Kelvin Harrison Jr. speaks about black masculinity in film.
Kelvin Harrison Jr., star A24’s newest film Waves, sat down with Complex today for an eye-opening interview. Harrison Jr. appeared in 2017’s It Comes At Night as well as a handful other films, but Waves feels like a breakout role for the actor.
Waves tells the emotional story an African American family dealing with loss and coming together to navigate through life. One major theme in the film is black men and masculinity and Complex asked Harrison Jr. about how he thinks his roles impact the culture’s perspective on that topic: “They challenge us to see ourselves in the mirror. The biggest thing is like, even with my own dad, he was so hard up; it took a lot for him to warm up to people in the family. My mom talked about this a lot and it took my sisters to come into the picture and to grow up for him to sten, to make him laugh more, to make him smile more, to make him listen more. My sister said to me recently, ‘I love my dad because now he finally took an opportunity to get to know me.’ He didn’t do that for so long because he didn’t have that. His dad never did that. I think he didn’t even understand that love language. You don’t understand what it was that he needed to do to break that wall that boundary that was created and what it took to get to your kid.”
Check out the rest the interview on Complex and see Waves in theaters now.