Da 5 Blood's Delroy Lindo on how Spike Lee's new movie tells the Vietnam War through the eyes of black soldiers

Spike Lee’s new film will show the Vietnam War through African-American eyes. Its star, Delroy Lindo, talks to Katie Rosseinsky
Retelling history: Delroy Lindo, who plays Paul in Da 5 Bloods
Charley Gallay/NBC/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

Since the fall of Saigon brought two inglorious decades of combat to a close, the Vietnam War has provided rich material for filmmakers, from auteurs reaching into the conflict’s dark heart to cash-hungry studios churning out Rambo-like blockbusters.

Look back through this canon, though, and an authentic African-American perspective is missing in action — despite black soldiers being disproportionately represented on the war’s front lines. Da 5 Bloods, the first war film from trailblazing director Spike Lee, is about to provide a much-needed corrective. Rooted in the experiences of black veterans, it follows four old comrades returning to Vietnam.

“We, meaning audiences, the culture at large, the world, are not exposed to conflict seen through the lens of black African-American experience,” says Delroy Lindo, who stars as Paul, the troubled central figure of the movie. “When black soldiers are included in these conflict films — Apocalypse Now, Platoon — we’re always on the periphery, if at all. African-Americans are 12 per cent of the population here in America and they were 30 plus per cent of the fighting force — foot soldiers, grunts, on the front line.”

When they touch down in Ho Chi Minh City, Paul and his pals’ mission is twofold: to find the remains of their much-missed squadron leader Stormin’ Norm (played in flashback by Black Panther’s Chadwick Boseman) and to hunt down a chest filled with gold, which they found — and hid — in the heat of battle decades ago. In another filmmaker’s hands, this premise might have all the raw material for a high-jinks tale of old-timers on one last hurrah — but Da 5 Bloods is not that story.

Like so many Vietnam veterans, Paul struggles with PTSD — not that he’d admit it to his “bloods” (played by Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis and Isiah Whitlock Jr). His return to the scene of battle catalyses a slow-burn breakdown, which Lindo describes as “Shakespearean, [August] Wilsonian, tragic.”

Some of the cast with director Spike Lee

The 67-year-old, who was born in south-east London but moved to the US aged 16, prepared for the role by drawing upon testimonies of veterans with PTSD, including that of a cousin who served in Vietnam, and argues that onscreen portraits of black soldiers are usually lacking in nuance. “No life is one thing, right?” he says. “[This film] is a very human presentation of these men and all of the foibles, the misgivings they have amongst themselves, but ultimately the love.”

Da 5 Bloods marks Lindo’s fourth collaboration with Lee. His brief but indelible turn as gangster West Indian Archie opposite Denzel Washington’s Malcolm X in 1992 was quickly followed by roles in Crooklyn (1994) and Clockers (1995) — then a quarter of a century elapsed before the right film came along. The director, Lindo says, has “a clarity of purpose that makes it more smooth to jump into the work”, so when he phoned up to offer the role, “it was relatively simple and straightforward. He sent me the script. I read it. We talked about the Trump thing. Once we got past that, we were ready to go.”

That Windrush is absent from the British cultural narrative more than irks me — it angers me

Ah, the Trump thing. Paul is a proud MAGA cap-wearing, build-a-wall chanting supporter of the man in the White House. Just eight per cent of African-Americans voted for Trump in 2016, and given Lee’s avowed antipathy for the President, who he refers to only as Agent Orange, it’s certainly a surprising character trait.

At first, Lindo petitioned the director to change his mind. “I said, ‘Man, does Paul need to be a Trumpite? Can we just make him a conservative?’ [Lee] took a few days and thought about it, then he called me back and said, ‘No.’”

A second and third read of the script, however, helped him to see how Paul might feel totally left behind by the establishment. Putting the cap on backwards, hiding the Make America Great Again slogan, “took a little bit of the edge off” wearing an item weighed down with political meaning. “Spike, God bless him, never asked me to put in on front-side until it really played centrally into the scene.”

Da 5 Bloods is at its most devastating when it weaves together the two wars these soldiers were fighting. Battlefield scenes are interspersed with real newsreel footage of civil rights activists. “That speaks to Spike’s skill as a storyteller,” Lindo says. “The two are completely intertwined. You have flashbacks of what’s going on in Vietnam, this brotherhood of African-American soldiers having to fight this war, being thrust into this abominable situation, and at home you have the intensity of the civil rights movement, which was tearing the country apart.”

From left, Isiah Whitlock Jr, Norm Lewis, Clarke Peters, Lindo and Jonathan Majors in the film

The film will land on Netflix at a time when race relations in the United States are at a critical point. Watching footage of clashes between police and activists at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Da 5 Bloods and seeing similar clips proliferate in real time on Twitter begs the question — have things changed? “We each have to answer that in our own ways, but it does absolutely make the film very contemporary, very prescient in the things it is presenting,” Lindo says. “And I want to believe that it makes the experience of engaging with this story that much more acute and important.”

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Lindo’s mother, a nurse, was part of the Windrush generation, travelling from Jamaica to London in the early Fifties. His reckoning with his British connection has been a “complicated” process, and one that proves that Britain cannot afford to look at scenes across the Atlantic with complacency. Lindo knew “nothing” about the Wind-rush until he starred in Wondrous Oblivion (2003), a film about migrant families set in the Sixties.

That this period is “absent from the [British] cultural narrative, the historical narrative” irks him. “It more than irks me, it angers me ... given that it was so fundamentally critical to changing the make-up of the United Kingdom, and it changed the definition of what it meant to be British.”

He is candid about the dearth of opportunities he’d have had as an actor if he had remained in London. “It’s a grand irony to me that you and I would not be having this conversation had I not had the opportunity to leave,” he says. “I’ve made a career for myself in America. I’m really clear that if I’d stayed in England, I would never have been able to have the life that I have formulated for myself.”

Da 5 Bloods is released on Netflix on June 12

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