Don Cheadle first garnered a lot of mainstream attention with his performance opposite Denzel Washington in Devil In a Blue Dress, for which he was awarded the Los Angeles Film Critics Association‘s Best Supporting Actor prize. Since then, of course, he’s appeared in a wide variety of mainstream and independent films, earning a Best Actor Academy Award nomination for the searing Hotel Rwanda, and further burnishing both his sociopolitical and off-camera professional credentials as one of the producers of the Oscar-winning Crash, which he was instrumental in helping get made. Heck, he was even nominated for a Grammy Award in 2004, for his narration/dramatization of the Walter Mosley novel Fear Itself.

In his new film, writer-director John Michael McDonagh’s The Guard, Cheadle plays a FBI agent, Wendell Everett, who arrives in rural Ireland to head up a large international drug trafficking investigation, and is then forced to rely on an eccentric small town cop, Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson), with a confrontational and crass personality. I had a chance to chat one-on-one with Cheadle recently, about working up a multi-layered accent for the film, the subversive racial humor coursing through this most curious and entertaining little dramedy, and his work on a long-gestating movie about Miles Davis, which will hopefully begin shooting in several months. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here.