Omar J. Dorsey is what you would call an actor who was born to be an actor. With the theatrically strong voice, fully able to be heard across many of the surrounding low-set booths of Burbank's classic Bob's Big Boy Restaurant during our chat this week, the expressive facial and hand gestures, and the all-around profound presence. It's a bit hard not to watch and be captivated. That is, until the famously inner 'shit talking guy' comes out. I sat down with the Django Unchained star to talk about the new movie, having drinks at Leo's, married life, and predicting who would be 2009's Best Actress winner-- before anyone else.
Just want to start off by saying I’m not just here to talk about what Leo DiCaprio is like on set, although that is a subject I’ll be landing on eventually. Want to start out with the gist of Django Unchained, what would you say the movie is about and what will moviegoers get from it?
It's a movie about slavery. It's also about a slave who's freed by a German bounty hunter, and they become bounty hunters together.
The German bounty hunter is played by Christoph Waltz.
Christoph plays the German who's the bounty hunter, who tries to pay-- I don't want to tell you the story! He gets Jamie [Foxx, who plays Django] and they do a couple of jobs, and he frees Jamie, but they become partners. The story is a love story also, about a man trying to find his wife who's still in slavery. |
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| Waltz and Foxx in Unchained (Entertainment Weekly) |
Played by Kerry Washington.
Yes. She ends up going from different places to different places, but ultimately ends at Calvin Candie's plantation [played by Leonardo DiCaprio] and that's roughly where a third of the movie is centered around. Them being at Calvin Candie's plantation, meeting up with Calvin, and trying to find Django's wife.
So would you say it's ultimately a story about finding freedom or finding love?
Ultimately it's a story about love, it's a love story. It's about the lengths a man would take to get his love back. Through death, through whatever it takes. Aspiring to get back to his one true love ... and there's a lot of violence in it because it's Quentin Teaantino.
I wanted to touch on that. Tarantino has a very unique style of directing. I’ve always sort of taken him as a director with a vision of a comic book.
It is. It's funny you say that. I was talking to my film professor from college, I had a couple weeks break and went back to Atlanta. I was talking about the film and I was like 'It's really big. Everything in the movie is so big, so over the top-- except for Django.' If you watch the movie you'll see, [Django] is very "Clint Eastwood in The Man Without a Name", or a Sergio Leone type Spaghetti Western- very quiet, very still, but everything is so big. But it's very comic book. The colors are comic book, the acting is comic book, the acting is so big and over the top.
Does it have a Kill Bill kind of feel? Maybe less comic-ish?
Yeah, sort of like a Kill Bill. When I think of Kill Bill I think of the colors, the action. I think about that yellow racing suit that Uma Thurman wears. To me the suit is iconic, and I think the green suit that Jamie wears in this movie will be iconic also. I saw it everyday going to set for five months, but it was a very iconic thing. It's very badass.
So you would say Unchained can sort of go into the category with Tarantino's other movies. Easily recognizable as a Tarantino.
Yeah it can, it can. But in full disclosure, Quentin Tarantino is my favorite director.
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| Tarantino on set of Unchained (The Weinstein Company) |
Wow, so it must've been a dream come true to work with him.
It was a dream come true to audition for him, really. It's wild because you're in this business and you meet people with a lot of fame all the time, but you rarely get a chance to meet your favorite people, or work with your favorite people. I worked with my favorite director and my favorite actor, Sam Jackson, so that was a double. And Leo is also one of my favorite actors, so it was one of those dream come true scenarios.
Your character in the movie Chicken Charlie sounds like just that, a character. What can you tell us about him?
He's a fighter. He's a Mandingo fighter and he's taken one too many blows. He has things about him that are wrong, like his speech pattern. He's docile, it's really weird because you'll see a really big guy-- but I guess it's not weird because it's slavery. He's just beaten down so much mentally and physically. Not because of slave owners or anything but because he's a Mandingo fighter. He's one of the guys that they pit in a ring to fight and they bet on him.
So he's a captured slave.
He's a slave but he's too beat up mentally and physically to be a slave. So when they were selling the slaves he's one of the ones that didn't sell. So that's what the character is.
You’ve done a lot of television acting as well, with work on Bones, Rizzoli & Isles, and The Mentalist. Being that developing a film character for an actor can be different than the development of a television character, where there can be spaced out recurring focuses on your character, where you could be focusing on another character at the same time, from your experiences on Rizzoli & Isles, what advice would you give an up-and-coming actor on developing and maintaining a recurring TV character?
Um, you have to work really closely with writers and creators because you don't want your character to divert too far into something that you don't want to be doing for the next couple-- I've been on Rizzoli & Isles for three years now, and you don't want it to become where you're thinking 'I don't want to go to work and do this anymore.' Or you just have to "go for yours", and hopefully they'll like it. If you do good enough and you believe in your character enough then whatever you bring to it, the producer, and the creators, and the director and the writers, (a lot of times are the same people) will go along with you. But you have to work hand in hand with the creators. They can do whatever they want with the character. Scrap it, or whatever.
But that's the key to keeping your character in mind even when you have to focus on other things? Staying in touch with the creators.
Exactly. With television especially, you have to bring a lot of yourself to those characters. Film is different, film is like you really are transforming into someone else. You're playing a character. Chicken Charlie is a totally different entity than anything I would do in reality. There's probably still a piece of me inside of that, but then with Big Mo [on Rizzoli & Isles] it's me: loud mouth, boisterous, shit talking guy!
Haha! Then you didn't have to go too far into character there.
Didn't have to go too far at all. And that's what I think made Angie Harmon and I's chemistry so great. She's the same person [as I am]. Everybody always says that [about our chemistry], Entertainment Weekly said we had the best chemistry.
So advice from Omar J. Dorsey: Stay in close contact with production when handling a recurring performance on television.
That, and also be definitive about your own character choices. It's just words on a paper. You have to bring it to life and you have to have good insight on what you want to do with that. If not, they can get anybody. Do you know how many people would beg to make $3,000 a day just to do the job?! So you have to really bring full ammunition of what you want that character to be for television, and like I said it has to be a lot of you. That's what television is. It's you.
You were recently married in your home state of Georgia, has life changed at all now that you’re in a more settled state of mind?
It has, I mean my life is complete now. My daughters moved out here [to Los Angeles] about 3 or 4 months ago to live with me and my fiancé at the time, but I always felt something was missing when they weren't living with me. Now that I have my daughters and my new wife, my life just feels complete. It feels like I'm ready to really forge ahead now.
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| Dorsey at the Los Angeles premiere of Storytales on October 6, 2012 (Joshua Tousey/PR Photos) |
Just take on the world. I don't have these other things hindering me. You know, you always think about things (especially when you get my age, mid 30s) like 'I need a love life. I need to settle--' All of that stuff is taken care of. Now it's time to work. To leave wealth or whatever I can for my family. So it's just the perfect situation.
And this subject brings me to Leonardo DiCaprio somehow *smiles*. Although usually serious in his roles, he seems like a pretty funny guy. You had scenes in Unchained where you worked closely with him, were there any funny moments on set during filming?
It was such a heavy movie that we had to have fun. When I got the role, I got it September of last year and I didn't even start filming until February. But Quentin Tarantino was like, 'This movie is so heavy, we're gonna have to have fun [off set]. It's not going to be fun on set because it's such a heavy subject.' After a few days, maybe a week or so we all became family. So we did our scenes and it was the after-hours stuff that was fun. Going to Leo's house to watch a boxing match, we're all partying and drinking or whatever, having a good time. Those were the fun times.
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| DiCaprio's Calvin Candie (Entertainment Weekly) |
It was more 'business first, play later' on set.
It was more business because these are serious actors we're talking about. We're talking about Christoph Waltz, we're talking about Walton Goggins. You go to set and the DP leaves to go get his Oscar and bring it back. He'd just won for doing Hugo, so he has to leave for a few days and come back on Monday with the Oscar in his hand. You've got Quentin and Jamie, who are both Oscar winners. So you're talking about crème de la crème at this point. So these guys are serious about their craft. There's a method to their madness, so there's not a lot of playing around and all that stuff! And a lot of them are method actors, so they're that character from the second they walk into make-up.
How do your character and Leonardo’s Calvin Candie compare?
Well, Calvin Candie is a slave owner and he runs a plantation. I'm one of the people that he buys.
A big contrast then. *awkward silence*
Right. He buys to sell me to somebody else, just to be a worker.
A second courteous waiter, in the last 2 minutes it seems, stops by our table and asks if we need anything. After giving off a quick list of sauces Dorsey gives him an unintentionally announcing response of "I'll take some tabasco", followed by a "Thank you boss." He goes back to eating his Denver omelet.
So um, it's a huge contrast. The contrast between Calvin Candie and Chicken Charlie, for lack of a better term, is a dog owner and a dog. It's almost subhuman. It's almost subhuman the way that Calvin Candie refers to any of the guys that he buys. They're his property. So it's even worse than a dog owner and a dog... A person who buys a car, or a used car, just to haul things around. A used truck just to haul wood around. If one of them breaks or something happens to it it doesn't matter. Calvin doesn't even really look at the male slaves as human, they're subhuman. Which is how they probably justified slavery in the beginning. That these are objects. These aren't real people.
So he regards female slaves differently than the males, is that what you're saying?
Of course, because the "man" comes out. If you've got Kerry Washington walking around you're going to be attracted because that's a beautiful woman. And what's funny is that his female slaves, the beautiful ones, he calls his "ponies".
His 'ponies'...
They look like some women who might be on Grambling's dance team or something. They're all light skinned with long hair.
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| Quenton Aaron and Dorsey in 2009's The Blind Side (Warner Bros) |
Touching on the subject of 2009’s The Blind Side, we all know the movie was received wonderfully, recognized by the academy and a winner for Sandra Bullock’s leading actress performance. What was the experience of being a part of a film with such a strong message like for you?
I have to tell you this. When we were doing the film, honestly, I tweeted and I told everyone 'I'm doing a movie right now, and I'm working with the woman who's about to win the Oscar for Best Actress'. I knew it. She's so loved in the industry. Now did I know it was going to be the biggest sports movie of all time? No. That movie cost 22 million dollars and it grossed 300 million. My pockets thank that! But I didn't know [the response would happen], I thought it would be a nice family movie. The first week it came out, it was number 2 behind Twilight. The second week it came out, it was still number 2 behind Twilight. The third week, it was number 1, in front of Twilight. I didn't see that at all. I was like 'Really?', and it just kept going up and up and up. That movie changed everything for me. I've been in a lot of big movies, and maybe if I had known [the movie] was going [to be so successful], maybe my audition wouldnt've gone as well as it did. To me when I read the script I thought, 'This is like a Lifetime movie.'
It does have a Lifetime feel to it.
It has that feel to it, except for Sandra. She put in some work. She was awesome.
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| Bullock as Leigh Anne Tuohy in 2009's The Blind Side (The LA Times) |
The funny thing about it is that during the scene of [lead character Michael Oher's] graduation, I met the real Leigh Anne Tuohy. [Her and Sandra] were... they were-- you couldn't tell the difference. They were so much alike. I could tell that Sandra had studied her, because she had all the mannerisms down. She had them all down. She got the upmost respect. While I was watching her work I was like, 'This woman's awesome.' I told everybody that she was going to win, I knew it! Just like I told everybody that Leo's going to win for Best Supporting Actor next year.
You heard it here first! *wink*
Even though I think Walton Goggins and Sam Jackson, all three of them put in masterful performances. But I think it's Leo's time.
By now Dorsey's finished the few bites that were left of his omelet and he's moved onto a small bowl of fruit that accompanied his plate. He takes a piece of cantaloupe in a spoon while I finish off my bacon and eggs. It's time to learn what's up next for him.
Finishing up I'd like to ask what you'll be working on next? Is there anything you can tell us about at this point that we can get excited for?
Right now we're producing a film called Umps. It's about a baseball umpire who makes a bad call. It's a comedy. It's about the things that go downhill throughout his life after he makes the bad call. Then it's the rebuilding [of his life].
It sounds amazing. Who is directing that one?
We don't have a director yet. We're looking at one person, who I can't mention. He's one of my favorite directors who has a great comic mind. But it's written by Doug Shilhouse and it's a really, really great script. I think I'm also doing a new movie with Ice Cube and Kevin Hart, called Ride Along. That starts filming in December in Atlanta. So other than that, have got more work to do!
And what more accomplishments could he possibly be after? We'll just have to wait and see.
Django Unchained opens in theaters Christmas day
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