We all know that entertainers are total sell-outs. Whether your problem is with the Rolling Stones for playing at the Super Bowl or Ice Cube for dropping his N.W. Attitude in the XXX sequel, we all hate The Man for breaking our favorite acts. And so we thought that, like Kanye West after a Hurricane Katrina benefit, Penn graduate and spoken word poet Carlos Andres Gomez would pretty much disappear after calling the former University president Judith Rodin a Nazi and a white supremacist at an MLK Day breakfast in 2003. Actually, he got a role in Spike Lee's $45 million heist film Inside Man, next to Denzel Washington, Jodie Foster, Clive Owen and Willem Dafoe.
Gomez's poetry focuses on three main issues now: the U.S. prison system ("A modern plantation," as Gomez describes it), HIV/AIDS ("The most profitable disease ... for pharmaceutical companies") and the inequality of education offered to inner-city youth of color. He did social work in Harlem and the Bronx and was a part-time teacher in the Lower East Side of Manhattan until he quit last June. He spent the last three years touring nearly 150 colleges and racking up almost a dozen poetry awards.
After a performance at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York City, he was approached by the casting director for Inside Man, who wanted him to audition for a small role. When he showed up to the call-back he found himself in a room with Spike Lee, who, after hearing Gomez read his lines, asked to hear some of his work. "I got into it and started quoting Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X and ended it by talking about the withholding of empowering education for black and Latino youth of color in NYC public schools," Gomez said. "He jumped out of his seat and gave me a hug and said 'Thank you.' I think that pretty much sealed it." Gomez ended up with a major supporting role, after Universal Studios cleared him, of course.
Gomez is a bit ambivalent about the fame he's achieved through Inside Man: "The movie has changed my whole social world, unfortunately." Of course, it's not completely new to him. He acknowledges that he was about "as 'mainstream' as it gets" on the spoken word scene, which he defines alternately as the art of Homer and West African griots and "a cheap gimmick shown on HBO." He's trying to cut back on his spoken word performances to take more acting classes and audition: he's already gone out to Los Angeles for two intensive classes and to work with a manager. He doesn't think he needs to worry about selling out. When discussing musicians that star in films, he is totally unapologetic. "I'm not surprised that studio executives are pushing to place lucrative music artists in major films ... good for [the artists] -- they are learning to be more savvy about their money and marketability; and I thought T.I. did one of the best acting jobs in ATL."
So far, it doesn't look like Carlos Gomez is getting soft. Though Inside Man is not as polemical as some of Spike Lee's other films, it's still in direct opposition to the Hollywood stereotype-factory pieces. He recently acted in an episode of Showtime's lesbian-themed drama The L Word and is hoping for more work from Lee, though he hasn't received any promises. "I'll always be a poet, no matter what," Gomez says.
Inside Man is in theaters now. Carlos Andres Gomez is currently on his Fight Apathy national tour (www.fightapathy.com).
