Isaiah Washington plays men who have made up their minds before the scene begins. It made him a dependable supporting actor for Spike Lee in the 1990s and, later, a television surgeon who brought him the attention the films never had.
Fi1m perspective
In Clockers (1995) a man who works two jobs and has never been in trouble walks into a police station and says he shot somebody. Isaiah Washington plays Victor Dunham without fuss: he says it, and he does not take it back. Harvey Keitel's detective does not believe a word, and Spike Lee's film spends most of its length with the brother on the benches instead. That is how Washington has usually been used. He plays the man who has already decided, and the scene is about everyone else catching up.
He came to acting after the US Air Force and Howard University, and Lee put him in four films in three years: Crooklyn (1994), Clockers, Girl 6 (1996) and Get on the Bus (1996). They were intense, mostly urban, mostly crime-adjacent supporting parts, and they set the type. Steven Soderbergh cast him as Kenneth in Out of Sight (1998), in an ensemble deep enough to waste people, and he is one of the ones who does not get wasted. True Crime (1999) gave him a larger part than usual, Frank Louis Beechum, a man wrongly convicted, and critics noticed the feeling in it.
Television did what the films had not. As Dr Preston Burke, a cardiothoracic surgeon on Grey's Anatomy from 2005 to 2007, with a return in 2014, he got the recognition, and the part fit him: composed, professional, certain he is right, and at his best opposite Sandra Oh, who gave him somebody to be certain at. The 100 (2014–2018) made him Thelonious Jaha, another man in charge, this time of a ruined world. Alongside it the film work has been smaller and independent, Blue Caprice (2013) among it, and in 2022 he directed for the first time, a Western called Corsicana.
What works is the refusal to plead. Victor in Clockers moved us more than the part's size should allow, because Washington never asks for it; he stands in that station with his clean record and lets Keitel do the disbelieving, and we understood what the confession costs a man like that without a line spent explaining it. What works less is that the same stillness, in a thinner script, looks like a man waiting for his cue. He needs somebody pushing back, Keitel across the table, Oh on the ward; when nobody pushes, not much happens. Start with Clockers, then Out of Sight, and notice how little time he needs in either. Corsicana suggests he would now rather decide where the camera goes than wait for it to find him.
Biography
Isaiah Washington is an American actor. Born on 3 August 1963 in Houston, Texas, he trained at Howard University and began his career in the early 1990s.
He appeared in several films directed by Spike Lee, including Crooklyn (1994), Clockers (1995), Girl 6 (1996) and Get on the Bus (1996). Other early film roles include Love Jones (1997), Bulworth (1998), Out of Sight (1998) as Kenneth, True Crime (1999), Romeo Must Die (2000), Exit Wounds (2001), Ghost Ship (2002) and Hollywood Homicide (2003).
Washington gained prominence as Dr Preston Burke in the first three seasons of Grey's Anatomy (2005–2007), returning for a guest appearance in 2014. He later played Thelonious Jaha in The 100 (2014–2018). He made his directorial debut with the Western Corsicana (2022).
