Don Cheadle

Don Cheadle (born November 29, 1964, Kansas City, Missouri, U.S.) is an American film and television actor who is known for the scene-stealing yet understated intensity of his performances.

Cheadle grew up in a middle-class family that often moved. He spent some of his elementary-school years in Lincoln, Nebraska, and graduated from high school in 1982 in Denver, Colorado. Having developed an early interest in acting, he then attended the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia (B.F.A. 1986). While still a student, Cheadle made his feature-film debut in the comedy Moving Violations (1985).

For the next several years, Cheadle appeared in guest roles on such TV shows as Fame, Hill Street Blues, and Night Court. In addition, he figured prominently in the realistic Vietnam War film Hamburger Hill (1987), which deliberately cast unfamiliar faces, and he played a gang leader in the police thriller Colors (1988), directed by Dennis Hopper. Cheadle was cast in the short-lived sitcom The Golden Palace (1992–93), and from 1993 to 1995 he played an earnest district attorney on Picket Fences. He first gained widespread critical notice for his performance as the violent Mouse, a friend of the protagonist (Denzel Washington), in Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), based on the first novel by Walter Mosley.

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Cheadle took the title role in the TV biography Rebound: The Legend of Earl “The Goat” Manigault (1996) and played supporting characters in John Singleton’s Rosewood, about the sacking of an African American town by a white mob in 1920s Florida; in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (both 1997); and in Steven Soderbergh’s crime comedy Out of Sight (1998). He received an Emmy Award nomination for his portrayal of a tormented Sammy Davis, Jr., in the TV movie The Rat Pack (1998). He also received a nomination for his performance as a teacher counseling an unjustly condemned young man in the 1999 television adaptation of Ernest J. Gaines’s novel A Lesson Before Dying.

Cheadle’s subsequent film characters included a DEA agent in Soderbergh’s Traffic (2000) and a demolition expert in the caper movie Ocean’s Eleven (2001), a role he reprised for the sequels (2004 and 2007). He also received Emmy nominations for playing the manager of a troubled singer in Things Behind the Sun (2001) and for his 2002 guest role as a medical student with Parkinson disease on the series ER. His performance as a police officer in Crash (2004) was also critically acclaimed. Cheadle’s fine-tuned portrayal of Paul Rusesabagina, the hotel manager who saved more than a thousand people during the Rwanda genocide of 1994, in Hotel Rwanda (2004) earned him a best-actor Academy Award nomination.

Cheadle later played a Sudanese American undercover operative in Traitor (2008) and was cast as James Rhodes/War Machine in a slew of superhero movies, beginning with Iron Man 2 (2010) and including the Avengers series. He cowrote, directed, and starred in Miles Ahead (2015), about Miles Davis. Though he was best known for his dramatic roles, Cheadle also earned plaudits for his comedic work. He was one of the leads in the dark comedy series House of Lies (2012–16), earning Emmy nominations in each of the series’ first four seasons. Cheadle then was cast in another dark comedy, Black Monday (2019– ), centred on the stock market crash of October 19, 1987, and his performance earned him his 9th and 10th Emmy nominations. In 2021 he and Benicio Del Toro starred as small-time criminals in Soderbergh’s No Sudden Move, a drama set in 1950s Detroit. That year he also appeared in Space Jam: A New Legacy, a live action–animated comedy that featured Bugs Bunny and other Looney Tunes cartoon characters.

In addition to being recognized for his acting, Cheadle was noted for his humanitarian work, particularly for the people of the Darfur region of Sudan.

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