Delroy Lindo on the ‘Sinners’ Note Ryan Coogler Gave Him That Changed Everything
Plus: Dreaming of Sundance and next year’s big contenders (already)
We’re in the thick of top 10-list season (don’t worry, I’ll share mine later this month), and Oscar campaigns are still going strong. (Stick around for my conversation with Sinners star Delroy Lindo, and if you’re going to the event tonight for Japan’s international feature submission, Kokuho, hosted by none other than Tom Cruise, please pass along any details!) But if you’ve had your eye on the future this week, I’ll also forgive you.
I spent Tuesday studying the first trailer for The Drama, the A24 project starring Robert Pattinson and Zendaya as a stressed-out couple heading to the altar, which is definitely hiding something within its vague plot description of “a happily engaged couple is put to the test when an unexpected turn sends their wedding week off the rails.”
In classic A24 fashion, the marketing is going light on details and heavy on clever stunts — did you catch the fake engagement announcement in the Boston Globe that came ahead of the trailer? Rumblings of a dark twist are bubbling up online. I can’t wait to see how the… drama plays out next spring. (Sorry.)
Speaking of next year, Wednesday brought the announcement of the full Sundance Film Festival 2026 lineup, with the customary combination of starry projects with grabby concepts — Olivia Wilde turning Cooper Hoffman into her sexual muse in a Gregg Araki film, and then Wilde directing Seth Rogen, Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz in a sex comedy?? — and topical, devastating documentaries (American Doctor, about medical workers in Gaza, promises to be much talked-about). I’ll have much more coverage of Sundance coming up in January, but I have to admit it’s exciting to have this collection of totally new titles to look forward to. Yes, I still love you, Oscar contenders! There is room in my heart for you all.
Before I get to my chat with Lindo, a reminder that there’s still a lot happening over at Prestige Junkie After Party, where last Friday Christopher Rosen and I reunited with Joyce Eng to discuss the busy week of awards news, and this coming Friday I’ll be joined by Chris Feil for a deep dive into this year’s international feature Oscar race. Chris Rosen and I will also be hosting a live mailbag episode on Friday, Dec. 19, so send us your burning questions about this Oscar season or anything else: katey@theankler.com.
The Soul of Sinners
Ryan Coogler encouraged everyone involved in the making of Sinners to become a historian of sorts. It’s baked into the premise of Coogler’s blockbuster feature, which isn’t just a period piece set in 1930s Mississippi, but also explicitly about the legacies of the past as well as the future, so that the film’s most memorable musical sequence is also a bit of time-travel.
In interviews, Coogler, the film’s writer and director, has said that the cast would arrive on set with their own family photos, and the costume designer Ruth Carter told me about the extensive research she conducted using a vast archive of historical photographs.
Delroy Lindo, who plays the hard-drinking yet thoughtful harmonica player Delta Slim, had a bit of a head start when it came to delving into history. In 2011, close to his 60th birthday, Lindo enrolled at NYU and began work on a master’s thesis that, in his words, is a “historical investigation of African-descended people in the geographical location that became the United Kingdom.” It’s not precisely the same history that’s explored in Sinners, but it’s close to Lindo’s heart; he was born in London to a Jamaican mother who had recently immigrated to the United Kingdom, part of what’s become known as the Windrush Generation.
Sinners may be set in a different time and place, but as Lindo explains, exploring Black history anywhere in the world often requires the same set of tools.
“One becomes a private investigator because one is uncovering aspects of history that heretofore had been either expurgated, entirely erased, or diminished,” Lindo tells me. “I think Sinners is a part of that, since it is presenting to an audience pieces of history that they may not be aware of.”
Lindo was not only already familiar with the power of uncovering history, but with what it’s like to be at the center of a historical drama that catches fire the way Sinners has. After starting his acting career on Broadway in the 1980s, he broke out in Spike Lee’s 1992 classic Malcolm X, in which Lindo plays the debonaire gangster West Indian Archie. (His acclaimed performance was the first of four collaborations Lindo has done with Lee, including 2020’s Da 5 Bloods, when Lindo was snubbed in the best actor race despite a groundswell of critical support.) With both Malcolm X and Sinners, Lindo says, “People speak about the work in cultural terms, in historical terms. That’s a manifestation of this work landing centrally in the zeitgeist. If you’d have told me that [would happen] when I was in acting school — I mean, I would’ve wanted to believe you, but I don’t know that I necessarily would have.”
Though it takes place over the span of just 24 hours, Sinners is a sweeping epic, with nearly a dozen major characters, two of them twins (both played by Michael B. Jordan). It’s a challenging film for even an actor as experienced and magnetic as Lindo to make an impact; just as you’ve gotten to know all of the characters and see them all interacting at the rural juke joint set up by twins Smoke and Stack, the vampires (led by Jack O’Connell’s Remmick) arrive and all hell breaks loose.
Lindo’s Delta Slim has an indelible introduction early in the film, playing music at the train station when Stack asks him to perform for the juke joint’s opening night. But when Lindo first received the script from Coogler, he noticed that the character was fading away after that scene. “My introduction was so dynamic and so rich, and I told Ryan that I seemed to disappear in the second act of the film,” Lindo says. Coogler, in a testament to the collaborative spirit that nearly everyone involved in Sinners has praised him for, promised he’d fix it. Adds Lindo, “I’m much more present than I was originally in that first draft.”
The train station where we first meet Delta Slim is one of the many intricate creations of Oscar-winning production designer Hannah Beachler (Black Panther), a space Lindo says he associates with a single word: “Home.” He shares another story that’s evidence not only of Coogler’s collaborative spirit, but also of how the director’s vision for Sinners extended to the most minute movements of the characters and how they fit into the world around them.
“Discovering me in that train station was discovering me in my element, in a place that is foundational to who I am,” he says. “I remember a piece of direction that Ryan gave me. He wanted me to sit on that crate, and at one point, I had this instinct to get up and move. He said, ‘No, no, no. This is your world.’ And he felt very strongly that I should sit. He proved to be right about that. Had I gotten up, it would have dissipated something. The fact that I could be in my world, be planted in my world on that box — it’s accurate storytelling.”