Willem Dafoe and Corey Hawkins in ‘The Man in My Basement.’
Andscape
“When I read this book for the first time in the mid-2000s, it was because my grandfather actually had a copy of it,” Corey Hawkins explains as we discuss his latest film, The Man in My Basement, adapted from the legendary author Walter Mosley’s titular novel. “I’m not sure if he read it because we never spoke about it, but he had a copy.”
Set in the 90s in the African American neighborhood of Sag Harbor, New York, Hawkins plays Charles Blakey, a man who is out of work, out of luck, and on the verge of foreclosure on his ancestral home. A knock on the door from a mysterious businessman, Anniston Bennet, played by Willem Dafoe, brings a bizarre and lucrative proposition to rent his dusty stand-up basement out for the summer and receive enough money to clear his debts for good.
Once Charles accepts, he finds himself led down a terrifying path that confronts his family’s ghosts and locks the men in a terrifying puzzle, at the heart of it, race, the source of their traumas, and the root of all evil. The Man in My Basement lands in theaters on Friday, September 12, 2025, before streaming on Hulu later this fall.
‘The Man In My Basement’ Unlocked Something For Corey Hawkins
“I remember being taken aback by my proximity to the characters in the book, “Hawkins, known for Straight Outta Compton and In the Heights, continues. “I grew up in Washington, DC, which at the time was known as Chocolate City. There were a lot of incredible black, middle-class working professionals, and reading this book that talked about Sag Harbor and that incredible historic enclave up there started by these black women was a beautiful melding.”
“I got curious about Charles, and I was strangely like, ‘Do I see myself in this guy?’ Do I see my uncles or my friends?’ That was years ago, and then I put it down, as you do with these novels. You create these imaginative worlds, and then to come back to them with this adaptation, and it’s really interesting. Walter Mosley is an incredible noir writer, and he writes these amazing characters that center blackness in different periods and different eras. I have always been a fan of his world.”
Filmmaker Nadia Latif makes her feature directorial debut with The Man in My Basement. She first read the book around 20 years ago and has always seen it as a film.
“She had some deep connection to it,” Dafoe shares. “She’s crazy smart, very articulate, cultured, and what really made me convinced that she could do it was all the preparation she gave me. She gave me a lot of material to look at, which was a combination of African American cinema, books, interviews on YouTube of mercenaries, and various people connected to colonial Africa. There was a lot to work with. The fact that she was not American, she grew up in the Sudan, and she’s black and she’s a woman, all that factored into a very personal take on this material.”
Hawkins adds, “Nadia was very purposeful in terms of these characters coming together, because it is acting, but, like these characters coming together, we had that spontaneity, because every time I walked down those steps into the basement, there was always something slightly different or unnerving.” The Man in My Basement, a psychological thriller, involves Hawkins and Dafoe’s characters descending into a dark rabbit hole of confessions and confrontations.
“Willem has this unquantifiable presence, and that’s what makes him who he is. When we got into a lot of those conversations and unnerving debates about good versus evil and how those things manifest in ourselves, I’m listening to the words come out of his mouth for the first time as he sits across from me with these bars in front of him and in this character’s basement,” the 24: Legacy actor continues. “It’s a different cinematic language down there. It’s a different emotional language than it is upstairs for Charles. It was just thrilling to be able to unpack those secrets because it really was like a game, like me and Willem would throw curveballs.”
Anniston Bennet, played by Willem Dafoe, in ‘The Man in My Basement.’
Andscape
How The Cast Maintained The Tension In ‘The Man In My Basement’
The leads didn’t have the opportunity to rehearse extensively before filming began. That’s something that Dafoe, known for his prolific body of work, which includes Platoon, Nosferatu, Spider-Man, The Florida Project, and Streets of Fire, believes helps give the conflict even more power and feel more natural.
“We would shoot,” he recalls. “There wasn’t extensive blocking, because the space is quite simple, so when we’re playing those basement scenes, we’re trying to make contact with what we have to say and what we want from the other person. I didn’t try to surprise Corey. You try to surprise yourself when you try to reach, to find some sort of, for lack of a better word, truth. We’re working together, I’m not trying to provoke a reaction in him, I’m using him, and he’s using me because we’re using each other’s characters to arrive at some peace with this, with our deep, dark secrets and the pain we’re both going through in very different ways.”
Part of that process meant not taking breaks when things got intense.
“It was relentless,” Hawkins laughs. “Their interaction breathes, but it also is uncomfortable, and I think anytime you feel like you might want to take a break from that, or step away, is when we leaned into it. I was what I like to call running with stallions. You get down there with these thoroughbreds, and I’m only as good as Willem allows me to be and vice versa, so we played off each other. Nadia was like a composer balancing these two instruments, but instruments of maybe each other’s destruction.”
“It was an interesting process working with him, and I valued every single moment of it. It was very tiring, and at the time I was also training for a marathon in Wales, where we were filming. We also saw a rugby game together in Cardiff. It was our first time going to see a rugby game, and we had a blast, because we didn’t know what the hell was going on.”
Corey Hawkins plays Charles Blakey in ‘The Man in My Basement.’
Andscape
Ghosts Of The Past Live On In ‘The Man In My Basement’
Despite being a quintessentially American story, The Man in the Basement was filmed in Bridgend, South Wales, in the UK, a town located 20 miles west of Cardiff, the Welsh capital, and 20 miles (32 km) east of Swansea, Wales’ second-largest city. Swansea also happens to be the city where I grew up in the 80s. A predominantly white community at the time, it was almost the community Hawkins and his character knew growing up. However, it mirrored Dafoe’s experience.
“I didn’t assume that Swansea and the parts of South Wales we were filming in had particularly high populations of black people, but I think it has changed a lot since then. It’s actually incredible how much it resembled Sag Harbor.” Hawkins muses. “Nadia also set the film in the 90s, versus the 2000s, for various reasons, including geopolitical ones. Wales was incredible to shoot in, because it really does have the water, the nature, it has structures, and it felt like the village of Sag Harbor. Even outside of Sag Harbor, in those historic areas around Azurest and Ninevah Beach, when you think of East Hamptons, you don’t necessarily think about this black community that makes that community tick beautifully.”
Dafoe continues, “The only black people I saw when I was a child were Africans at the local Institute of Paper Chemistry. There was no large black population where I was, but then I lived in New York for a long time. To understand the perspective of the Charles character, and also believe that Aniston was a credible character, I had to do a deep dive. I had to educate myself about certain things that are not of my experience.”
“It had more to do with identity, history, and what contributes to how people see themselves. It’s also interesting that Nadia understands the difference between the African experience and the African American experience. I found her very smart, very sensitive, not judging, but very sharp in her analysis of certain topics about history, power, colonialism, and race relations.”
(Left to right) Corey Hawkins, Nadia Latif and Willem Dafoe attend the premiere of ‘The Man in My Basement’ during the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival in Toronto, Ontario.
Getty Images
We round out the chat over Zoom, as both Dafoe and Hawkins are premiering the film at the Toronto Film Festival, discussing the theory that Anniston Bennet, the mysterious and maleficent individual who enters Blakey’s life, turning it upside down, isn’t actually real but is instead a manifestation of generational trauma and wickedness of the real world. Dafoe is the first to answer.
“Because I had to play him, I had to believe he exists,” he says. “I don’t know how you play a ghost. I think it doesn’t matter, as long as your feet are held to the fire, to question some of the topics and some of the situations that are embedded into the film. Once again, I had to do the research to believe that he was a credible character, and I think he could have existed.”
“That’s a great question,” Hawkins laughs. “I think Nadia would have a different answer than I would. I won’t say what my answer is, but the allowance of the possibility of that, especially after you’ve seen the film twice, is what really makes The Man in My Basement percolate in people’s thoughts. At the end, the door is open, and who is inside the cage, and that curiosity has got the best of Charles, digging into that legacy. How many people see Aniston or know that he’s down there? What is the secret? Why is it a secret? There are all of those questions, and I think it could be up for interpretation.”