Actor Don Cheadle On Super Bowl LV Ad, Marvel, Looking Ahead At Season 3 Of ‘Black Monday’…

In 2014, Oscar-nominated actor Don Cheadle famously stepped into an elevator with a llama, setting social media ablaze while stealing the scene of a Super Bowl ad packed with stars.

This Sunday, Cheadle is back, exploring the concept of what’s real and what’s fake in a new Super Bowl LV commercial for Michelob ULTRA Organic Seltzer.

“It’s a cool return. I think this is a fun commercial and a fun way to do it. I think they always want to do something that’s fun and interesting and unique. And that’s why I want to do it,” said Cheadle of the new spot, which features more than just a Cheadle lookalike as his brother Colin takes on the role of Don Cheadle doppelgänger. “Being in it with my brother, we get to take shots at each other. So that’s another fun aspect of it. I think that’s part of the fun of the commercial is that it’s a big gag and there’s a reveal. So I don’t want to give that away. It’s just a lot of fun and I think people are gonna dig it.”

I spoke with Kansas City native Don Cheadle about appearing in the new Michelob ULTRA Organic Seltzer Super Bowl spot, his role in the most profitable film of all time, Avengers: Endgame, life imitating art in season three of Showtime’s Wall Street comedy Black Monday, teaming again with Academy Award-winning director Steven Soderbergh on the HBO Max crime thriller No Sudden Move, his activism and more. A transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length, follows below.

Well, this is obviously not your first Super Bowl ad. How much fun is it being part of the game in that capacity?

DON CHEADLE: It’s a lot of fun. It’s cool to be doing it with this brand and with a product that’s organic. That’s kind of on brand for me.

It’s the Super Bowl, which is always a big deal. Plus my team is in it – and is probably going to win, let’s be honest. It’s gotta be the Kansas City Chiefs. That’s it.

And my brother is in this spot! Which is really a cool part of it. To get to be in a commercial with my brother and have this much fun is great.

What was his reaction to being able to kind of step into your shoes, so to speak, there for a few minutes?

DC: What’s great is this is sort of his return too. I actually was able to get Colin in a film that I did many years ago on HBO called Rebound: The Legend of Earl “The Goat” Manigault. They needed someone to be a younger me who could play basketball. And I said, “Well, my brother!” And they were like, “Yeah, we’re gonna hire your brother…” I said, “Well, audition him. Don’t just take my word for it. Audition him!” And he got the part on his own skills. So it’s good to be able to get to bring him back many years later to do it again.

Casting a humorous eye upon the idea of real and fake – it’s certainly an interesting time to be doing that in America. What grabbed you about the treatment for this particular ad?

DC: I think the concept was really fun and interesting. And, again, a way to skewer all of that stuff that we’re talking about: What’s real? What’s not real? Who’s the arbiter of all that stuff? We’re not taking ourselves super seriously. It’s a Super Bowl commercial to have a laugh on “my boat.” So it’s all in there.

From Boogie Nights to Hotel Rwanda, TV to film, your resume is so diverse. Especially this far along, how important is it for you, creatively, to maintain that type of diversity in your work?

DC: For me, it’s always been about what’s interesting and what’s cool. I’m pretty platform agnostic. I want to go where I think the work is fun and challenging and going to bring something to me – and, hopefully, I can bring something to it. And just keep expanding the resume – to do as many different things as I can. 

That’s one of the great things that this career affords actors the possibility to do, which is to inhabit a lot of different characters and tap into a lot of different aspects of not only yourself but things that you want to talk about that are in the world and in the zeitgeist – and hopefully be a part of those conversations and sometimes move those conversations.

Given the uncertain, volatile nature of the stock market at the moment, it seems fitting to talk about season three of Black Monday. What’s it like to see life imitating art the way it is right now and ponder decades of lessons not learned?

DC: There’s never going to be a dearth of material to draw from for that show. And it’s in this real wag the dog moment that we’re seeing that, with GameStop

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and AMC and how the market has reacted and responded to that as well. It’s very telling about the big guys versus the little guys. The whole David versus Goliath sort of motif that we’re looking at. It’s very interesting. 

We’re also being very faithful to the throwback aspect of our show – the period piece that it is. I think the juxtaposition of that is what makes our show really fun and, as you said, seeing how far we haven’t come a lot of times and the lessons we haven’t learned. 

Clearly, because we’re humans, if humans are involved in something like this, greed is going to run it. And we’re going to find out where people really sit when there’s millions and billions of dollars at stake.

I’ve heard you tell the story of being offered your role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe while at your child’s laser tag birthday party. You wound up doing six films. I can’t imagine anyone truly expected quite the level of success all of those films would go on to achieve. Was there a moment there when it started to hit you just what a major cultural thing that was going to be moving forward? 

DC: I think it just kept being bigger and bigger, more and more, up to Avengers: Endgame being the biggest movie that’s ever been made – the most profitable movie ever and all of that. No one saw that coming, clearly, twelve years ago. There were cool comic books and a cool character to anchor it around with Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man – and then the thing just took off. 

And now, with the Disney+ shows and all of the different ways to continue to move forward with these characters and find all of these different ways to explore with them and have them show up in each other’s storylines, it keeps expanding. 

So I don’t think we’ve seen anywhere near the end of the potential of what this is. It’s an amazing juggernaut.

Speaking of Disney+, what’s it been like figuring out what stories are left to tell with that character as work begins on Armor Wars?

DC: It’s in a very nascent stage of it. We’re just about to start, coming up here the beginning of this year, to start to answer those questions: What is there to tell? 

I think with Rhodey, there is a lot of room to explore and a lot of landscape that we haven’t even begun to navigate with him. So I’m hopeful that we’re going to get into his personal life, his relationships, and really understand who he is, what his MO is. How he’s walking this line between being a military person, and really his fealty to that versus what he’s going to have to do, potentially, as a citizen in actions that won’t be sanctioned by the military to go get this armor back. And what his moral code’s going to be.

So that’s all stuff that we’re going to be looking forward to jumping into once we get in the spring.

You’ve teamed up again with Steven Soderbergh for the film No Sudden Move. From the Ocean’s movies through to this latest one, what’s that relationship been like between the two of you working together on so many pictures now?

DC: Steven has been a cool collaborator. We also have a series in development. It’s been amazing. He’s always been someone that I can go to and kind of chop stuff up about what we’re doing creatively. We always have each other in mind, trying to figure out ways to keep the relationship going.

And it’s at a point now where there’s never been more places to sort of use our voices in terms of how much streaming there is, places that want these kinds of stories that we’re telling.

So it’s a relationship that’s continued now for many, many years and I’m appreciative of it.

I write about a lot of music. And we’ve seen the role of music evolve, from the socially conscious folk tradition through to today where you don’t see as much music with a message and, when you do, it seems harder for it to resonate. But from Darfur to the last four years, you’ve never been afraid to speak your mind. How important is it today to take advantage of the platform you have and use it for good? 

DC: I think we’ve seen the effect of that, not just from me but from a lot of people, for sure on social media, who have a big voice so to speak – mine not nearly as big as a lot of those people on the platform.

We’ve also seen it not just in this country but all over the world. Look at what’s happening in Russia. That’s astounding. People are finding their collective voices and attempting to move their communities and move things – and not always in a positive way, as we saw what happened in our own country on January 6. 

But people are trying to find their voice and are trying to become a part of the process and aren’t just sitting back saying, “Well, I can’t do anything.” Which is that sort of ennui and sort of disaffected nature of how we’ve looked at our government that has been the reason why we’ve gotten to a lot of these places where people are struggling to make ends meet and can’t put food on the table. 

So I’m glad that people are now engaged and are awake and aware and are attempting to take control of their own destinies in that way.