Don Cheadle Talks Fight Night’s Many Reunions — and What’s Truly Sad About Real-Life Heist’s Aftermath

The following contains spoilers from the finale of Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist , now streaming on Peacock.

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There was no lack of body count as Peacock’s Fight Night , based on Jeff Keating’s true-crime podcast of the same name, came to a close.

Heading into the finale, three of the men involved in the heist pulled the night of the October 1970 Muhammad Ali-Jerry Quarry bout were shot dead, by each other. In the episode’s final hour, heist mastermind Richard “Cadillac Richie” Wheeler (Terrence Howard) was arrested by the Atlanta P.D., after being tricked into confessing on tape by Detective J.D. Hudson (Don Cheadle) and informant Gordon “Chicken Man” Williams (Kevin Hart).

In real life, multiple players in the heist were indicted, and then later, unceremoniously, found dead, alongside others, inside a car that had been riddled with bullets in the Bronx. The real-life Hudson famously said, in a page 47 New York Times story about the deaths , “It was just a question of who caught up with them first — the police or the victims. It appears the victims got there first.”

TVLine spoke with Cheadle about reuniting with a flurry of friends for Fight Night , doing right by the actual J.D. Hudson, and what made the outcome of the real-life heist truly sad.

TVLINE | Watching Fight Night , this felt like the kind of project where, much more than usual, the cast had a tremendous time working together. Did I read that right?
We did . I mean, I can only speak for myself but I had a great time, I had fun. It was for me kind of like “going home.” Working with everyone in this cast that I had worked with prior to this, but to do it in this kind of way, with this really interesting, entertaining story, and to do the dramatic stuff and the comedic stuff find a place where all that can live inside of all that great stylishness…. It’s a lot of good things in the bucket.

TVLINE | Who on the cast would you say you were you closest to, going into this?
Oh, I know them all, I’ve worked with all of them. I worked with Taraji [P. Henson] very closely in [the 2007 film] Talk to Me ; Terrence [Howard], I was a producer of [the 2004 movie] Crash and I put him in that; [fellow Marvel films vet] Sam [Jackson] and I have known each other many years and just worked together a couple years ago on Secret Invasion ; and Kevin [Hart] and I have known each other almost a decade, maybe a bit more. Kevin and I have been trying to find something to do together for a while. So for me, this was about getting to go back into the sandbox with all these guys that I had been there with in some capacy before, and finding a new thing to do. That was a lot of fun.

TVLINE | I enjoyed how there was a clear Ocean’s Eleven vibe to certain Fight Night segments, especially the finale. [ Cheadle plays Basher in the Ocean’s film franchise .]
Oh, that’s sweet. I haven’t watched any of it yet, but I understood what we were going for.

TVLINE | As I told Scott Caan last year, I’m that guy who’ll watch any Ocean’s movie to the end if I come across one in progress when channel surfing.
OK, I just walked away from Scott Caan not 15 minutes ago…. That is hilarious.

TVLINE | You are I are about the same age. What was your relationship with the 1970s?
Mostly in school. [ Laughs ] But also with the music, there was a lot of music, a lot of great artists. And it really was a time when so much change was happening. Coming out of the Civil Rights Act [of 1964], things were not unlike now, where things are pushing and pulling against freedoms. So, it was a very vibrant time. But it depended on where you were. It was very different if you were living in New York—

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TVLINE | Or Stamford, Connecticut, like me.
Or Stamford, Connecticut. Or, pick your place. Nothing was quite like the South at that time.

TVLINE | Did you feel a certain responsibility in playing one of the series’ more reality-based characters, one of the first Black police officers in Atlanta?
You want to get it right, and do the research. The script is the bible, our guide, but whenever you have the opportunity to actually depict someone who you can watch interviews of, and read transcripts of, and listen to them on a podcast…. J.D.’s all over the podcast [on which the TV series is based ]. There’s a responsibility because you want it to be good, but there’s an extra layer when somebody’s descendant can walk up to you and say, “What the f–k?!” [ Laughs ]

TVLINE | I was watching YouTube videos of J.D. Hudson , and you can feel the integrity in his very word.
Yes. Yes. He was a very serious dude — but also not without humor, and not without a clear understanding of irony. I like the J.D. that I got to research quite a bit.

TVLINE | I caught up on some New York Times clippings about the heist and the aftermath, and the way the series ended, the way justice was meted out… that’s not the way things played out in real life.
In “real life,” it was quite a bit of bloodshed. And kind of nobody got out. The sad part about it is that when you ask people how all of that happened, and what the punishment was as a result, it was “a bunch of Black people killing other Black people.” And it barely made the news.

TVLINE | Seriously. One of the clippings I found was maybe two column inches, and on page 25. The reporting on the deaths was page 47.
Exactly. Exactly. It didn’t rise to the level of something that was so newsworthy that we had to make sure we understood everything about it. It was just “something that happened to those people.”

TVLINE | And Gordon “Chicken Man” Williams, did he really become a pastor or is that an apocryphal tale?
No, he did. I think he did.

TVLINE | Who in Fight Night do you wish you got to have more scenes with?
I had half a scene with Taraji! Barely anything with Taraji. And I had barely anything with Terrence. It would have been cool to play with those guys a little bit more.

TVLINE | You and Samuel L. Jackson actually acted together for the very first time in that terrific Secret Invasion bar scene , and TVLine gave you two a Performer of the Week honorable mention for Fight Night ‘s interrogation room face-off. Has it been a delight to finally act in scenes opposite him in those last couple of projects?
Absolutely. I’ve known Sam a long time, and we’ve been trying to figure out — as we all do when we bump into people we respect and admire and like their work — “Well, do we have to put it together? What’s it going to be? What are we going to play? Brothers?” So yeah, it was a lot of fun to have the opportunity to do it then, and in Fight Night .

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