Today,
Nelson Mandela died. An era has ended and we all must say goodbye to a great
man, a legend, a unique voice with something incredible to say, a man who was,
most importantly, an incredible screen actor.
I
know, you think I’m making a big deal out of this. “Sure,” you say “Nelson
Mandela turned in incredible performances in Driving Miss Daisy and Chain
Reaction (Co-starring Keanu Reeves) but at the end of the day Mr. Mandela
was just a Hollywood actor plying his sonorous voice across Tinseltown. It’s
not like he changed the world or anything.”
But
how good was Nelson Mandela at narrating the struggle of portly seabirds in March of the Penguins? Not to mention
that TV show, Through the Wormhole.
He taught me about science and theoretical physics and all kinds of stuff.
Yeah, Mandela didn’t fight to end state-instituted racism and change an entire
country but he was still pretty cool in Wanted
as the bad guy. I mean, I thought Nelson was good the whole time! He was the leader
of the whole group of assassins and then in the end it turned out he was
manipulating all these highly trained killers for his own reasons! Whammo!
Shocker! I know, he didn’t write the story but he acted the hell of it. Nelson
Mandela might not be the topic of history courses a hundred years from now but
he was such a good actor Shakespeare would’ve shook his hand and patted his
rump as if to say “Good game out there, buddy.”
Don’t
even get me started on The Shawshank
Redemption. I can still hear Nelson Mandela’s voice ringing in my ears, “Andy Dufresne crawled through a river of
shit and came out clean on the other side.” How believable was Nelson in
the role of the convict? Do you know how much skill that takes? It’s not like
Nelson Mandela had spent 27 years behind bars because he was branded as a
political revolutionary and suffered his sentence with incredible grace and
inspiring hope. Mandela did a great job playing a convict without any real life
experience, which is chill as fuck.
You
can have your Mahatma Ghandis and Martin Luther King Jr.’s and Malcolm X’s:
those people did incredible things in their home country that still inspire us
to this day. Nelson Mandela’s performance in Million Dollar Baby may not have taken steps to eliminate racial
boundaries in a nation but that movie won Oscars and that’s pretty cool.
Plus,
he’s God.
