The Sweet Taste of Freedom : Jeffrey Wright savors what he learned while reliving a little-told part of history in ‘Ride With the Devil.’

Jeffrey Wright credits one of his co-stars in Ang Lee’s Civil War epic, “Ride With the Devil,” with helping him gain insight into his character, Daniel Holt, a freed Southern slave fighting for the Confederacy--and it wasn’t “Ride’s” leads, Skeet Ulrich or Tobey Maguire.

Instead, the help came from Bugs, Wright’s horse in the film.

“I think Holt related to his horse more deeply than the people around him,” suggests Wright in a recent interview in Los Angeles. “There is a kind of silence and a calmness that I derived from the horse and a regality, not only from the horse, but also from the horsemen who taught us to ride.

“We worked with some of the best cats in the country as far as wranglers. They were great horsemen and taught us a lot about an old way of life and real communication with the animal.”

Understanding an old and very different way of life was key to the film and to Wright’s performance. In “Ride,” which opens Wednesday, he portrays a former slave who is genuine friends with the son of the man who used to own him.

Wright, who made his film debut as the lead in 1996’s drama about the art world, “Basquiat,” says that before making “Ride” he knew there were Southern slaves and freed blacks who fought for the Confederacy.

“The fact of the matter is, most white Northerners didn’t know black folks, but most white Southerners did,” explains Wright.

“Some of the reasons why blacks went into battle [on the side of the] South was born of ignorance and subservience and filled with real pathos.”

Based on Daniel Woodrell’s novel “Woe to Live On,” the film is about the bloody guerrilla warfare between pro-South “Bushwhackers” and pro-North “Jayhawkers” along the Kansas-Missouri border during the Civil War. Joining up with the Bushwhackers are Jake Roedel (Maguire), the son of a German immigrant, and Jake’s childhood friend, Jack Bull Chiles (Ulrich), the son of a Missouri plantation owner. Their unit includes the flamboyant Southern gentleman George Clyde (Simon Baker) and his loyal former slave (Wright).

Wright points out that the relationship of white Southerners to blacks was--and remains--complex. “To kind of demonize the South and kind of lionize the North is simplistic, I think,” Wright says. “The history is much more complex than we had been led to believe.”

Wright says he’s run across more racists in the North than in the South. “Sometimes I think the South starts at Maine,” he says.

At the outset of “Ride,” Clyde and Holt are loyal friends. “They grew up together and were friends as kids,” Wright explains. “But what Holt grows to realize throughout the course of the movie is that it is still a political relationship of master-slave.”

In fact, Holt discovers he has much more in common with Maguire’s Jake “because it is a class relationship. At the time, the poor whites and the poor blacks had more in common than they were led to believe.”

“Ride” producer and screenwriter James Schamus points out that many Southern white and black children grew up together before the Civil War. “Then at a certain point, the brutality of the system intervened,” he says.

The Australian Baker, who plays Clyde, knew little about U.S. history, let alone the Civil War, before making “Ride.” He says that Wright helped him to understand the history of this tragic time. “We spent a lot of time going out and sharing a drink and chatting,” Baker says.

“Jeffrey was very helpful with the understanding of what independence meant to a Southern slave and the feeling of what they went through.”

Wright manages to convey Holt’s inner thoughts with very little dialogue. Relying on body language for the first half of the film, his walk is nothing more than a sad shuffle. With his head down, Holt holds himself like a man still in shackles. But as his friendship with Clyde begins to drift away and he bonds with Jake, Holt is transformed into an emancipated, free-thinking individual.

“For the first half of the movie he has been silenced,” Schamus says of Wright’s character. “Then he rises to speech and has the power to say things, the freedom to say things.”

Wright, adds Schamus, is a true scholar. “He came to this part with an enormous amount of historical understanding on how his character would have spoken,” he says. “We began intensively to craft the vocal performance. There are really substantial things he brought to the process.”

Taiwanese director Lee was able to identify with Jake and Holt and to tell the story from the outsiders’ point of view, Wright believes.

“That is why he is able to tell a clear story, because he steps into it free of his blinders and sees it with human eyes,” says Wright. “Therefore, he humanizes it and lets the events in the film take on a life.”

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Wright, 33, who hails from Washington, didn’t start acting until his senior year in college. “I studied political sciences, and then I just started acting,” he says. “I guess it was a natural progression from politics to theater.”

He had considered going to law school but changed his mind once he began acting. “I went to NYU to grad school [in acting] for about two months, and then I quit. I kind of trained the old-fashioned way. I did a lot of regional and off-Broadway theater.

“I would go through periods of two months [of unemployment], and then I would get another play,” he says. “In the meantime, I wouldn’t do anything. I wouldn’t wait tables. I wouldn’t work in a bar. It was always my thought you are what you do. I wanted to act. I didn’t want to be a bartender.”

By the early ‘90s, Wright was frustrated with his stage career. So he left New York to try Los Angeles.

“I was fed up with having no money and just fed up with the routine of trying to get work,” he says. But when film work didn’t materialize quickly, he returned to New York, where he landed the role of the outspoken nurse Belize in the Broadway production of Tony Kushner’s 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama “Angels in America.” Wright ended up winning a Tony for his work.

“ ‘Angels’ was the first time I really comfortably considered myself an actor,” he says. “It was a culmination of the work I had put in before of learning the craft. I didn’t any longer consider myself a student. I said, ‘Now I got a grip on this acting thing.’ ”

The play also salvaged a sense of idealism. “I realized whatever forces at work were not letting me give up on the reason I had gone into acting,” Wright says. “I had been drawn into acting in the first place to say something. We can affect change with these stories that we tell. We can be part of something that is more than just some capitalist vacuum.”

The actor, who is currently in production on John Singleton’s remake of “Shaft,” says he misses his horse Bugs--to the point that he rented another movie Bugs was in.

“I fast-forward to see him,” Wright says with a warm smile. “He was the villain’s horse. I made a vow--I haven’t kept it though--that I wouldn’t do a movie unless a horse is in it after doing this one. But those movies are hard to come by.”