When Nate Parker “arrived” with the screening of his film The Birth of a Nation at the Sundance festival in January, the timing couldn’t have been more urgent.
Ten days before its unveiling, #OscarsSoWhite had begun to trend again on Twitter. For the second year in a row, no actors of colour were nominated for an Academy Award. Here was an incendiary-looking picture from a first-time African American film‑maker, featuring a mostly black cast, and centring on Nat Turner, a former slave who led a brutally violent revolt in 1831 to free slaves in Virginia. The film had the potential to seize the moment – and it did.
The Sundance screening was key. Parker had ensured that cast, crew, friends and family made the trek to Park City, Utah, for his film’s premiere. Their energy was felt in the room. Before the screening even got under way, the crowd stood as soon as Parker’s name was called. Once it concluded, a second, and much longer, ovation followed, with many in attendance seen drying their tears.
Immediate reactions on Twitter were ecstatic. A bidding war between the hottest arthouse distributors followed. Fox Searchlight, the company that led the similarly themed 12 Years a Slave to a best picture Oscar win in 2014, was the victor, purportedly beating Netflix to land the film for $17.5m (a colossal amount by Sundance standards).
Its aim in spending so much was clear: The Birth of a Nation would be their great Oscar hope. It came as no surprise when the film won the grand jury prize as well as the audience award; no other selection came close to matching its impact on the industry during the 10-day span of the festival. It seemed nothing could possibly derail’s Parker’s rise from little-known actor to Hollywood’s new hope.
Imagine, then, the shockwaves that reverberated through Hollywood when Parker publicly addressed a rape trial from his college years in two trade interviews tied to his impending awards campaign. Before he spoke out about the 1999 incident to Variety and Deadline, two of Hollywood’s most trusted sources, few were aware of the rape charge, of which he had been cleared. Suddenly, Parker’s past troubles threaten to tarnish his passion project.
Parker was born in Norfolk, Virginia, the same state where Turner was born into slavery, a fact Parker only discovered when he took African American studies at college. “Imagine my dismay,” he told the Hollywood Reporter before arriving at Sundance, “in learning that one of the greatest men to walk the soil in this country was a man who grew up and lived and breathed and fought less than 100 miles from where I grew up.”
His mother Carolyn – she was 17 years old when she gave birth to Parker – is a devout Christian, exerting a huge influence on Parker, now himself father to five young children. Speaking to Christianity Today Parker relayed what he viewed as the spiritual significance of The Birth of a Nation: “If you’re able to view this film without the baggage of racism, then it’s very clearly a story of someone that was compelled by his faith to act as the hand of the God through his interpretation.”
Carolyn never married Parker’s biological father, instead first wedding the man who would give Parker his surname; she later married Walter Whitfield, an air force man, who uprooted his new family to Maine. When Parker was 11, his biological father, with whom he’d kept in touch, died of cancer with little warning. His death, coupled with all the changes, proved to be a lot for Parker, according to his mother, who has said that her son became “quite depressed”.
He channelled his depression into anger, taking his demons out on classmates during his teenage years by beating them up at school. “It wasn’t just rage,” Parker recalled. “It was just being a kid that needed some kind of clarity.” Aged 14, unable to bond with his new stepfather, Carolyn had her son return to Virginia to live with her brother Jay Combs, a former wrestler, who encouraged Parker to join his high school’s wrestling team. Parker was a natural at the sport and landed a full wrestling scholarship to Pennsylvania State University.
It was at the beginning of his second year, in 1999, when he and Jean Celestin, a friend from the wrestling team, were charged with the rape and sexual assault of an 18-year-old female student, who claimed to have been unconscious during the alleged attack.
As the case went viral on campus, the pair were suspended from the team. Parker, who had had an earlier sexual encounter with the woman, which both said was consensual, was acquitted of the charges in 2001, while Celestin was found guilty of sexual assault, before being granted a new trial in 2005. That case never came to court after prosecutors balked at tracking down all the former witnesses. Court documents show that the woman said she was harassed by Parker and Celestin after she reported the incident to the police. She dropped out of college as a result.
It’s since been revealed that the woman at the centre of the case, who had a child, killed herself in 2012. Parker responded to the development on his Facebook page, saying he was “devastated”. “As a 36-year-old father of daughters and person of faith, I look back on that time as a teenager and can say without hesitation that I should have used more wisdom,” he wrote.
After the trial, Parker transferred to the University of Oklahoma, where he earned a degree in management science and information systems, and quickly landed work designing websites. He had no aspirations to become an actor – instead he was roped into a newfound career after being approached by Jon Simmons, the agent who still represents him, at a talent search in Dallas, Texas, where his friend, an aspiring model, was hoping to get a gig.
The story goes that Simmons had Parker cold-read a scene from The Fast and the Furious and Parker was hooked. “The way it made me feel, it was like winning a match times a hundred,” he told the Virginian-Pilot. Naturally, he relocated to Los Angeles.
Parker’s enviable bone structure and toned figure were noticed immediately, landing him small roles despite the fact he had no prior acting experience. In 2007, he put his athletic frame to use in the swimming-team drama Pride, which saw him act opposite Terrence Howard. His charisma impressed Denzel Washington, who cast him a year later in The Great Debaters, where Parker delivered a breakthrough performance as a student on an all-black debating team in 1935.
From there, more well-received supporting performances followed: for Spike Lee, he ventured to Brooklyn in Red Hook Summer (2012); he conspired with Richard Gere in the financial thriller Arbitrage the same year. Despite his popularity, Parker soon arrived at a crossroads, uninspired creatively by the roles he was being offered. “So few of them had integrity,” he told the Hollywood Reporter. “As a black man, you leave auditions not hoping you get the job but wondering how you explain it to your family if you do.”
Once shooting on Beyond the Lights (2014) wrapped, Parker met his agents to tell them he would not be accepting any more projects until he could get his own film about American revolutionary Nat Turner off the ground. He stuck to his word, not working for two years on anything but what would come to be known as The Birth of a Nation, provocatively named after DW Griffith’s notoriously racist 1915 film. Parker had written and directed a couple of short films; putting together a feature posed a foreign challenge. To get it all rolling, he invested $100,000 of his own money before securing backers, including retired NBA player Michael Finley.
The future of The Birth of Nation remains in doubt. Parker is expected to promote the film as planned, taking it to the Toronto international film festival in September, followed by a tour to churches and campusescorrect around the US, where he’ll discuss the issues of social justice raised by the film. But as awards season expert and Indiewire’s editor-at-large Anne Thompson notes, the issue of rape “is going to keep coming up”, despite Parker’s wishes to the contrary. (He told Deadline: “I will not relive that period of my life every time I go under the microscope.”)
There’s no avoiding it, argues Thompson, because Turner’s quest for retribution is largely set in motion because of a horrific rape.
Thompson believes there’s “no precedent” for the situation Parker finds himself in. “The pattern with more established people in Hollywood is forgive and forget,” she says, citing Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, both of whom were also embroiled in rape controversies and yet managed to maintain their standing. “The larger Hollywood community doesn’t know Nate Parker. And they need to find out who he is.” As for the general public, many might find the very idea of worrying about Hollywood’s assessment – or debates about the quality of the film – secondary concerns in the circumstances.
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The Parker file
Born Nathaniel Emanuel Combs, 18 November, 1979 in Norfolk, Virginia.
Best of times Taking his first full-length feature film,The Birth of a Nation, to the Sundance film festival, where it scored the biggest sale in the event’s history, as well as winning the grand jury prize.
What he says “Far too often, as a black actor... you receive a hundred scripts in a year and two of them you feel represent the experience of the black male with strength and power and integrity. And I felt the need to, instead of complaining about that, to find a way to change it with my art. So I started writing. I wrote several scripts, but Nat Turner and his life was one that I wanted to really delve into as a writer.”
What others say “Once he got on the right path, you knew he was going to be great at whatever he decided to do in life.”
Steve Martin, his early wrestling coach
