‘Spider-Verse’ co-director Kemp Powers, ‘American Fiction’ star Jeffrey Wright join the Envelope

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In this week’s episode of the Envelope video podcast, “American Fiction” star Jeffrey Wright explains why he was drawn to writer-director Cord Jefferson‘s pungent media satire, in which Wright’s character pens a stereotypically “Black” novel in a fit of pique — and it turns into a publishing-world blockbuster.

“From the first scene I was drawn in,” Wright tells host Yvonne Villarreal about reading the script for the Toronto International Film Festival’s People’s Choice award winner. “I loved that conversation around race in the context of race [and] language. And it’s a conversation that I think we’ve been having in our culture recently. It’s a conversation I’ve had with myself and with others. And it was just smartly done. I think one of the problems that we face today is that there’s so much conversation around race. Race is always informing us. It has from the beginnings of our country, but we kind of lack fluency. So it becomes an obstacle to real progress and this was sharply drawn [in ‘American Fiction’].”

Plus, host Shawn Finnie catches up with “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse” co-director Kemp Powers about the subversive subtext the film brings to hero Miles Morales:

“I know that there was this kind of vocal thing for a long time about ‘Miles isn’t a legitimate Spider-Man. He’s not the real Spider-Man,’” Power says. “We’re like, ‘What’s a clever way that we can have the natural story also be a metaphor for pushing back against the idea that this character shouldn’t even exist in the first place?’ I hope that people received both the obvious and the kind of subversive elements of it in a positive way... When Miguel says to him, ‘You’re not supposed to be Spider-Man,’ some people hear it exactly the way he said it based on the story. The spider bit the wrong person. But we all knew that some people were going to hear a different way.”

Watch the full episode now on latimes.com, where you can also read the full transcript, as well as on our YouTube channel. Listen to the audio-only version wherever you get your podcasts.

And be sure to come back next week as we chat with Greta Lee, the star of Celine Song’s acclaimed cross-cultural love story “Past Lives.”