Actor Nate Parker Talks the Difficulties of Being a Black Actor + Financing His Own Film

In a recent interview, Nate Parker opens up about the difficulties of being an actor of color and selecting roles.

He tells the Hollywood Reporter:

“So few of them had integrity. As a black man, you leave auditions not hoping you get the job but wondering how you explain it to your family if you do.”

Nate also reveals that he wanted to see Nat Turner’s story turned into a powerful film so badly, he decided to invest in the movie himself.

Here’s the excerpt:

A few days after actor Nate Parker finished shooting the R&B romance Beyond the Lights in late 2013, he met with his agents and told them he would not be acting again — not until he could play American revolutionary Nat Turner.

“I was willing to stick to that — and if it was my lot to never act again, so be it,” says Parker, who didn’t work for nearly two years, instead spending every minute — and nearly every dime — trying to get his passion project made.

The result is The Birth of a Nation, premiering in Sundance’s U.S. Dramatic Competition. Parker, 36, wrote, produced, directed and stars in the drama, playing Turner, a slave who led an 1831 rebellion in Southampton County, Va. He has been writing the script for his version of Turner’s story for seven years but has been carrying the story around with him for much longer.

“Growing up as a black man in the South, there was such a shortage of heroism in respect to the history that I was taught,” says Parker, who was a high school wrestling state champion and All-American at the University of Oklahoma. Parker didn’t even learn about Turner’s story (despite growing up in Virginia) until he took African-American studies classes in college. “Imagine my dismay,” he says, “in learning that one of the greatest men to walk the soil in this country was a man who grew up and lived and breathed and fought less than 100 miles from where I grew up.”