Shades of Fishburne

The notion of “staying true to your roots” has almost as many meanings as a giant sequoia has growth rings. Laurence Fishburne’s allegiances are as abiding toward his African American heritage as they are to New York City, where he maintains a home base in TriBeCa across the bridge from Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood where he grew up. (His other “crib” is in Los Angeles.)

There’s another, more subjective part of Fishburne’s roots to which he stays attuned. In his mind’s eye, he can see himself as a child hanging around the house on a weekend afternoon. Rain outside. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do. So he turns on the tube, and the images of an old movie come into view in which the only thing that isn’t faded is the electricity of an actor’s performance.

“Sundays, man!” he says, reeling off a haiku of sweet remembrance in the outdoor dining area of a SoHo restaurant. “ ‘Million Dollar Movie’! Peter O’Toole in ‘Murphy’s War.’ James Mason . . . in anything!”

Of such encounters are dreams--and careers--made. And part of what makes the 36-year-old actor so dedicated to and optimistic about his work is the knowledge that somewhere, somehow, there’ll be another dreamy, bored kid--”not even born yet,” he says--who’ll come across, say, his Vinnie the chess wizard in “Searching for Bobby Fischer.” Or his Oscar-nominated turn as Ike Turner in “What’s Love Got to Do With It.” Or his “Othello.”

Each of these performances could open a door, switch on the light of someone’s ambition to do great things onstage or in front of a camera.

“That’s the thing about film and television. It keeps going,” he says. “There are things that influenced me as a kid that I didn’t see until more than 10 years after they were made.”

So he works hard. And often enough so that his movies seem to come out in bunches. “Event Horizon,” a horror movie in which Fishburne plays the captain of a doomed rescue mission in deep space, opened recently, and on Wednesday “Hoodlum,” a gangster epic chronicling the Depression-era rise of legendary Harlem gangster Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, opens nationwide.

Fishburne served as “Hoodlum’s” executive producer, and his involvement in bringing out a little-known aspect of African American history would seem consistent with such recent work for television as “The Tuskegee Airmen,” the saga of black fighter pilots battling prejudice and Nazis during World War II, and last season’s “Miss Evers’ Boys,” about an entirely different Tuskegee experiment with black men in which they were used as subjects for syphilis research.

“It’s not as if I’d laid out a master plan to do [such films],” Fishburne says. “It’s just that there’s this--and I hate to use ‘role model’ in relation to this--but there is a responsibility that comes with my success. And for me it’s always been important to represent my culture in positive ways. So when I have the opportunity to do these things, I do them.”

To be sure, you couldn’t use “role model” to describe Bumpy Johnson, who, from all accounts, was a magnetic, complex, somewhat scary guy. “He didn’t like you to look him in the eye,” Fishburne says.

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This isn’t the first time Fishburne has played Bumpy. Though his character’s name in 1984’s “The Cotton Club” was Bumpy Rhodes, Fishburne prepared for that role by doing research on Johnson, who, for all his notoriety as a street criminal and numbers racketeer, also wrote poetry, mastered chess and was fiercely protective of his racial identity and his code of ethics.

“You could say this movie gave me a second chance to get [Johnson] right,” says Fishburne, who “got a handle” on the role by memorizing classical poems.

Directed by Bill Duke, who had previously helmed another gritty crime film, 1992’s “Deep Cover,” with Fishburne in the lead, “Hoodlum” also stars Andy Garcia, Vanessa L. Williams, Tim Roth, Cicely Tyson and Clarence Williams III, who plays the token black henchman of Bumpy’s short-fused rival, Dutch Schultz (Roth).

After “Hoodlum” completed filming last summer in Chicago (picked over New York as a site because there were more exteriors with a ‘30s look), Fishburne spent the fall in England working on “Event Horizon,” which gave him his first crack at science fiction.

“Which I’d always wanted to do,” he says. “And what was really amazing was they had offered Miller”--”Horizon’s” gallant mission commander--”to me right off the bat. Which never happens. . . . We’re not usually in the captain’s chair very often.”

By “we,” of course, he means African Americans. And if there’s been a prevailing characteristic in Fishburne’s still-ascending career, it’s that he has expanded the parameters of what black actors can or cannot play on stage or screen.

To put it another way: When talking to Fishburne, you’re speaking to Furious Styles, “Boyz N the Hood’s” wise parent, as well as to Ike Turner or Dap Dunlap, nationalist college student in Spike Lee’s 1988 film, “School Daze.”

But you’re also speaking to Cowboy Curtis, best buddy to Pee-wee Herman on the legendary kid-vid series “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.” And to Nelson Crowe, rogue CIA agent in the 1995 thriller “Bad Company,” as well as to sleazy cop Tanny Brown in “Just Cause.”

Such roles as “Horizon’s” Capt. Miller could have been inhabited by white actors, which prompts one to ask how or where Fishburne falls on the controversial issue of “color-blind” casting, whose opponents include such black artists as playwright August Wilson. (Fishburne made his Broadway debut in Wilson’s 1992 play, “Two Trains Running.”)

“I’ve been fortunate enough to be associated with people who are brave enough to put me in roles that aren’t marked ‘black,’ ” Fishburne says. “But I think the circumstances have to be appropriate. And so much depends on who you are and what the piece is. . . . It’s a tricky thing. I think cultural identity has great importance for each group. . . . But we’re a country that’s evolving and changing. We’re just 200 years old, and we’re still figuring out how we all fit in and where we’re from and where we’re going.”

Fishburne is at the point in his career where he can pick and choose his roles. (His next project is “Socrates,” a crime story written by Walter Mosley about an ex-con turned crime fighter.) Is there any part he won’t play? Fishburne vigorously shakes his head.

“I don’t have a moral code book that says, you know, ‘Don’t play a pimp!’ Or ‘Don’t play a drug dealer!’ I know this sounds obvious, but it’s not what you do, but, really, the way you do it.”

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As an example, he talks about a script he just finished reading, an adaptation of John Irving’s novel “The Cider House Rules,” which hasn’t yet been produced. One of the characters is Arthur Rose, a crew boss for the cider house’s apple pickers, who has an incestuous relationship with his daughter.

“He’s a guy who’s capable and charming, but he’s got this lust he can’t let go of,” Fishburne says. “And in the end, [the daughter] kills him with a knife, and there’s this beautiful scene . . . when he’s sitting, like, almost perfectly still, and he’s dying . . . when he talks about how good she is with a knife, because he taught her. . . .

“And it’s like, Whoa! I mean I was totally afraid of this character. Like, how do you play a guy with that kind of baggage and make him a human being? And the challenge for an actor is to bring that humanity forward so that when people experience him they’ll say, ‘I know someone like that.’ ”