Courtney B. Vance

Let me start by saying “Courtney Vance” has a comedic side to him. He made me laugh the ENTIRE conversation. He’s also very gracious & friendly.

Courtney B. Vance Is energetic and expansive as we talked at the Heldrich Hotel recently, even giving me a hug when I greeted him and his team (We’d never met before.)

Vance has good reason to be so gregarious and easygoing, as his three-decade career has perhaps never been better than it is right now. He won an Emmy last year for his much-lauded performance as Johnnie Cochran in The People v. O.J. Simpson. Courtney B. Vance is finally finding his stride, after years of diligently seeking out interesting roles in movies, television, and theater.

I asked Vance if he attributes his recent career surge to anything in particular. He thought for a second, then shook his head. “I’ve just been working. Nothing has really changed. I think if you just hang in there long enough, and keep doing what you know is your sweet spot, I think the world eventually catches up to you. I’m an overnight sensation after 30 years.”

Vance has been steadily plugging away since his days at Harvard and the Yale School of Drama, first making a splash in the world premiere of August Wilson‘s seminal play Fences, which moved from the Yale Rep to Broadway all while Vance was finishing school, and then again on stage in 1990’s smash hit Six Degrees of Separation. Both of those projects have been revived recently—Fences as a film and Six Degrees on Broadway.

The actor admits that Denzel Washington’s film, for which Viola Davis won an Oscar, was “very weird” to watch. “Fences was my like my intro into the business,” Vance elaborated; he played Cory on and off between 1984 and 1988. “I lived with it for three and a half, four years, and saw definitive actors of our time; Mary Alice, and James Earl Jones,and I watched them for 600 performances.”

When his wife, Angela Bassett, did the play with Laurence Fishburneat the Pasadena Playhouse and asked Vance to read lines with her, he couldn’t separate the character from Mary Alice. “Angela realized it was weird. You know, she’s sees Mary as Rose as well. I still know all the lines. I know all James’s lines, and I know all Mary’s lines from watching.”

So when it comes to the film version, Vance is diplomatic. “I don’t put that pressure on Denzel, and the film, to be able to get to what we got to in four years in four weeks. It’s just impossible. So, I appreciate where they got to. I deeply appreciate what they did with that.”

But Vance wasn’t talking to me so we could dwell on the past. We were there to discuss the present, and the future. O.K.—and a little recent past. I had to ask Vance about the seismic experience that was People v. O.J., about how he’d come to the job and what he thought was so significant about it. How did it feel to be at the center of such a buzzy, critically lauded phenomenon?

“The work breeds the work,” he answered after a contemplative pause. “People remember—they saw you in something, maybe, a number of years before. But in that interim, the question is: what do you do while you’re waiting? A lot of people, some people, just can’t continue to wait, and they step out. And that’s where you step into that spot, and there I was.”

When he got the role of sly, fiery defense attorney Johnnie Cochran, Vance says he asked himself, “Are you ready for your moment? I was ready for it. My whole career had built up to that point.” The key to diving into the character, whom Vance says he didn’t know much about, was all on his head. “Once I put the wig on, I said, ‘I can do this.’ It was the wig. Victoria Wood, incredible wig maker. Sam Jackson told me. I asked him, ‘I need a wig. Who do I go, who is your person?’ He said, ‘I got one on the East, one on the West Coast. But Victoria Wood is the person.’ She came over to the house, and fit me with Saran Wrap. Literally, Saran Wrap, and a magic marker. I sat down in front of her mirror, and I was him. It happened that fast.

Please follow Mr. Vance on Instagram @courtneybvance