More than a riff

“If Elvis Presley was the king of rock ‘n’ roll, then Muddy Waters was the god,” declares Jeffrey Wright, and he’s got a case.

After all, the legendary bluesman helped originate the music without which rock would never have been and is cited as a primary influence by the likes of Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and the Rolling Stones.

“So many musicians express their absolute adoration, love and respect for Muddy Waters,” says Wright. “He’s adored, he’s revered in a way that’s reserved for that seminal few. He couldn’t read or write but is somehow responsible for influencing half the popular music of the latter half of the 20th century and beyond. It’s a tribute to his genius and his honesty.”

On this overcast day in Beverly Hills, a hint of gray in Wright’s beard, the actor is nattily dressed in a close-fitting black suit and blue tie in a style reminiscent of late-’50s pop stars. He looks ready for a period album cover: “Three More From Jeffrey Wright.”

The Tony-, Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning actor appeared earlier this season as Gen. Colin Powell in Oliver Stone’s “W.” and recently reprised his spy-with-a-conscience take on CIA operative Felix Leiter in the Bond opus “Quantum of Solace.” This weekend will find him as the sharecropper-turned-Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Waters in “Cadillac Records” with Adrien Brody, Beyonce Knowles and Gabrielle Union. Among the other titans represented in the film are fellow Hall of Famers Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf and Willie Dixon.

“All those cats came from the same place. It’s almost as though there was just one collective bluesman within the bodies of a dozen or so guys, all from the same neighborhood in Mississippi,” Wright says. “They created this music; they dug it out of the dirt. Literally. It came out of songs of the field -- field hollering and things like that. Some of the first blues guitars were strings attached to the sides of shacks that they would strum, causing the whole house to act as a sounding board.

“Some of us knew more than others about the history of this music, but we all, in discovering the history of these people, fell in love and were energized in a way that celebrated that discovery.”

For an actor who had played guitar for years but didn’t consider himself anywhere near as sharp as of one of the most expressive blues ax men ever, convincing audiences he had the appropriate chops was a real challenge.

“It was particularly daunting on 1 1/2 takes,” he says of the average number of tries they had per scene. “We shot it in 28 days on a budget of less than $10 million, and there was never a sense that there was $10,000,001. It was a really tight schedule for a film, the logistics of which were fairly complicated. So that was a real concern of mine.”

Wright’s Waters lives around and within the grooves of his music -- it’s a startlingly charismatic rendition of a breathing, carnal person you can easily believe ripping a scalding riff out of thin air and growling, “I’m a man / I spell M . . . A . . . N.”

“The key, really, for me, was the music,” the actor says, “and the music contains a sexuality, contains a desire for freedom relative to that sexuality but also relative to social constraints and political constraints. There was, for me, very little separation between the art form and the man. . . . When he sings, ‘I’m a man’ [in the seminal blues hit ‘Mannish Boy’], it’s about his eroticism but it’s also about him as a social being and as a political being as well. Potent stuff.

“The music was a direct expression of language and culture and place. There wasn’t a lot of putting on airs in the middle of a Mississippi cotton field under the midday sun. So that kind of carnal, blood-filled drive lives in the music because it lived in the man. It’s such an honest expression of personality.”

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Where you’ve seen him

Jeffrey Wright is perhaps best known now as James Bond’s “brother from Langley,” CIA operative Felix Leiter, in “Casino Royale” and “Quantum of Solace.” Other memorable appearances include “Syriana” (2005) with George Clooney and Matt Damon, “Broken Flowers” (2005) with Bill Murray, HBO’s “Boycott” (2001, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.) and Ang Lee’s “Ride With the Devil” (1999). He made his first big impression on film audiences as the titular artist in Julian Schnabel’s “Basquiat” (1996), and the multiply honored actor really loaded up his awards shelf for his work in the Broadway and HBO versions of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” (Tony, Drama Desk, Golden Globe and Emmy awards).

-- Michael Ordona