Spike Lee Looking Reasonable

Today on Slate, Lee Siegel interviews Spike Lee in a feature that the site calls Interrogation, but might just as well be named, in this instance, When Megalomaniacs Collide.

Spike comes out of it looking pretty sane, which is probably only possible with this particular interviewer. Here's the best point that Spike scores:

Slate: Do you think there's a difference between a black acting style and a white acting style?

Lee: No, I'm not gonna—no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not. Nope.

Slate: Because I look at a great actor like Jeffrey Wright—-do you like his stuff?

SL: Yeah, I love Jeffrey.

Slate: And I see that he's not an actor in the mold of, say, Brando, or Sean Penn. Wright disappears into his characters like a British actor, and I see a lot of African-American actors doing that—-Cuba Gooding, I think, does that also.

SL: You're putting Cuba Gooding in the same league with Jeffrey Wright?

Slate: No.

SL: Oh, thank you.

Leaving aside whatever nonsense Siegel is trying to wrestle into coherence about Penn vs. Brando vs. British actors -- Cuba Gooding disappears into his characters? I recently got cable, and caught the first three minutes of Boat Trip the other night (the same way I might watch the first few frames of invasive surgery on the medical channel before my brain catches up to my eyeballs). Anyway, it didn't look like Cuba was disappearing into much, other than the vortex of his career.