Wentworth Miller is of African American, Jamaican, German, English, Russian, Dutch, French, Syrian, and Lebanese descent. In a 2004 interview with the Guardian in regards to the film Human Pressure (which follows the story of “a light-skinned African American man who decides to ‘cross’ as white to facilitate a life and a profession that will in any other case be inaccessible to him in Nineteen Forties America”), Miller stated:
“‘There have been quite a lot of issues I understood mechanically about this character. ‘Passing’ just isn’t one thing that has crossed my thoughts. Then again, being of blended race you do have this query of, ‘Nicely, perhaps I haven’t got to reply to any specific group, since I am not likely part of any specific group. Possibly I solely must reply to myself.’ It makes you a form of racial lone ranger.”
In a 2017 interview with Interview Journal, Wentworth elaborated on rising up blended race and his id, “To be sincere, it wasn’t one thing l took a really shut take a look at till I received to varsity, which I feel is what faculty is all about: self-examination and coping with these questions of ‘Who am I?'”
When requested if that self-examination induced him any anxiousness, Miller answered, “If it did, it got here from the truth that different folks have been making an attempt to outline me and my very own journey. There’s a quote I usually confer with from Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which is that ‘definitions belong to the definers and never the outlined.’ The attractive factor about having grown up in Brooklyn is, due to the wealthy cultural and racial range there, nobody appeared to offer an excessive amount of thought to the place I match on the racial spectrum. However there have been instances after I would run up in opposition to somebody who was involved in determining what race was. That will come as a shock, and in some instances, like a slap within the face.”
He elaborated on how his id performed into his appearing, “Nicely, the backstory to anybody of blended race is a lifetime spent being incorrectly perceived and selecting both to permit that misperception to proceed or to appropriate it, so I’m conscious of id and race as being way more fluid, I feel, than somebody who’s ‘purely’ one factor or the opposite. And appearing does problem me to deal with these specific points.”
