Wentworth Miller is of African-American, Jamaican, German, English, Russian, Dutch, French, Syrian, and Lebanese descent. In a 2004 interview with the Guardian concerning 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 might in any other case be inaccessible to him in Forties America”), Miller mentioned:
“There have been a lot of issues I understood robotically about this character. ‘Passing’ isn’t one thing that has crossed my thoughts. Alternatively, being of combined race you do have this query of, ‘Nicely, possibly I haven’t got to reply to any specific neighborhood, since I am not likely part of any specific neighborhood. Perhaps I solely must reply to myself.’ It makes you a sort of racial lone ranger.”
In a 2017 interview with Interview Journal, Wentworth elaborated on rising up combined race and his id, “To be trustworthy, it wasn’t one thing l took a really shut take a look at till I obtained to school, which I believe is what school is all about: self-examination and coping with these questions of ‘Who am I?'”
When requested if that self-examination precipitated him any nervousness, Miller answered, “If it did, it got here from the truth that different individuals had been making an attempt to outline me and my very own journey. There’s a quote I usually seek advice from 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 provide an excessive amount of thought to the place I match on the racial spectrum. However there have been instances after I would run up towards somebody who was involved in determining what race was. That will come as a shock, and in some circumstances, like a slap within the face.”
He elaborated on how his id performed into his appearing, “Nicely, the backstory to anybody of combined 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 rather more fluid, I believe, than somebody who’s ‘purely’ one factor or the opposite. And appearing does problem me to deal with these specific points.”
