Nylon - November 2008 - (Page 108) new kid on the block T HIS FACE MAY BE PLASTERED ON BILLBOARDS ON NEARLY EVERY STREET D OL ISN’T A HOUSEHOLD CORNER IN LOS ANGELES, BUT ACTOR TRISTAN WILDS LEE NAME JUST YET. BY DAVID GREENWALD. PHOTOGRAPHED BY JAESUNG LEE “Are you a movie star or something? Do I know you?” our waitress asks actor Tristan Wilds at a diner in Playa Del Rey, California, noticing my rolling tape recorder as she offers up another pot of decaf. “Are you gonna start singing for me?” “Eventually I will,” says Wilds, humbly. He means it. Wilds, who stars in the CW’s new 90210 (hence the billboards) and Fox Searchlight’s The Secret Life of Bees, once rubbed elbows with Jay-Z in the “Roc Boys” music video and has his own material in the works. Wilds’s latest role is as Dakota Fanning’s love interest in Bees, where he also appears alongside Queen Latifah, Alicia Keys, Jennifer Hudson, and a number of other actresses—an experience the 19 year old found more than a little intimidating. “It was kind of scary at first, being around so many women,” he says. “You don’t know what to do with yourself.” Wilds first earned kudos for his role as troubled teen Michael Lee on HBO’s lauded drama The Wire. It’s a long way from the mean streets of Baltimore to the bejeweled hills of 90210, but trading gunfights for frappuccinos hasn’t meant forgoing Wilds’s penchant for drama. In the show’s first episode, a blond-haired, blue-eyed lacrosse player refers to Wilds’s character, Dixon, as an “Obama,” and the actor says future scripts won’t shy away from racial tension. “He’s still dealing with being black in a white family. It’s a struggle for him,” Wilds says of Dixon, whose adoptive family moves from Kansas to Beverly Hills at the start of the series. “The racial line is blurred a lot more in this society with the kids now, but it’s still there. It’s blurred, it’s not gone.” This wasn’t just an onscreen move for Wilds, a New York native who’s starting to see why audiences eat up everything SoCal offers after his first few weeks on the West Coast. “It’s like, ‘Wow, you guys live like this all the time?’” he says. “This is their life: beaches, parties, the glitz, and the glam. That amazes people, and what amazes people usually makes it on TV.” Many stars get lost in it, but Wilds is trying to stay grounded. Munching on a plate of chili fries, he says it’s the little things about home that he misses in L.A. “You can’t walk across the street and get a hot dog,” he sighs. While he cites “the usuals” as acting influences—he’s on a first name basis with Denzel and Will—it’s his family that seems to have had the biggest impact. He followed his older brother, who did TV work on the early ’90s football show Grunt & Punt, into acting—and the whole clan helped him develop his fashion sense. “I watched my brother dress. I always talked to my older sister like, ‘How do I look?’” he says. “And my dad, when he gets dapper, he gets dapper. He dresses head to toe fly.”Billboards and all, the young actor says he still has a lot to learn. “I’m missing school right now,” he says, naming USC, NYU, and Morehouse among his top college picks. “I’d probably study sociology and psychology,” he says. “I like to see how people think, how people tick.” stylist: monique bean. grooming: dean bryant for artistsbytimothypriano.com. hat and cardigan by polo by ralph lauren, shirt by corpus, jeans by wesc, shoes by converse by john varvatos. http://www.artistsbytimothypriano.com
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