R.I.P. Nelson Mandela: Incredible Hollywood Actor

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.