Luke thrilled to work with Perry
To hear him tell it, Derek Luke was dying for the chance to take on his first-ever comedy. And the fact that it was a Tyler Perry farce, with Perry in drag and his character, Madea, in all her glory, was the clincher.
“He makes movies for my mom, my grandmom, my whole family,” Luke says. “I was expecting to have more of a comical part. I thought I’d have more comic interaction with Madea.”
But no, Luke was there to play the foil in “Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail,” the male who misunderstands the women in Perry’s universe. His character, Joshua Hardaway, was written with Luke in mind. He’s the prosecutor who declines to go after a prostitute (Keisha Knight Pulliam) whom he knew outside of the courtroom.
“As one of the few males in this story, it’s like my character is not allowed to get away with what I’ve been hiding in my heart,” Luke, 34, says. “Mistakes, wrongs I’ve done to women, come back on Joshua. He seems to me to be a man of integrity, though.
“It’s the kind of part that makes you think while you’re playing it. Women have given all of us a very strong foundation. We often don’t get to see what women do, not just as wives, sisters, mothers, but they’re the people who teach us our function in the home. Women give us all our process to greatness.
Luke was late getting to the set to start his part on the film because his previous movie, “Notorious,” ran over its filming schedule. The film biography of the late rapper “The Notorious B. I. G.” was a critical and box-office success, but it was a tricky project for all concerned. Two of the film’s producers were major figures in the admittedly burnished and sanitized story — Biggy Smalls’ mom, and his musical mentor, Sean “Puffy” Combs. Luke played Combs, presented in the film “as an entrepreneur portrayed as a visionary fount of wisdom,” as Tom Keogh put it in his Seattle Times review.
Luke won an Independent Spirit Award for his first big-screen performance, playing the title character in Denzel Washington’s coming-of-age-in-the- Navy drama, “Antwone Fisher” (2002). He followed that with much-praised turns in “Pieces of April” and “Spartan.” He’s done sports dramas (“Glory Road,” “Friday Night Lights”) and war films (“Lions for Lambs,” Spike Lee’s “Miracle at St. Anna”). He carried Philip Noyce’s South African drama “Catch a Fire.”
But he was more than happy to take a supporting part in a film by a box-office sure thing. Perry, especially when his film is about his most colorful creation, the auntie everybody calls Madea, always opens big.
“Tyler is a new generation of filmmaker, a guy wearing all the hats,” Perry says. “This is something studio people, college- educated people, have been trying and failing to capture for years — family movies from a black perspective. He has a gift, and you want to be a part of his purpose and his dream.”
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