'Westworld' Season 4 on HBO: How Jeffrey Wright who majored in political science took up acting
Fan-favorite sci-fi drama ‘Westworld’ Season 4 has made its comeback with a bang on HBO on June 26. The multiple Emmy award winning series has been lauded by fans and critics for brilliant portrayal of a totally novel yet out-of-the-box dystopian world. This world is filled up with human bots who reside within an amusement park in New York. These bots who were originally humans, have gone through countless emotional journeys within the past four seasons. They all had to lose their special ones along with their humanity because of which they also lost a part of themselves in the fight to survive within that dystopian realm. Nothing has been same for all of them ever since. ‘Westworld’ has been adapted from an iconic 1973 film of the same name.
Jeffrey Wright portrayed the character of human Arnold and his synthetically cloned doppelganger Bernard Lowe in first two seasons simultaneously where he was human in one timeline and then cut to being a part-time bot Bernard in another realm within same season. In second season, he acts like an earlier version of Bernard who gets taught by Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) how to act like Arnold. In the ending of Season 3, we saw how Bernard wakes up finally but in the same motel room from which he gained the access to the Valley Beyond. He's literally covered in dust, which describes how a lot of time has passed since he entered this surreal paradise. Whether he's awoken in the world of the ‘Westworld’ Season 4 time skip or even much ahead of the series current timeline is yet to be revealed, but whatever he's discovered during his absence could be something really huge which is why now his absence which has been seen since first episode of this season, is going to play a key role in Season 4's entire story as a whole.
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Jeffrey Wright as a political science major before acting career
In an old interview with Slant magazine dated September 2013, Wright opened up on being a political science major whilst growing up in Washington. He said, “Well, yeah. You know, I was a political science major in college and I grew up in Washington D.C. You grow up in Washington and you kind of have no choice but to be political. And there was also just a function of the times too. I came of consciousness in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, you know? So, as an African-American individual, I was politicized by that. But also, the early movies that I took in were not necessarily overtly political in nature, but had political under- and overtones. So that was the stuff I was really attracted to. I think one of the first “adult” movies I saw in the theater was Dog Day Afternoon, and it had a definite politics about it. And there were all those great Lumet films, and Schlesinger films, and Coppola. The films that Hollywood was churning out at that time were about something, and that kind of shaped my understanding of what movies were about or what they could be about.”
Opening up on the advice that his acting coach gave him back then in his schooling days, Wright also added, “No, I was actually told the opposite by my first acting coach. I took a class in my junior year of college, and there was a guy who taught the class who was how shall I put it? a bit of a cultural conservative. And I remember saying to him, You know, I want to pursue this. Because I knew after the first day that I wanted to pursue it. I knew I was going to be an actor. And this guy said, Well, I could see you doing comedy routines, and things like that. He was kind of a…I think he was a bit of a racist, to be honest. So, no, he was not all that encouraging. But, then again, that’s good because most people can be discouraged from doing good stuff, and if they listen, then it wasn’t meant to be their journey anyway.”
