State of the Art | Actor Luke Forbes

Will Pierce Photography

Written by Andara Solarys

My parents are immigrants from the West Indian diaspora. I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Most of my family emanate from the Windrush generation of Caribbean folk who migrated to England during and after World War Two. First generation folks associate themselves as New Yorkers primarily I suppose, but also have an international affinity before being Americans because ‘New York is not America’. It’s a different beast altogether. My sensibility as an American is wrapped up in not being from the US, entirely. In a way I relate very much to people who have an old world connection. I believe this transcends race. On paper I seem to be this quintessential American; elite prep school, Ivy League educated but slightly unmoored, as I decided to pursue a life in the Arts and as a nomad. No one in my family is an “artist”, it wasn’t outright supported but it wasn’t demeaned either. Perhaps, again, it’s the inherent normalcy of movement in my people that I’ve been allowed to figure it out. I truly believe my parents are just fine with the fact that I’m here and able to be.

I came up in the eighties and nineties and New York has changed, quite a bit. I’m very fortunate that I was born and raised in brownstone Brooklyn. Given how much physical change has taken place, aesthetically, as much as it has changed, when I walk the streets, it still feels like home to me. There’s definitely an energy to Brooklyn, there’s  a swagger to people who are from here. I think that it’s waning. There’s an adversity you almost become addicted to, a requisite resilience that doesn’t feel the same. You come to learn: As much as this is your hometown, it really doesn’t belong to you. I suspect that every generation who’s been here can probably say the same thing;  things turn over really quickly here. Whether you call it gentrification or changing of the guards, it’s a different place now. Vibe wise, for sure. Good or bad we’ll see. 

“Thank God, I had the education that I had. That I have the folks I have. That’s my privilege, but I got myself into Cornell and Harvard.”

My grandparents on my father’s side primarily were part of the “Windrush Generation”. My dad was born and raised in London. He came to the United States by himself when he was nineteen. Like a quintessential story; no money, no family, completely solo. He worked as a long haul truck driver, drove cabs, worked for the MTA as a bus driver, then retired from an administrative post. Just a hard working man. My mother came to America with my grandmother and her siblings. She actually finished high school here in Brooklyn and my parents met in New York. Their journey certainly  brought an  inherent pressure. You  couldn’t come into my parents house half steppin’. I don’t think that that’s just  an Asian-American thing. It’s an immigrant thing. I think that’s a natural effect of anybody who comes to this country who has faced some serious obstacles. Thank God, I had the education that I had. That I have the folks I have. That’s my privilege, but I got myself into Cornell and Harvard. I pursued the things that I pursued because I had a genuine interest in human nature, philosophy and history. I ended up studying Government and Economics. Yet, I read more books that had nothing to do with school curriculum.Ultimately, I didn’t know why I was in college except that, that’s what you did. 

Looking back, you come to realize while soaking things in, connecting the dots to your place in existence, riding this evolutionary wave, privileged enough to be alive, that all of this has happened before. The Bible is a pretty damn good road map as to understand why we’re in the positions we’re in. If you’re actually reading it with an open mind and an open heart it doesn’t matter that it was thousands of years ago, since those are the same issues we’re dealing with now. The word is very much alive.  I think I’ve been able to avoid getting swept up in the present day chatter because it’s all a distraction. I experience stress like anyone else but seem to present as very resolute because of my faith and understanding. Knowledge of oneness. The powers that be in our societies and the media, in particular, would much rather have us at odds because if one is distracted from what’s real, they’re able to get away with promoting their message. It keeps you dumb, afraid, inactive and inert and you turn around twenty five years later having spent all this time worrying about things that didn’t  matter or weren’t true. 

I think the antidote to all of this is for people to remember who they are. No matter where you’re from. I’ve been told many times by native born American black folks that I don’t have the standing to say the things that I say sometimes because theirs is  a different experience than what my parents or my forefathers from the Caribbean have gone through. Granted, they weren’t American slaves, but colonialism wasn’t a walk in the park either. I also don’t subscribe to this notion that my history was ripped away from me and I don’t know where I come from. I know exactly where I come from. My home never was broken.

“You weren’t a slave, right? So, does generational trauma exist or not? Yes, but so does generational healing.”

My father has always been in my life but particularly what I mean is that your ancestors aren’t just your blood relatives. Your ancestors are the people who fought, struggled, sacrificed and then passed down knowledge, culture, principles and moral standards. Frederick Douglas is my ancestor. God, the eternal oneness, is your source! You wouldn’t be sitting here if it wasn’t for them. Truly, the antidote is to remember that you’re part of a great legacy. Everyone is comparing suffering. Every single one of us, in this wave of life and human activity on this planet has suffered. Period. Why do you compare wounds and scars? Rather than highlight the fact that you’re here, not only by the grace of God, but by this beautiful, generational sacrifice. There’s so much power and beauty in that. In the sense of good and evil, do I believe there is some overarching force guiding all these schisms and -isms? Yes, but victimization is a cancerous thing and so is this nihilistic worldview that has taken root, especially in young people. “You can never understand my pain.” Sure, in the absolute sense, I guess not, but is that not like saying you’ll never understand the pain of your ancestors? You weren’t a slave, right? So, does generational trauma exist or not? Yes, but so does generational healing. Isn’t it just coincidental that the laziest response is the victim response? It keeps you flat and useless in the face of what you perceive as insurmountable odds. I call the activists: re-activists. When you ask them what they want, they can’t tell you. It’s just grievances. You’ve got to be active. I worked with a great actor/director, his name is Steven Mckinley Henderson. He told me: “Luke, we will live for our causes. We’re not going to die for our causes anymore.” And I believe he said it to me because he sensed that I hold the same spirit. No more martyrdom! As the great Bob Marley said: “The people who are trying to make this world worse are not taking the day off. Why should I?”

Windrush Cruise Boat arrives at Tilbury Dock, London on June 22nd 1948 with  the first wave of Britain’s post-war labor recruitment from the Commonwealth

I live in the Catskill Mountains, upstate New York. I’m distinctively a minority in this area. I probably raised the diversity of my county by two thousand percent just by living up there now (laughs). I’ve got neighbors who I’m not ‘supposed’ to be neighborly with based on the conversation in the cultural zeitgeist. Yet, these  people would give me the shirt off their backs. They’re literally opening their doors to me, helping me craft relationships that I need in order to get me going and further my entrepreneurial endeavors. They couldn’t be more removed from the narrative; from what we’re told we are.  The reality is: it’s about culture, it’s about what you do, your daily practices, but the media dictates we’re supposed to be hating each other. I took six solo cross country trips in the last five years. Even during the Floyd riots. I’ve met people at grocery stores, in gas stations throughout Utah, Arizona, New Mexico… and they were inviting me to their house for dinner. You won’t meet kinder people than the everyday American, but the ones who are telling you to hate people and to not fraternize with your neighbors are the ones shutting themselves off and spreading that kind of messaging. When I look at my friends, we’re like this kaleidoscope of different people.  But ultimately culturally very similar.  I think we need to analyze and decide what really matters: your neighbors, your local politicians, your local happenings and realize the mess; the noise you’re bombarded with has nothing to do with you. You’re being conned.

If you’re not creating (the new), it’s like being stuck in the self help aisle at a bookstore. You’ve done all the therapy, you’ve read all the books, listened to the podcasts, but when you get shoved back into life, you’re shell shocked. A good therapist will push you back out in the world. Go forth and apply yourself. You’ve got to live, you’ve got to live it out! This is also part of the practice: you can give over your spiritual energy and enter into a vortex of negativity or you can realize that the sun is going to shine tomorrow, with or without you. You can get with it, or get lost. These young people sprouted up out of the ground yesterday and yet they think the world just happened today. My response to that is: Great, I heard you, received. You think we’re never going to overcome, so just stay in your house while the world is climate changed. I will enjoy this life because we don’t get another one as far as I can tell, in this realm.

I just find it very telling that people have found solace in this kind of victim culture. There’s a reason for that. It’s sad but there is a weakness that has been glorified. It’s the currency of these schools of thought. Like any track or groove, the deeper you get into this, it’s just harder for them to work their way out. Especially when contrary evidence comes to the forefront. Then, they double and quadruple down and go to hell in a hand basket with their ideology, despite how detrimental it is to their well being. This is the new religious vanguard. I’m seeing it all around me. My industry is rife with it. It’s completely saturated with this kind of thing, particularly Hollywood. Right now, the writers and the actors are on strike. The industry is in a bit of a turmoil. We’re trying to figure out how the pieces of the pie need to be cut more equitably and who’s getting what slice etcetera. I don’t sit around holding my breath, I have little to no faith in the people that are negotiating these terms because they’ve done it before and they only see the world to the extent of their own face. Now, there’s a schism going on because there are elections happening amongst the top brass in my union (SAG-AFTRA) and there’s a squabbling that questions: “Why didn’t you work harder to end the mandates?” The current president has tried, but no one in the industry nor in our union believed in it. This is all hindsight. No one’s talking about it truly out in the open, because to do so is to say that the vast majority of the people in power in this business were duped and they’re not going to do that, obviously. There will be a whole paradigm of people who are going to pretend that they didn’t say what they said in the recent past, even though we’ve got it on celluloid. Willful ignorance is a deadly practice.

From the actor’s perspective, there’s always so much left on the table. The writing was on the wall. For instance: voice actors for new media and video games. Over a decade ago, these kinds of things were eclipsing big studio films, selling a billion plus units. The people who helped make that a reality should get a percentage or a cut to some degree. There was nothing. It was all just left out there. That’s because the people who negotiated it, didn’t have the foresight. With our business now on strike, I feel like I’m entering a new pandemic. We were shelved as an industry for three years. I would have loved for artists in particular during this time to be bearers of truth, that’s our role in society. Yet, here we are now complicit propagandists in line with the media channels and we corroborate fallacious nonsense and dogma rather than, ‘listening to the science’. We knew by late 2020 that this thing resembled the flu. What happened to that? 

“If we ever come back from the strike, I suspect that the TV show will get renewed but as we say in the hood: You’ve got to diversify your bonds.”

I became an actor to trigger people. Shakespeare; hold the mirror up. Shakespeare wasn’t there to make you feel good. Those were the real rebels. Shakespeare was brilliant because he denounced the monarchy, he would speak about kings and queens while they were watching and he didn’t get his head chopped off. The fool in all of Shakespeare’s plays is the most in tuned person. I must thank our comedians, if it wasn’t for people like Dave Chappelle and Bill Burr keeping us free; the comedians are truly the champions of free speech. I can tell you the actors have given it up. 

The funny thing is I worked quite a bit during the pandemic. I did a couple of movies and I’m currently on a TV show that’s on Amazon Prime. If we ever come back from the strike, I suspect that the TV show will get renewed but as we say in the hood: You’ve got to diversify your bonds. I diversified my options, when the lockdown was going on for nearly a year and a half. It was necessary to have a conversation with myself about the reasons why I became an actor. I will be one until I die. I didn’t do it for fame. The people I look up to are great storytellers, and truth tellers. I do believe there’s nobility to our art form. I don’t believe that it is being exploited to those ends at the moment. I said to myself, this is not all that I am. I had an entire life before I became an actor. I’ve got an education and got a good brain. I did a professional program in construction engineering during the pandemic, which is why I’m in the Catskills. I’ve started a  business; Polyhistor Construction! I’m building homes with a friend of mine. There’s such low inventory of homes in my area. If all else fails, if we never go back to the theaters, I’m not jumping off a bridge. I’ve got to live my life! I could be a victim, but what else can I do? That’s vastly more interesting. How can I be of service? I’m a very fit person and health is a big deal for me. I coach people in fitness, health, nutrition and wellness. So I’ve got a side business with about a dozen clients. I’m establishing an online offering through a local gym and wellness center. The Chi Hive, they’re fantastic and we are building community, a truly diverse one. I’m getting the bills paid while this mess works itself out. Again, I have a dad that I watched work two or three jobs on some occasions because he had sh*t to do! Boo hoo… Oh my God, who am I? That I can’t act for you?! (Laughs). That’s the great paradox I have an awareness of; I’m very talented and I’m able to do this beautiful thing. Thank God. At the same time: No one f*cking cares! You have to have that mentality because it’s all vanity anyway. That’s how I look at it. I’ve been poor and broke in my life. My folks didn’t have anything when they arrived here. I know how to lose something, I know how to build it back and I have the energy for it. 

          Short film | “For those who don’t know”  by Brian Chamberlayne