Taking the lead

I’m having a ball,” Yahya Abdul-Mateen II says, not for the first time today. It’s early March, people are still shaking hands with one another, and the two of us are sitting in a classroom at the New York Academy of Art, studying a Still Life 101 set-up: a pitcher, an apple, a few clementines here and there. I am dutifully following our teacher’s instructions with the skill level of a neurotic third-grader.

Abdul-Mateen, 34, is blithely slathering burnt umber oil paint onto his canvas, full speed ahead. He might as well be wearing a beret. Abdul-Mateen is not technically a painter, but he will be playing one in the upcoming , a reboot of the iconic black horror movie about the hook-handed ghost of a lynched man who, and he’s currently filming , across from Keanu Reeves. “I have these moments where my sense of reality slows down and I pull back and I can see the bigger picture,” he tells me. “I say, ‘Wow, I’m really doing this thing’.”