Jeffrey Wright Dishes on ‘The Batman,’ Wes Anderson, and Bond

Jeffrey Wright has been in the acting game since the ’90s, but the 2010s are really when Wright started to come into the limelight. From appearing in HBO dramas like Westworld and Boardwalk Empire to becoming a recurring Wes Anderson actor and starring in Spike Lee’s latest movie Highest 2 Lowest, Wright has become a very busy man, able to smoothly transition between genres and mediums.

And in a new interview with Collider, Wright looked back on his diverse career, dishing on The Batman, working with Anderson, and how an early James Bond classic helped inspire him as an actor.

Wright’s respect for Anderson comes through clearly. Speaking about working on Anderson’s 2025 movie The Phoenician Scheme, Wright said he first fell in love with Anderson’s “lyrical, thoughtful” writing style when they first teamed up on The French Dispatch, adding that he’ll pretty much accept any part Anderson offers him—without even reading the script. (He still does read the scripts, though.) Wright said he has an immense amount of “respect and trust” for Anderson, and equally appreciates “the trust he has in me in helping him to realize these various visions that he conjures up in his films.”

Wright’s franchise parts, meanwhile, have challenged him to work “in an authentic and organic way inside these established aesthetics,” he told Collider. For example, when playing Felix in Daniel Craig’s James Bond movies, Wright said he hoped to mirror the acting style of Jack Lord—the first actor to play the character in 1962’s Dr. No. But Wright also wanted to put his own distinct spin on Felix: “There’s certain tweaks I made to the language to kind of reflect ‘a brother from Langley,’” he explained, “and I dropped that in there for the duality it communicates.”

In 2006, Wright being cast as Felix wasn’t a big deal, but flash forward to 2022, and that was very much not the case when he played Commissioner Gordon for The Batman. News of Wright’s casting caused a racist backlash that he first rebuffed back in 2022—but he remains (justifiably) annoyed about it. The situation was “fucking racist and stupid. […] It’s absent all logic,” he told Collider.

“It’s just so blind in a way that I find revealing to not recognize that the evolution of these films reflects the evolution of society,” Wright said, adding “that somehow it’s defiling this franchise not to keep it grounded in the cultural reality of 1939 when the comic books were first published.” Even stories need to reflect the real diversity in today’s world, he said, although he added that when he gets involved in projects, he feels “that I own these stories as much as anyone.”

You can read the full interview here to get more of Wright’s thoughts on Westworld’s cultural staying power, how he got his start in acting, and more. And if you can’t wait to see more of Wright, he’s set to appear in upcoming film The Wizard of the Kremlin and will return in The Last of Us season three—and of course, The Batman Part II.

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