No sane person would decline an invitation to the creative inner circle of Denzel Washington and Spike Lee. Cinematic collaborators for a fifth time this summer, following Mo’ Better Blues, Malcolm X, He Got Game and Inside Man, their 35-year alliance sits in the same league as Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese, or Frances McDormand and the Coen brothers. So Jeffrey Wright — the gravitas purveyor behind Bernard Lowe of Westworld and Felix Leiter of three James Bond movies — didn’t really have a decision to make when asked to play Paul Christopher in this year’s majestic crime thriller Highest 2 Lowest.

“I have enormous respect for Denzel, and I think there was a kind of mutual trust in what we might do together,” says the 59-year-old, whose character is the close confidant of Washington’s music mogul David King. “He’s one of the great actors, period, and he’s an incredibly generous actor in that he gives so much to play off. He wants to engage with you, and he wants you to engage, and he’s throwing ideas at you and, ideally, that’s being reciprocated. It’s very alive.”

As Wright sees it, director Lee is bringing Highest 2 Lowest back home rather than riding on the coattails of Japanese legend Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 police procedural High and Low. Both movies adapt King’s Ransom, the novel written by Ed McBain in 1959, and centre around filthy rich fellas being forced to choose between major business buyouts or coughing up their life savings to placate kidnappers. This time, as in the book, the chaos unravels across the Big Apple.

“There’s no other filmmaker anywhere who celebrates New York City through the lens Spike Lee does. Not only does he have a deep and genuine nurtured love for New York City, the city has the same level of passion for him,” enthuses Wright. “We filmed in Brooklyn, Manhattan, The Bronx; everywhere Spike shows up, the streets are there to welcome him. Spike is as New York as it gets and, in that New York is one of the great characters in American cinema, there’s a very small room of people who are able to capture that character in all its complexity and vibrancy.”

Born in Washington DC, the Oscar-nominated actor’s love affair with the same skyscraping city began in 1988 after shelving his political science degree in order to join the New York University Tisch School of the Arts for a semester. Wright never looked back, appearing in plays such as Les Blancs, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Angels in America, before heading semi-permanently to Hollywood, yet Highest 2 Lowest marked the first time he’d ever shot a movie in the park across from his home. Adding to that glow of familiarity was the fact Wright’s son Elijah had been cast alongside him, as Christopher’s son Kyle.

Charmingly, this wasn’t their first rodeo on a movie set together, as Elijah had directed his dad in a short film titled Shashanna and the Night Ghouls when he was just eight years old. “But being with him on Spike’s set was special,” notes the proud parent. “We were filming largely in the neighbourhood in which we live, so it had a real intimate quality to it, and I was just so pleased with what he did. He’s not jaded like one is tempted to be after [you’ve done] this for a long time. He had no kind of false affectation in his performance; there was an authenticity and groundedness about him that was truthful.”

Wright’s offspring (he also has a daughter with ex-wife Carmen Ejogo) is the catalyst behind his involvement with The Last of Us franchise, too. Now one of HBO’s most prized properties — and rightly so; post-apocalypses are rarely rendered so spectacularly — the show started life as a PlayStation game Elijah obsessed over. When voicing Isaac Dixon for the game’s second instalment was put on the table, Wright accepted based entirely on the youngster’s “bananas” reaction. What he didn’t anticipate was reprising the militia villain in the mega-budget TV adaptation.

“The production levels are at an entirely different scale than what I was working with on the game. It was really cool to luxuriate in the incredible worlds that they built — just a wildly talented design team there,” marvels Wright.

Referring to a rain-lashed scene in the season finale, during which Dixon attacks an enemy compound via boat, the waxing lyrical continues: “That was one of the most incredible rigs I’ve ever worked on. We were nowhere near any water, in the middle of a forest clearing outside Vancouver, and it was an actual boat hoisted up and rotating on two gimbals some guy had found in a military surplus auction somewhere. It was filled in after with digital effects. I just loved the stagecraft that had gone into it.”

Dixon will return for the third season of The Last of Us in 2027, but, before that, Wright’s roadmap leads him back to London for The Agency (co-starring Michael Fassbender on Prime Video) and wherever The Batman: Part II eventually anchors down after a filming delay.

“Over these last couple years, I’ve spent practically half the year in London,” he reveals. “I’m staying outside the city and it’s actually been really lovely; I hadn’t spent as much time in the proper countryside and I’m quite enjoying the idyll. I go to work, I come back home, I hop on my bike, and I bounce between the Highland cows and the sheep and the horses and the ducks along the canal. It’s been a nice departure from New York in some ways.”

Highest 2 Lowest is now streaming on Apple TV+.

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