No half nelson

Standing at an imposing 6’4,” there’s no danger of missing Dennis Haysbert when he walks into the room. “Hello there,” he says in a low, tranquil voice that really ought to be harnessed for some hare-brained harmonics experiment.

Those calming authoritative tones, you may recall, made him a more popular American president (abroad at any rate) than his real-life counterpart. The black judge may be enough of a TV convention for The Simpsons to have fun with, but Mr. Haysbert’s portrayal of President David Palmer on the series 24 was a network television first. The actor admits he’s still miffed by Palmer’s assassination as part of the convoluted conspiracy machinations at the start of season five.
“I don’t understand why the producers destroyed all the people around Jack Bauer,” he says. “It’s turned the show into a man against the world thing that seems to me to be implausible. Americans have an unhappy legacy of killing off our leaders – Malcolm X, Dr Martin Luther King, JFK, RFK – why kill off the fictional ones too.”
To be fair, he doesn’t sound bitter. Having spent 20 years in the business before this frantic franchise would earn him his first Golden Globe nomination, he must know that there isn’t much a top-flight producer won’t do for ratings.
“Oh yes,” he nods. “I’m actually acting even longer than that. I was one of those kids that did everything at Junior High. I did football and basketball and track. Golf even. But acting was always my first love.”
I ask him if treading the boards went down well with the other jocks.
“Well, if they had anything to say about it I was a defensive football player and next time they were on offence they soon changed their tune.”
Though he was offered various athletic scholarships, he chose to study acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He guested on TV shows such as The A-Team, Dallas and Magnum P.I. before landing a role as the voodoo-practicing Cuban baseball player in the movie Major League. The film would spawn two sequels.
“That was a big deal for my family,” Haysbert recalls. “My mother was very always supportive but my father was always cautious. He wanted me to go to college and find myself a steady job. He came around when he saw Major League.”
Though he has made a career out of playing military men in the likes of Jarhead, Navy SEALs and the recently premiered action-drama The Unit (he is also, incidentally, the voice of the Military Channel) Haysbert’s most appealing work has been in the very un-military Far From Heaven. Todd Haynes’ gorgeous reworking of the Douglas Sirk weepie All That Heaven Allows cast Julianne Moore as a middle-class suburban housewife who falls in love with Haysbert, her gardener, when her marriage breaks down.
“It’s remarkable that the white establishment still seems threatened by the depiction of interracial relationships,” says Haysbert. “But there’s a real double standard there. It’s OK for a black woman like Halle Berry to be onscreen with James Bond or Billy Bob Thornton. But a black man with a white woman is still taboo.”
Currently, you can catch the 52-year-old in Goodbye Bafana. Adapted from James Gregory’s book, Goodbye Bafana: Nelson Mandela, My Prisoner, My Friend, the film stars Joseph Fiennes as Gregory, a guard at the Robben Island penal colony who slowly bonds with inmate and future South African president, Nelson Mandela (Haysbert).
“They were pretty big shoes to fill,” says Haysbert. “It was exciting, but really that’s just another word for terrifying. I was frightened that I’d mess up. I studied everything I could. I spent around four or five months doing research before I went to South Africa. I read every book and studied every DVD. It helped that we were physically similar. I had to stoop a bit as he ages during the film, but he was pretty strapping. People forget he was boxer and an athlete.”
Sadly, the actor will probably never know what Mandela thinks of his performance. Mandela has never confirmed Gregory’s claim that they became friends and reportedly considered suing his former jailer when the book was initially published. Mandela’s friend and official biographer, Anthony Sampson, says Gregory rarely had contact with Mandela and fabricated the friendship from details he gleaned while censoring correspondence.
“That was something that (director) Bille August and the producers dealt with,” explains Haysbert. “To tell the truth my only concern was Nelson Mandela. Whether it is or isn’t true is something that has yet to be clarified. But for the moment I’m happy with it. It felt like the right kind of story to tell. If it is all a delusion, then a South African guard is, at the end of the Apartheid era, calling Nelson Mandela his friend. They’re still discussing the Freedom Charter together. That, in itself, is a beautiful thing.”b

Goodbye Bafana is on general release.