10 Things You DIdn’t Know About Oscar Nominee and ‘Highest 2 Lowest’ Actor Jeffrey Wright

Jeffrey Wright stars in the new “Spike Lee Joint,” Highest 2 Lowest with Denzel Washington.

Here are 10 things you probably don’t know about the prolific 59-year-old actor.

1. Jeffrey was born in Washington, D.C., and was 1 year old when his father died. His mother was a lawyer working with the United States Customs Department and raised him with the help of his sister, who is a nurse. He attended D.C.’s prestigious St. Albans School for Boys.

2. Jeffrey attended Amherst College in Massachusetts, earning a degree in political science with the goal of becoming an attorney. “My best subject in college was constitutional law,” he said in an interview with US Weekly. “My worst subject was oversleeping.” It was at Amherst that he developed an interest in acting; he later enrolled in the theater department at New York University.

3. Jeffrey revealed to Ebony, “one of the regrets of my life” was at Amherst when he missed lectures given by American author and civil rights activist James Baldwin.

4. His first job was at age 14 as a locker room attendant at a Washington public swimming pool, and his big splurge as an actor in the ’90s was “a 27-inch color TV. It was a big deal at the time.”

5. Jeffrey’s spellbinding performance in 2023’s American Fiction earned him a Best Actor Oscar nomination. He lost out to Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer. Jeffrey said to Ebony, “It’s just really cool to be acknowledged.”

6. He has played American CIA operative Felix Leiter in three James Bond movies — Casino Royale (2006), Quantum of Solace (2008) and No Time to Die (2021). “The coolest thing about working on a James Bond movie,” he shared with US Weekly, “is just that you get to be in a Bond movie!”

7. While filming The Hunger Games: Catching Fire in Oahu, Hawaii, Jeffrey took up surfing, a sport he loves so much that “if I weren’t an actor, I’d be surfing every day and eating lots of fresh fish.”

8. The work he’s most proud of is Angels in America, which he told Route Magazine is “definitely the center of the map for me.”

9. Jeffrey’s favorite movie is Apocalypse Now (“I’ve watched it 500 times”), his dream role would be a Shakespeare character, and his favorite book is George Orwell’s 1984.

10. He boasted to US Weekly, “I’m pretty mean in the kitchen. My biggest crowd-pleasers are my charred grilled oysters. My favorite food indulgence is a charred, buttery, pink-in-the-middle steak.”