‘Race’ actor talks about Jesse Owens and getting him right onscreen

CLEVELAND – When actor Stephan James was in Cleveland recently, he was special guest at a local school and part of a halftime celebration at a Cavaliers game.

Part of that had to do with James starring in a new movie, “Race.” But more had to do with the role he plays in the film: track legend, and former Clevelander, Jesse Owens.

Made with the support of Owens’ daughters and the Jesse Owens Foundation, the film chronicles his life from his leaving Cleveland to study and race at Ohio State University through his spectacular success at the 1936 Olympics. Held in Berlin, those Olympics were meant to showcase Adolf Hitler’s notions of Aryan superiority; Owens was foremost in putting the lie to those ideas as he won four gold medals in the 100 meters, 200 meters, long jump and 400-meter relay.

The film ends shortly after the Olympics, with a scene reminding the audience that however much Owens did overseas, he was still subject to the widespread racial discrimination in America. As James said, “It wasn’t just ‘Germany was evil, America was good.’ ”

Indeed, the film’s title, “Race,” refers both to the track events spread through the movie and to an underlying theme encompassing not only Owens but also others caught up in the racial conflicts of the era.

For James, “Race” is not only a major role in a much-promoted movie but his latest performance as a real person, after playing John Lewis in “Selma.” With “Race,” “Selma” and “When the Game Stands Tall,” he has also seemed to lean on films with inspirational currents.

During an interview in a downtown Cleveland hotel, James was asked if he deliberately looked for a certain kind of movie.

Not necessarily, he said. (For one thing, he’d love to play Spider-Man.)

“Those types of stories obviously attract me,” he said. “But it’s really been about storytelling and character. It wasn’t something I planned or thought out. It was just a chance to do cool stories.”

Owens is such a big story, James said, that he would have taken a much smaller role just to be part of “Race.” But there is a special task in a movie like “Race” (or “Selma,” for that matter) to properly convey both real events and real people.

“Race” spreads its historical account beyond Owens into other plot threads. There is American Olympics leader Avery Brundage (Jeremy Irons) trying to keep the United States in the games amid protests over Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews.

And there’s documentarian Leni Riefenstahl (Carice van Houten), trying to accurately convey what was happening at the Olympics even when the Nazi authorities wanted a propaganda piece – and doing that as a woman in a male-dominated culture.

Those people could well have their own movies, James said. But when asked if they distracted from the Owens story, he said: “I think that those stories are important to tell. It’s important to paint a picture, for people who may not know, of what those games were like. I think it was important that we touched on those topics, that we created an environment to show people what it was like behind the scenes.”

James also felt the obligation of properly portraying a man who, though dead more than 35 years, remains prominent in sports and history and a touchstone in American discussions of race.

“It’s so much more pressure, so much more weight on the situation to play someone who actually walked the earth,” James said. “I have an obligation to be accurate to their lives, and to be truthful. People take creative license in a lot of things because it’s entertainment, it’s not just storytelling. But it was my duty, when you’re doing a John Lewis or Jesse Owens, to understand the type of people that they were or are, to understand the times in which they’re living in.

“Some things we don’t know if they’re true or not,” he said, but sometimes you can turn to other people for the clearest account. “For me, that was Jesse’s daughters, to be able to learn about him as a person. They were there for me to learn about him as a man, as a father, as a husband.”

Getting him right also meant replicating Owens on the track.

“With a guy like Jesse Owens, I couldn’t just wake up and go to set without training,” James said. “I had to train to be the fastest man alive, and I not only had to learn how to be fast but I had to learn how to run like Jesse because he was so specific in the way he did things.”

Indeed, Owens’ style of running was changed by Larry Snyder (Jason Sudeikis), his coach at Ohio State, and part of the movie shows Owens adjusting to the new style.

James had been active in sports in his youth in Canada, but not in track. On top of that, he had to learn with 1930s gear, including shoes that look awkward compared to the sleek footwear these days.

“It was a process for me,” he said. “Two months of training at Georgia Tech with the track and field coaches there. Coach Nat Page helped me first with conditioning and then making sure I was tapping into the little things Jesse did, whether it was from his start to his stride to the way his face looked.“

As for the shoes – leather with long spikes and no socks – James said they were very uncomfortable. “I can’t imagine how he did it. I’d be very, very interested to see how he would fare today, with current technology, against a Usain Bolt or Justin Gatlin.”