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Wentworth Miller, The Human Stain
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Written by Donald D. Ernst   
Wednesday, 21 December 2011
Good looks, good school (Princeton), pretty good Hollywood job (in development). But Wentworth Miller wanted to test himself as an actor. Voila, good luck. He won a starring role in the mini-series Dinotopia. Then he read the script for The Human Stain, from Philip Roth's novel about a professor looking back in regret on having kept the secret of his identity as a black man. Part of the film would show the character 50 years earlier.

The story hit "too close to home" for the fair-skinned, mixed-race Miller, who had been accused of racism at Princeton when a satirical cartoon he drew of a Cornel West course was misinterpreted. "But the script spoke to so many relevant issues. I grew up on the outskirts of two different communities. Which one did I belong to? [My character] thinks that he belongs to no community and that he has to answer only to himself. He turns his back on the community that gave him so much. That is betrayal."

Miller, 31, says that to play a younger Anthony Hopkins, "I rented all his videos so I could steal pieces of his performances and layer them into mine." His own is quietly virtuosic, revealing the character's intelligence, ambition, brutality and solitude.

"This project spoiled me in the best way," he says. And Miller honored it. In a sterling cast, he held his own as a young man learning to live a lie.
Last Updated ( Wednesday, 21 December 2011 )