Jeffrey Wright and Spike Lee are only nine years apart in age. They have also known each other since near the beginning of their careers, with the Tony and Emmy-winning actor telling us that he first met Lee when he was still a young thespian on the make in New York City. It was 1989 and Wright had just moved to the five boroughs after growing up in D.C. Yet even back then—and in the same year that Lee would win the Palme d’Or for Do the Right Thing —Spike already loomed large in the popular imagination as a singular chronicler of NYC stories.

“He certainly is on the Mount Rushmore of New York ambassadors,” Wright muses with a smile when we catch up with the Westworld actor. “I remember seeing She’s Gotta Have It , I guess in’86, a couple of years before I moved here, and that wa

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