” Lindo recalls. “And in the various conversations I had with producers, the writer, the director at the time, it was all leading into being very inclusive. It was really exciting conceptually, but it was also exciting in terms of the character that was going to form. And then, for whatever reason, it just went off the rails.”

Lindo doesn’t specify which character he was supposed to play, but teases that “there was a Marcus Garvey-esque component to who this man was shaping up to be.”

“I’m not saying that it would’ve been an out-and-out Garvey-ite. Not that, but just in terms of how this man’s philosophy, his ethos, and what was driving him. He was a character who had, very similar to Sinners, created a community, a Black community. He was a character who was the head of this community.” 

When Marvel initially cast Lindo in this undisclosed part, the actor received an unexpected congratulatory message from Jeffrey Bell and Paul Zbyszewski, who created another past Marvel project that Lindo would’ve been a part of if not for decisions made above his pay grade. In the age of Marvel before the Disney+ boom, Bell and Zbyszewski hoped to launch an Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. spinoff for ABC called Most Wanted. Lindo was set to play Dominic Fortune, a rogue adventurer aiding Adrianne Palicki’s Bobbi Morse and Nick Blood’s Lance Hunter from the mothership show. ABC eventually passed on that show in May 2016. 

“They said something like, ‘Congratulations, man. We’re very happy for you. I’m really sorry that you’re not on our project,'” Lindo says of Bell and Zbyszewski’s message. “I told my son and his friends, you never know who’s watching. Always do your best. Somebody may come back around.”

Paying it forward

Despite how these experiences turned out, they all helped to create the Delroy Lindo of today. “I hope to God that I am wise enough to embrace that and conduct myself accordingly going forward,” he says.

Lindo seems to be in a particularly reflective headspace these days, which coincides with the writing of a book that he describes as “memoir-ish” and hopes to release soon. It won’t be “a classic celebrity memoir,” he says. Instead, he’s focusing on a specific selection of his films as they pertain to the larger narrative he’s developing, which he doesn’t want to reveal right away. The conceit stems from his college thesis, which he developed while getting a master’s degree at New York University in 2014, at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Fundamental to his narrative in the book is his work with Lee and revisiting his mother’s life.

Lindo doesn’t have a ghostwriter, either. He’s writing it himself. “There was talk of getting a collaborator,” he says, “and for a variety of reasons, it didn’t work out. It’s fine that it didn’t work out because…” He knocks on wood. “I’m better off writing it myself.” Lindo adds, “Nobody else could have done that. I had to do it. I had to experience it. Ultimately, on some level, it has told me what it wants to be. I find I work like that, too.”