Email to a friend | Print Friendly *Don Cheadle plays 60s radio activist and former felon Ralph Waldo “Petey” Greene Jr. in “Talk to Me.” In the film, Petey’s friend and colleague, Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejiofor), tells him he says the things he would like to say.
So I asked Cheadle if Petey expressed the things troubling him? “I just think he embodied the kind of spirit that I think would be refreshing today,” Cheadle remarked. “I would prefer people who just spoke their minds, whether you agree with them or not.
I think people often walk around with a smile on their face and you really don't know what's happening, especially in my town. People don't say no to you. They just don't call you back.
I think Ralph "Petey" Greene and characters like him, Miles Davis and other characters like him, would say, "Get out of my face. I don't like you." Let you know straight off the bat, so you don't have to wonder.
” Petey Greene always surrounded himself with controversy, but it wasn’t idle attention. “He brought Howard Stern on his show before Howard Stern was Howard Stern. And it pissed a lot of people off, which he was fine with because he wanted to be on the cutting edge,” Cheadle says.
“There's a thing on him on YouTube - Petey Greene shows how to eat a watermelon or something like Whoa! Did you see it? It's wild, right?
It's great. “He was a live wire and you never knew where he was going to go—at a degree that was steep and dangerous, yet really precise and insightful. That YouTube tape really captures how he talks about racism, about manner, about prevailing attitudes, about everything…He goes right to the stereotypes.
” The atmosphere on the set of “Oceans 13,” that also stars Cheadles, was quite different than that of “Talks to Me.” But Cheadle and cast members didn’t hesitate to talk about some serious issues. “I’m not an expert on activism,” he confides, “I’m someone who’s learning.
I’m swimming in the stream with all these other people who are trying to figure out what to do [about the life and death African matters]. I don't think there is an answer. But I do believe that from the amount of noise we've been able to make, from the positions that we've been fortunate to hold, myself, George Clooney, that activism--and I'm just specifically talking about Darfur--that we've seen it reach levels that I don't think it would've reached had there not been this kind of light shown on it.
So in that regard, I feel very fortunate and very blessed to have anything to do with what might be any solution to Darfur. “I went to China and Egypt and eventually the UN with George in December. He's been to Darfur and he's been to the Sudan.
We have a project/organization/foundation, I don't know what we're calling it yet, that we started just a few weeks ago called Not On Our Watch and we've raised about ten million dollars so far and just gave 750,000 to Oxfam last week. And that's George, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt and myself and Jerry Weintraub, who's produced the movie. So the tendrils of this just keep folding in and I'm trying to braid them all into a rope that we can use to really start flogging this issue and get people to focus and push our government.
“I believe our government is actually doing, compared to the rest of the world, a great deal. But we need to be doing it in a way that is not unilateral. We need to work with the other leaders around the world, France, China and the middle powers to try and push this thing through because genocide is a crime against humanity.
It shouldn't be a crime that's looks specifically as an American issue, or China's issue or South Africa's issue. It should be not allowable on the face of the earth. One of the pressing issues right now is in a place that where we're trying to turn up the heat on and get bring attention to is the Olympics that are coming up in Beijing in 2008, because China's relationship to the Sudan is such that they buy 67% of their oil.
It's a four billion dollar industry to the Sudanese people right now. A lot of that money is directly going to buy weapons, bombers, paying for Jiang Yu's militia and it's underwriting this genocide that is happening. We want to focus on China's relationship to the Sudan and find ways to bring that issue to the light.
And to try to exert presssure on them to do something.” Harry Potter is back in “…”The Order of the Phoenix” and fighting evil forces along with his best buds Ruper Grint and Emma Watson. DANIEL RADCLIFFE: I mean, I don't know, I think everybody's got that side of them which they can draw upon when they have to.
DR: Yeah, I love doing all that stuff to do with Harry in this film because David [Yates] kept referring to it as Dumbledore's army as being like the French resistance, which was a metaphor that really appealed to me. And also, Harry as a leader and a teacher was able to show off his wizardry skills. That showing off stuff was really, really fun to do.
DR: Well, I did the kiss first and I think the reason that it wasn't a problem or a sort of worry in the slightest was that in the back of my mind, I was thinking I'll be naked on stage in six months, I've got to get over this. Because if that's a worry, then the whole nude scene would be a greater worry. But really, the kiss was sort of more of a big deal than perhaps-- Everyone sort of assumed it was a really big sort of moment but it's sort of just like doing any other scene really, which is very disappointing for people to hear I know.
But that's unfortunately how it was.
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