Michael Potts Is the Secret Weapon of ‘The Piano Lesson.’ He’s Gotten Used to That

In “Always Great,” Awards Insider speaks with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this installment, The Wire and Book of Mormon alum Michael Potts explores his bumpy journey to the world of August Wilson, culminating in his brilliant turn in The Piano Lesson.

After enough time auditioning in Hollywood, Michael Potts learned to steel himself for the question he’d get over and over: Where are you from? “I was not seen as urban enough—or ‘street’ enough, the word I used to hear a lot—when we first got out of school,” the Yale Drama graduate says. “In this business, you get categorized, you get typecast…. I was foreign to them. Alien.” His favorite example relates to 1999’s The Cider House Rules. Potts had already secured the role of Peaches in a previous iteration of the project that fell apart. He was asked to read for the part again—and he knew, for this audition, he wasn’t exactly the favorite. So he decided to play what he calls a “dirty trick” on director Lasse Hallström.

“He asked me, ‘Where are you from?’ I knew it—I knew it was coming,” says Potts, who was born in Brooklyn. “I just lied and I started making up shit. Without missing a beat, I said Madagascar. I just kept making up shit about it, and he couldn’t have been more intrigued! He was, like, ‘Oh, really?’ Which I’m finding so funny, like, you’re Swedish, and you’re asking me where I’m from? He was more willing to believe ‘Madagascar’ than to believe I was who he was talking to.”

Potts cracks up when telling this story—but for an actor who’s demonstrated an astounding talent and range between Broadway, film, and television, it must also rankle him to be treated as some kind of oddity. “I had to get angry about it sometimes and shake my fist at the heavens, but what was that going to do?” he says. “I really believed they had no idea what to do with my kind of Black man. Let’s put it like that.”

Potts has battled and subverted these perceptions his whole career, a big reason why it’s taken him decades to be cast in the kinds of parts that got him into acting in the first place—that is to say, roles created by legendary playwright August Wilson. Potts was a pre-med student when he saw a clip from Fences during a broadcast of the Tony Awards in the late 1980s. “It was the first time I heard something that was familiar to me—it sounded like my family, it was language I heard growing up around my grandparents and their neighbors and friends,” Potts says. He studied the actor in that scene, Courtney B. Vance, and discovered he went to Yale. Potts emulated Vance’s professional trajectory but wasn’t considered a Wilsonian actor by the decision-makers: “I was typecast in more bougie roles, that sort of thing. In a lot of people’s minds that didn’t jive with being an August Wilson character.”

Potts instead became known as a top Shakespearean performer in regional theaters around the country. He emerged as a menacingly soft-spoken fan favorite on an iconic HBO drama. He starred in three Broadway musicals in a six-year stretch. Only after all that did he nab his first-ever role in a Wilson production—and then, a few more. Turns out he was the right guy for those jobs all along.

In a cast of scene-stealers, Potts still manages to run away with every bit of his screen time in The Piano Lesson, which examines a family’s legacy of trauma and resilience through two siblings’ debate over whether to sell their generations-old piano. Potts went straight from the Broadway revival of Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize winner to its Netflix film adaptation, playing the tragicomic Wining Boy Charles, a widower with a tendency for gambling away his money and rambling about his glory days. “This is a man who lives his life with an odd mixture of zest and sorrow—he can just be comic relief, but what’s so brilliant about him is this man is bringing in so much pain,” Potts says. “He’s easily one of my favorite characters I’ve ever played.”

Wining Boy fits Potts like a glove: The actor intimately understands the character’s flamboyant display of sadness, and he fits beautifully into the movie’s larger family portrait as uncle to John David Washington and Danielle Deadwyler and brother to Samuel L. Jackson. It’s wild to consider that, just a few years ago, he couldn’t even get into a room for a Wilson play audition.

It took a few lucky breaks to bring Potts into this world. In 2016, he played the lead in a musical revival of Cabin in the Sky directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who just so happened to be mounting a revival of Wilson’s Jitney for Broadway. “He took a chance on me,” Potts says, as he was cast as the gossipy Turnbo in what turned out to be a Tony-winning production. Then, the next year, Potts won a part opposite Denzel Washington in a new stage take on Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. “He grabbed my hand and he was, like, ‘How come I don’t know you?’ and I laughed, ‘Why would you know me? You’re Denzel Washington. We don’t travel in the same circles,’” Potts recalls. “We developed a rapport.”

Washington told Potts about his intention to bring all of Wilson’s plays to the screen. While Potts wasn’t exactly waiting by the phone, he soon learned who was writing the script for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the next film in Washington’s collection: Santiago-Hudson. “After we closed Iceman, maybe three or four months later, I got a call from my manager saying, ‘Denzel wants you in the Ma Rainey movie,’” Potts says. After shooting that, he went to The Piano Lesson on Broadway, then joined the film—which was directed by Washington’s son, Malcolm.