Lights Out Star Mekhi Phifer Says Thanos Was Right About Some Things

Mekhi Phifer is an actor who has been working more or less nonstop for thirty years. Whether it’s ER and Clockers or 8 Mile and Torchwood, Phifer is usually known for playing a character with a hard exterior and an engaging interior world, able to steal a scene and take charge of a room. It’s no different in his latest movie, Lights Out, where he stars opposite Frank Grillo, Jaime King, and a number of other Hollywood favorites working on an indie movie about a down-and-out veteran (Grillo) who turns to the world of underground fighting at the urging of a friend (Phifer).

One of Phifer’s favorite elements of Lights Out was the villainous turn for Jaime King. The Sin City star, who plays a corrupt cop in Lights Out, manages to be scary, even while she’s looming over a room full of angry, armed men twice her size.

“Being someone who is the antagonist doesn’t mean that you have to yell, scream, be physical,” Phifer said. “Look at Joe Pesci in Casino or Goodfellas. Joe Pesci was the scariest guy by far than anybody, scarier than Paulie, scarier than Robert De Niro’s character, Ray Liotta’s character. He was the scariest guy, and he was the smallest guy. So that’s not as scary as someone who can suddenly kill you without any inhibitions, who can put business first. ‘This is not personal. You’re just a number in my book. This is nothing personal. This is what I have to do.’ To me, that’s more scary than someone who’s emotionally ranting or showing, ‘I’m crazy. I’m tough.’ Those are usually typically the weaker characters for me.”

As many times as he has been called upon to play cops and crooks, Phifer says he never gets tired of it. He latches onto pieces of character development and plays each role differently than the one before it even if, to many fans, it feels like he often plays the same handful of “types.”

“I feel like each person in life has their own differences and things that set them apart that make them unique,” Phifer told ComicBook.com. “What I do is try to find those little nuances. It’s not even so much that, because even just like you were talking about my skin, the light was shining on me and all that stuff, but we still have the same grievances. We’re still people. We still have the same wants. We want to provide for our families, we want to make money. We want to be interested in what we do to bring in our work and our revenue. So there’s little things, there’s nuances that make us different. We all really want the same things. We all want to be entertained and to feel comfortable and feel safe, and then I just try to find those little things in those particular people that make them interesting and make the audience want to root for that person. Somebody asked me a little while ago, ‘Do you enjoy playing good guys or bad guys?”‘I don’t consider the mindset of the people that I portray as good or bad. I just think that they’re particular people that made choices. Then I leave it up to the audience to decide in their moral compass, whether they’re good or bad or what drives them, or if that driving force is good or bad. But I think as the individual, I just want to play someone who’s passionate about their journey.”

He even threw in a comparison we can all get behind. 

“I think about Thanos and the Avengers. Thanos, he really felt like he was doing a good thing for the universe. He said, ‘I’m going to get rid of half the population of the whole universe because I think that we are stress on the resources, the natural resources that make this universe beautiful,’” Phifer explained. “Now, the way he went about it, you may disagree, but he really did feel like he was doing the right thing. So when you watch it, yeah, I root for Robert Downey Jr. and I root for my buddy Don Cheadle and Chris Hemsworth and everybody else, but I see where he’s coming from. I go, ‘Yo, Thanos is probably right in certain respects.’ He may be going about it the wrong way, but the way that he portrayed it, he didn’t come off as a bad guy. He came off as a guy that you could disagree with and then have to take extreme measures to stop him from doing whatever he’s trying to do.”

In Lights Out, a homeless veteran, Michael “Duffy” Duffield (Frank Grillo), meets a talkative Ex-Con, Max Bomer (Mekhi Phifer) who notices Duffy’s skills after he gets into a bar fight and offers him a well-paying “job” competing in underground fight clubs. The pair form an unlikely partnership after their first fight and decide to travel to LA so Duffy can atone for his past and Max can pay back a crime boss, Sage Parker (Dermot Mulroney). Duffy enters Sage’s fight club and eventually wins, but it also gets him tied up in the crime world and offered jobs he can’t refuse, including one with Sage’s partner and Police officer, Ellen Ridgway (Jaime King). The deeper Duffy goes in this world, the more deadly it gets.

You can buy or rent Lights Out on digital platforms now.