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Don Cheadle confessed it was nice to go out on a high note after the way Ocean’s Twelve was trounced in reviews. “Yeah, after people want to come up and tell you in your face, ‘Hey, 12 sucked!’ You know, it’s like the movie that people have no compunction about telling you they didn’t like. Those movies are what they are. It’s a franchise; it’s fun. I enjoyed those guys. I feel I’m like the only one besides Steven Soderbergh that’s working in those because I’m trying to f**king wrestle this dumb accent down, not that the accent is dumb but my attempt to work with it is not always successful.

I feel I’m the one who’s in the trailer, they’re out there playing basketball, and I’m going over a diction book going, ‘I, I, A, A.’ You know? They’re frustrating for that, but you know, look, they’re just puffy and a nice little piece of popcorn. If people like it, that’s great. It’s a cry for peace, that’s what the Ocean’s series is.”

Looking Into the Future: Cheadle’s going to be pretty busy over the next year. “I’m starting a film in September, hopefully, if all things go forward, called Traitor. I have a documentary that I’ve produced coming out in October about activism in Darfur and then hopefully next year pre-strike I’ll get this Miles Davis project up and running.”

Cheadle offered a tease of what writer/director Jeffrey Nachmanoff’s Traitor is all about. “It’s a movie about someone who infiltrates a cell, an agent that infiltrates a cell and maybe has gone over and isn’t an agent anymore, but may actually be on the side of the extremists. A Muslin American.”

As for the Miles Davis project, Cheadle has already begun practicing.

“You know the lessons, I’ve been touring so much and traveling so much, I haven’t been able to jump back into the lessons so much but I play every day. “

Asked if he sounds good, Cheadle replied, “Yeah, it’s a work in progress, I’ll tell you that much. It [doesn’t] sound good to me, but I’m not going to play in the movie. I just have to play so I’m comfortable with it. We have all of Miles’ archival music. I’d never try to play it personally.”

A Subject Close to His Heart - The Darfur Situation: Cheadle explained what’s going on now. “Well, it’s hasn’t changed that much for the people on the ground. I mean, it’s still over 2 million people displaced in camps on the Chad/Sudan border and there’s still attacks by the Janjaweed. The government is obfuscating and saying it’s not true and the numbers, there’s been a thousand people killed and we know it’s 200,000 shy of the real number. The US made a unilateral move as we’re want to do in my opinion, a very big mistake to try to impose sanctions and certain asset freezes and name a couple of other people on the list of those who’d be potentially tried as war criminals. But none of the upper level people have been targeted and we didn’t work with the UN security council so once again we stepped out on our own to try...”

How to Get Involved: Cheadle says it’s easy. “You can go online and go to The IRC.org and find out. You can go to Google Earth and click Darfur and it will show you a map of the villages that have been burned, you know what I mean? First, find out what is going on and then when people ask me what they can do, I ask them what can you do? Take stock in what you have. You guys are in this unique position because you all have the power of the pen and the power of the article and you can talk to a great number of people. But people who are involved in church groups and in school groups and whatever civically you do in your community, all of those things help to raise the din and raise the level of noise and get our leaders doing what we want them to do.

In this country we have a great process coming up called the elections and these debates are coming up. We’ve worked really hard to interject that question into the debates and make sure all of these people who either have been to the region or at least talked about it. We have Brownback, Clinton, McCain, Obama, Gov. Richardson, Senator Biden, they’ve all been to the area or talked about it or seen it. We want to hear how they’re going to make it a part of their platform and what they plan to do about it.

We have the Olympics coming up in 2008. The Chinese are sponsoring it and their motto is One World, One Dream but they buy 60% of the oil from Sudan, so you can argue that they’re underwriting a great portion of that genocide. There’s places to throw the light and there’s places to push and we just think we’re at a period of time where we haven’t been before. A number of these watershed moments are up so we want people to help push on those.”