In this article:
"My apartment was blown out Sept. 11
The return of "Blade"
More celebs:
Interview: Peter Krause of "Six Feet Under."
Who's News

Interview with the vampire slayer

Sure, Wesley Snipes sinks his teeth into his role as "Blade II"'s tormented nightstalker. But are action heroes really the kind of parts this dramatic actor prays for? Well, yeah, and here's why.

By Touré

-- Photo by Michael O'Neill

Vinylmania, a small record store in New York's West Village, has been one of Wesley Snipes' favorite places since he was a freshman at Purchase College in Westchester, N.Y., in the early '80s. DJ'ing has been one of his favorite pastimes just as long. "Sometimes I bring people to the crib and spin for 'em," he says. "Sometimes when we have parties I spin, or when we go to clubs, I spin in the clubs." He's been DJ'ing long enough to have an extremely detailed philosophy behind which records he picks. It's based on matching common song components and fluctuating the "BPMs" (that's beats per minute) from track to track in a way that stirs the listener's emotions all night long. "I like it that you feel like you've had an experience," says Snipes, who owns more than 1,000 LPs and 4,000 CDs.

The store's proprietor, the affable Charlie Grappone, greets him like an old friend. "I'm looking for some drum 'n' bass, two-step and house," Snipes says in his rich, resonant voice. "Y'know, those funky bass lines. Africanism grooves. Tribal, man. Tribal." Grappone plucks records from the shelves and spins them on the house turntables, and Snipes dances in the nearly empty store as a thick bass groove rises.

Grappone mentions that he's in the store only because his business was slashed by Sept. 11 and he had to let his entire staff go.

"Certain roles are more challenging than others, but I haven't come across one yet that I can't tackle." -- Photo by Michael O'Neill

"My apartment got blown out," Snipes says. "I lived right across the street from Ground Zero." The collapse of the World Trade Center towers caused extensive structural damage to Snipes' fourth-floor apartment and destroyed several precious belongings. "The most damaged part of the building was where my baby boys slept," he says. On that day he was at his home in Marina del Rey, Calif., taking care of his recently born child, Iset, his third.

"If my daughter hadn't been born [on July 31, his own birthday], I would've been here. When I got back to New York, I was homeless for a while." He laughs. "No one believes me, but it's true."

Several times Snipes says it's time to go, but then he gets caught up in yet another groove, and the 10-minute pit stop becomes an hour-long excursion, a mini-vacation from his movie-star life. He spends $600 on a stack of records that includes Osunlade, Fela Kuti, India Arie, Si*sé, Afroman, a few Middle Eastern grooves and a killer Sade house remix. "I don't get out much," he says.

His taste in movies is as eclectic as his taste in music. Snipes is an actor willing to take on anything, unafraid to squeeze into a tight-fitting dress for the cross-dressing road comedy "To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar" or bleach his hair to play a futuristic criminal in "Demolition Man". "Certain roles are more challenging than others," he says, "but I haven't come across one yet that I can't tackle."

And there have been plenty. In the past 15 years, Snipes has made 42 movies. He shot four last year alone. In one, a political drama called "Liberty Stands Still", he plays a former CIA agent who takes a gun manufacturer hostage. "I did 90 pages of dialogue in two days and did it three different ways," he says.

His latest movie, "Blade II", out at the end of March, is a return to the comic-book vampire slayer Snipes made famous in 1998, although this time around he's fighting alongside vampires against a much scarier sort of undead, called Reapers. "It's rare that you get a chance to do a sequel," Snipes says, "so we wanted to improve [what] we did mediocre in Part 1. We were shooting in the dark with Blade. Nobody knew it was gonna be anything." It proved to be a $160 million hit.

What originally attracted Snipes to the project was its unconventionality. "Blade" was the type of flick he'd been wanting to see: a stylish blockbuster that puts a comic-book superhero in a Hong Kong-style action thriller with warrior philosophy and up-to-the-minute special effects. Like the original, "Blade II" has plenty of fancy weapons and enough hyperkinetic fight scenes to showcase its star's ample martial arts skills.

"I have a great deal of fun playing Blade," says Snipes, a fifth-degree black belt. "The lifestyle of it, the controlled rebelliousness, is wonderful to me. And it's therapeutic, too. A role like this lets you vent."

Snipes radiates a mixture of self-assured coolness and two-fisted machismo. Even in person his posture is regal. His eyes are large and dark brown. His hands are grooved and muscled. His top lip has a divot in the middle. He's 39 but looks no older than he did playing rookie Willie Mays Hayes in the 1989 baseball comedy "Major League". He attributes it to eating right and working out. Snipes likes to travel with a personal chef; when he's in New York he often puts in time at the gym of the USA Shaolin Temple. "There are two types of training I do there," he says. "Painful and more painful."

Later, at Nobu, a chic Asian eatery in downtown Manhattan, Snipes sits down to black cod and miso with sake. He's wearing cargo jeans and a blue denim shirt with hidden buttons. This is an actor who takes his job very seriously, even when it involves something as trivial as blasting vampires into oblivion. "I think people take for granted the amount of acting that goes into a Blade," he says. "It's the acting discipline that lays the foundation for everything I do in the film. I'm always bringing those acting chops to the table to help flesh out the character."

Although he has become famous playing a gallery of ultra-alpha males such as Blade or Nino Brown, the silk-suited cracklord in "New Jack City", what separates Snipes from other stars of action-filled escapism is his background as a classically trained actor. He never intended to become an action star. His early work suggested Snipes was poised to become a dramatic powerhouse to rival Denzel Washington, an actor with a capital A. While attending the prestigious School of Performing Arts in Manhattan, he was in two off-Broadway productions that caught the attention of legendary theater impresario Joseph Papp, who called on the day Snipes' mother was moving the family to Orlando to see if the 15-year-old would stick around for a play Papp was mounting.

His rise in Hollywood began during the black film renaissance of the late '80s and early '90s when Spike Lee, then among America's hottest directors, cast him in "Mo' Better Blues" and "Jungle Fever". Soon after, he crossed over, often playing one half of interracial buddy teams in a string of hits that began with "White Men Can't Jump". The films helped establish Snipes as a major star, one whose name alone above the title was enough to generate box-office cash on a Friday night.

Snipes tried to mix it up with a few dramatic parts, but moviegoers around the world loved the heroic law-enforcement types he played in "Passenger 57" and "Boiling Point". "Some films don't translate in Thailand. But them action joints ... I went over there, and it's 40,000 people screaming my name," he says.

To hear Snipes tell it, it's not completely his fault that he's considered to be on the same level of the Hollywood food chain as Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme (although Snipes has more range).

When it's suggested that his performances are stronger opposite black actors than white, a curious moment arises. He laughs and disses black actors. "[A] lot of the scripts I've been in with other non-white actors haven't been all that great. [A] lot of non-white actors ain't all that great," he says. Then Snipes tries to cover his tracks. He says that "there are a lot of good actors coming out of both cultures."

This is not the first time Snipes has put his foot in his mouth when discussing race in public. He once implied that he was no longer interested in dating black women because they were too much work. He is currently is involved with Korean painter Nikki Park, the mother of his two youngest children.

Snipes is among the highest-paid stars in Hollywood, pocketing around $15 million a picture. He has no intention of abandoning action movies, but he plans to continue using his income to bankroll more relevant, risk-taking works like "Down in the Delta" through Amen Ra Films, his production company.

"Action flicks have afforded me the opportunity to create businesses and employ people," he says. "We gave Maya Angelou her first directorial opportunity ["Delta"] and got [Terry McMillan's novel] "Disappearing Acts" made and then, with HBO's assistance, hired mostly all black women on the crew. Ain't no other actor doing that. Ain't none."

Next weekend, Snipes returns to theaters as Blade, who this time fights a foe even more terrifying than vampires. "A role like this lets you vent," the actor says.

New York-based writer Touré last profiled Oscar-nominated actress Halle Berry for USA WEEKEND Magazine.

Photography by Michael O'Neill

More celebs:
Interview: Peter Krause of "Six Feet Under."
Who's News