Clifton Powell is the man further down the cast list who runs the crew, the road or the block, in a voice that expects to be obeyed. Given a reason for his loyalty, as he is in Ray, he becomes one of the more interesting things in the film.
Fi1m perspective
Clifton Powell rarely gets the girl, the last word or the poster. He gets the back room, the car and a line that tells somebody else what to do. For forty years he has been the tough, authoritative man in the supporting cast of urban dramas and comedies, the one the leads have to get past, and he has a face and a voice that make the getting past look difficult. A generation who never saw him in a cinema know that voice anyway: he is Big Smoke, the antagonist of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004), and for a great many people that is the performance.
The career runs the way supporting careers usually run. Screen work from the early 1980s, after the stage and training. A run of 1990s parts that put him in the right films, Menace II Society (1993) and Dead Presidents (1995) among them. Then the wider notice, in Rush Hour (1998), Next Friday (2000), Ray (2004) and Norbit (2007), which is as high up the studio ladder as he has been. From the mid-2000s the work shifted to low-budget features that went straight to disc and to guest parts on television, with recurring roles and voice work alongside, and he has kept at it into the mid-2020s. That is not a decline so much as the ordinary weather for an actor who was never going to be asked to carry a film.
Ray is the one to click through to. Taylor Hackford's biopic gives Ray Charles's women almost nothing to do but wait, and gives the two men who run his business and his road, Powell's Jeff Brown and Harry Lennix's Joe Adams, more shades of loyalty than either wife or mistress is allowed. We noticed, about an hour in, that we were watching Powell rather than Jamie Foxx whenever money came up, because Brown was the only person on screen who seemed to want two things at once and to know it. Powell has said he tried to make Jeff Brown human. It is a modest ambition, and he met it, which is more than most of the film's script manages for anyone.
Norbit is the other side of the ledger. Eddie Murphy's commitment to three roles cannot save a comedy that mistakes physical mockery for a joke, and our review did not single Powell out, which in that company is neither praise nor blame. He is a man who does the job he is hired for, and the job is only ever as good as the film around it.
By his own account he has played more pastors than gangsters. Casting directors have not always noticed. If you want to see what he can do when a script gives him room, start with Ray, and watch the scenes about contracts rather than the ones about songs.
Biography
Clifton Powell is an American actor and comedian. Born on 16 March 1956 in Washington, D.C., he trained at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts and Emerson College.
He has appeared in numerous films since the 1980s, including Menace II Society (1993), Rush Hour (1998), Ray (2004) as Jeff Brown, for which he received an NAACP Image Award nomination, and Norbit (2007) as Earl Latimore. Powell also voiced Big Smoke in the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004).
On television he has had recurring roles in series such as Roc, South Central and Army Wives, and guest appearances including on House and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.
