Mario Van Peebles is an accomplished actor and director.  Past acting roles include Corporeal Jones in Clint Eastwood’s “Heartbreak Ridge” (1986) for which he received an NAACP Image Award, the role of Malcolm X in Michael Mann’s “Ali” (2001), and “Baadassss!” (2003), in which he played his father, Melvin Van Peebles, and received a nomination for Best Actor for the 2005 NAACP Image Awards.  Television work includes “Ten Thousand Black Men Named George,” “Crown Heights,” and the groundbreaking comedy series “Rude Awakening.”  Past theater roles include “War Letters,” produced by the Sundance Theatre Lab at the Canon Theatre, “Oak and Ivy,” and “Waltz of the Stork,” directed by his father.

As a director, Van Peebles earned a Director’s Guild Award Nomination for his made for TV film, M”alcolm Takes A Shot” (1990).  He also directed and co-produced “Panther” (1995), a film about the Black Panther Party, for which he won the Silver Leopard Award at the Locarno Film Festival, and the critically-acclaimed “Baadassss!” (2003), which was nominated for three Independent Spirit Awards for Best Feature, Best Director, and Best Screenplay, as well as an NAACP Award for Outstanding Independent or Foreign Film.

Van Peebles will next be seen in “Carlito’s Way: The Beginning,” a film about Carlito Brigante, the 1960′s heroin czar of Harlem.