By Bill Vaughan
Entertainment Writer
These are the best times for OMAR MILLER. He is currently taking a bow for his performance as Cornbread in one of 2025’s most acclaimed movies — Ryan Coogler‘s “Sinners.” After the film last week won the Best Cinematic and Box Office Achievement award at the Golden Globes, the world is now waiting to learn how many Oscar nominations it will receive when they are announced Jan. 22.
The actor, producer and director who also counts among his credits “CSI: Miami,” Boots Riley‘s “I’m A Virgo,” “The Last Days of Ptolemy Gray,” and “Miracle of St. Ana” for Spike Lee (who once considered him for a biopic of his famous lookalike — boxer Joe Louis) has always maintained that it is all about telling great stories.
Miller felt he was fulfilling that mission when he spoke with Tasty Clips in 2020 about his role in the CBS sitcom “The Unicorn” starring Walton Goggins, who soared last year with “The White Lotus” and “Fallout.”
“Right now, in the world dealing with all the grief and the loss and everyone who’s dealing behind the COVID pandemic and the American failure to contain this thing, it’s just super relevant,” he said.
Of CBS’ then announced diversity guidelines promising 50-50 casting of people of color in reality programming such as “Survivor,” and “Big Brother,” Miller believed it was a start.
“You have to recognize there’s a problem before you believe you can fix it,” he said. “I believe that now the world has recognized how much of an issue race is. In America, in particular. The onus is on us to actually move forward from here. Politically you are seeing it and in a lot of different ways what it is that people care about.”
“Some people are so committed to inequality and racism that they’re willing to hurt, maim, kill other people to maintain that status quo,” he added. “Others of us, on the other side, are so committed to progress that we’re willing to expose ourselves, our livelihoods to risk it to change things for the better for the future generation. We have to determine who we are as a people in the United States. Nobody can figure that out but us for us.”
At the time, Miller’s “Ballers” co-star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was rumored to be exploring a political future. Of that, he said, “You can’t count the big fella out on anything but given this last entertainer presidency and even the one before that with Ronald Reagan, I think we can do without actors being presidents. We’ve had our fair share of that.”
He revealed that the most recognition in his career and best party of his life came courtesy of his “8 Mile” star Marshall Mathers, aka the rapper Eminem. “100 percent! I can’t even explain. I can’t even say what was happening,” Miller said. “This party was outrageous. I mean one of the best and I’ve been to a lot of parties. This was a good time, Jack. A good old Detroit time. A grimy good time. There were basically six guys and 70 girls there. Man did we have a blast.”
As for the conversation on whether Eminem is the greatest rapper of all time, he said: “At the end of the day, if you’re talking about rhyming words, you’re going to be hard pressed to find somebody to beat him. But once again we have to address who we are as a people, because in the U.S., you can’t ever separate race from any other factor in someone’s life.
“That he is a white man in a primarily Black medium in this sense works against him,” Miller said. “It worked for him as far as wealth and finance, but it works against him as far as this all-time conversation.
“Obviously, he has a place somewhere in the lexicon of great rappers. That’s without question. The body of work shows that. So again, it is art. It’s subjective to what you’re looking for in a rapper.”
The L.A. native has been enjoying additional success as a voiceover actor with his work on “Rugrats,” as Raph in “Rise of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and as Finn in “The Lego Star Wars” movies for Disney+.
“I guess John Boyega was busy,” he joked. “So, they hollered at the kid, and I picked up the flag. This world of voiceover is such a different animal. Now I’m immersed in it. I must have done a thousand voiceover auditions before I got one job. I couldn’t get arrested. Now I’m out there. You check your boy’s voice on all kinds of stuff.”
For more than 11 years, Bill Vaughan has kept Wave readers up to date with the latest news in entertainment. Now, we are collecting some of those past columns into what we call the Best of Tasty Clips. To contact Vaughan, visit his social media pages on Facebook and Instagram or @tasty_clips, on X @tastyclips, and on LinkedIn to William Vaughan.
