'I fought for him': Jason Mitchell on lessons to be learned from 'Mudbound'
Perhaps the most emotionally charged role of the 2015 blockbuster "Straight Outta Compton" is that of late N.W.A rapper Eazy-E, as played by Jason Mitchell. In a number of scenes, after Eazy-E finds out he had AIDS, Mitchell captures a level of sensitivity not often afforded black men in media; there's ugly-crying and hugging and intimacy. There's vulnerability.
It's this performance that put Mitchell, 30, at the top of Dee Rees' wish list for one of her leads in "Mudbound," in theaters and available on Netflix.
"That's why I wanted him, because of that hospital scene where he's hugging another man and crying," she says. "And I fought for him."
"Mudbound" is a tale of two families connected by land. The Jacksons are black sharecroppers who claim an ancestral connection to the soil they till, while the McAllans are white, middle class and bought their their way
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