FARAI CHIDEYA: HAROLD PERRINEAU

First let me flip the script a little bit and name a genre rather than a person. As a big science fiction freak, I found my "matinee idols" to have often been people who could convince me that on-screen depictions of other worlds were at least as interesting as the ones I could conjure up by reading a book. Among my favorites were George Takei as Lieutenant Sulu in Star Trek, Michael Rennie as Klaatu ("Klaatu barada nikto," remember? Oh, never mind) in The Day the Earth Stood Still and yes, the Trinity of Carrie-Anne, Keanu and Laurence in The Matrix. Now it's rumored that Harold Perrineau (The Best Man; the complex narrator on HBO's Oz) will be joining the cast of The Matrix 2.

Perrineau in particular qualifies as a modern-day matinee idol on the rise. The stellar and full-frontal Oz, which shows his character showering in his wheelchair next to other inmates, manages to diminish neither his dignity nor his sex appeal. In film roles he's played the mercurial Mercutio in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, a tranny in Woman on Top, a black New York intellectual with a white roommate and girlfriend in A Day in Black and White and a rather whipped member of the black bourgeoisie in The Best Man. Certainly he can do justice to other realms of time and space as well.

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