Usher Interview

R&B sensation makes his mark as a lead in Ron Underwood's latest flick, In the Mix.

By Anne Kelly-Saxenmeyer

For someone who leads an unmanicured life, waiting in the bar of the lovely, dignified hotel in Beverly Hills where Usher Raymond IV prefers to stay when in Los Angeles is far more nerve-wracking than sitting down with the R&B superstar himself - who arrives in jeans and hooded sweatshirt (albeit the coolest jeans and hooded sweatshirt), with little entourage and an easy smile. Walking through the lobby, he greets the staff like they're his neighbors. Usher, as he is known, is a fine young man, even if that term is too quaint for a businessman of his stature.

On a cooling day in September, the now 27-year-old is juggling three ventures from his temporary digs: He's promoting his upcoming movie, Lions Gate Films' In the Mix, which is being billed as a romantic comedy and marks his first major acting lead out of the high school realm. He's in the final week of coordinating the film's soundtrack, which is being hosted by his record label, Us Records, and will feature three artists from the Us roster who have albums due next year. And he's putting together Project Restart, a concert to benefit survivors of Hurricane Katrina, scheduled for October in Atlanta. On the wider periphery of his pursuits today are his clothing line, his basketball team - the NBA's Cleveland Cavaliers, of which he is part owner - and, of course, his career as the top-selling artist in the recording industry.

If Usher's progress toward becoming a brand places him in the contemporary business world, the kind of multitasking he hopes to take on in Hollywood is a throwback to the heyday of the movie musical. Asked what he thinks of today's film landscape, he answers not as a media mogul but as an entertainer eager to employ all his talents at once. "It's a great time for entertainers, specifically [recording] artists, to make that transition from singing or dancing or rapping into the movie business," he says. "If you think about the way entertainment was initially built, [by] triple threats like Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Ginger Rogers and so many of those great actors who had all those talents - artists are looking for those opportunities now."

With so much on his plate, how far does Usher want to go as an actor? He says he's willing to take on anything; he'd like an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony to put beside his Grammys. For the moment, however, he's focusing on projects that will entice fans of his music into the theaters, such as The Ballad of Walter Holmes (2006), which has been called a Saturday Night Fever-like drama about an R&B singer from the streets. In the future, he would like to do a biographical piece on Marvin Gaye (whom he portrayed on NBC's "American Dreams") or Jackie Wilson. And he's interested, both as a producer and an actor, in using contemporary dance and music to tell theatrical stories - musicals.

Tempering his hip, urban vibe with a sense of classic style has worked for Usher in his music career, which really took off after he shed the mean-kid makeover engineered by his first producer, Sean ‘P. Diddy' Combs, and went with a more innocent, classically cool image in partnership with R&B producer Jermaine Dupri. (Usher's breakthrough second album, "My Way," was released in 1997, after the artist graduated from high school.) Given that he also has a sense of cinematic history, it's easy to see what appealed to him aesthetically in director Ron Underwood's In the Mix, which Usher also executive produced. The movie - which centers on a romance between Darrell (Usher), a deejay who aspires to run his own record label, and Dolly (Emmanuelle Chriqui), the beautiful daughter of mob boss Frank Pacelli (Chazz Palminteri), the long-time employer of Darrell's late father - invites the actor to step back and forth between eras. His character is equally comfortable spinning records in a club and descending the staircase of the Pacelli mansion in a tailored Italian suit, looking like a member of the Rat Pack. His co-star makes her entrance essentially dressed as Audrey Hepburn.

"This was an opportunity to bring my audience into my next step as an actor, as well as to take on a role that I felt like Hollywood would understand and respect," says Usher, who jumped at the chance to play "not just any deejay, but the coolest deejay." He continues, "When I read it, I said, ‘I can definitely relate to this guy. I understand who he is.' And it wasn't so far away from music that people wouldn't feel like they were getting a treat." For the portrayal, Usher drew in part on his younger half-brother James Lackey, an aspiring music producer. "There's something in the way that he communicates with his people and the passion that lies there that I kind of related it to," he says. And he borrowed from all the deejays he has observed over the years - "the hustle and the way that they attack their jobs."

Usher also connected with Darrell's concept of family. "This guy has a back-story where you kind of question: Where's his family? If you even took the time to think about it. But his father passed, and he looks at the people in his immediate circle as his family... A lot of that I pulled from myself because, as I've gone around in my life, I've kind of had to turn acquaintances into family. They start out as people who are just working for you, but before you know it, you create real relationships with them. I've lived on the road for, man, close to the last 12 years of my life. So I can kind of relate to making your own family."

Though the movie centers on an implicitly forbidden relationship between two people of different races and classes, Usher sees the story as not about social issues but about love bridging a specific cultural divide. "We, as Italians and black Americans, have a lot of similarities that we don't notice," he says. "Family is everything to both of us. Honor is everything to both of us. Culture is everything to both of us. And I felt like a story like this shows that - even down to our concept of food."

In the Mix is a sort of second debut for Usher. His first feature film lead was in the ensemble piece Light it Up, in which he starred alongside Forest Whitaker and Rosario Dawson, and, at age nineteen, proved that he could really act. The role he has chosen for coming onto the scene as a leading man doesn't aspire to the depths of that first role, and it gives one the sense that Usher is only beginning to find his voice as a grown-up actor.

Ironically, the suave image that made his music career click may not be the most compelling direction for him on film.

This would hardly prove a setback for an artist who, as a teenager, persevered through a disappointing first album and a total rethink. Though he's sometimes nostalgic in his sensibilities, Usher is tenaciously forward-looking when it comes to building his life. Discussing his acting aspirations, he says, "It took me ten years to build my career as a [recording] artist, so I can only imagine how much time it's going to take to find the roles that are going to truly solidify me as an actor... I feel like I'm a baby in this, even though I've been doing it for a while. I'm taking the same approach I took in music: I had to go through high peaks and low valleys to find out what really worked for me, and when I found it, I stuck to it. Now, as an actor, someone has to be willing to take a risk on you, first of all, but you have to be willing to put yourself through everything."