Moses Gunn (Rollerball) Rollerball
Moses Gunn was forty-six when he played Cletus, Houston's coach. He was already, by 1975, one of the most distinguished American stage actors of his generation — a co-founder of the Negro Ensemble Company, an Obie winner for Titus Andronicus in the Park, a Tony nominee for The Poison Tree — and one of the few film actors of his generation who had played Othello on Broadway.wikipedia
A late start and an Obie for Aaron
Gunn was born October 2, 1929, in St. Louis, Missouri, and did not start acting until he was thirty-two. He came to the theatre through Tennessee A&I State University and the University of Kansas, where he taught English and Latin before moving to New York in 1962 for the off-Broadway premiere of Jean Genet's The Blacks. He worked extensively in Joseph Papp's Shakespeare in the Park, winning the Obie for his Aaron in Titus Andronicus — a role that, in a New York Shakespeare Festival run, became one of the canonical American Aarons of the postwar period.
In 1968, with playwright Douglas Turner Ward, actor Robert Hooks, and manager Gerald Krone, Gunn co-founded the Negro Ensemble Company. The NEC became the principal training and producing house for Black American theatre in the 1970s and 1980s — Charles Fuller's A Soldier's Play (1982), Phylicia Rashad, Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, and Sherman Hemsley all passed through it.
Bumpy Jonas, then Cletus
Gunn's screen career through the 1970s was bracketed by two roles that did not look anything alike: Bumpy Jonas in Shaft (1971) — the Harlem crime boss whose missing daughter sets the film's plot in motion — and Joe Kagan, the gentle Black homesteader on Little House on the Prairie (1977–1981). Cletus, in Rollerball, sits between them, structurally closer to Shaft — a man with a network, a man who can be asked to find things out — but tonally closer to Little House — gentle, paternal, never raising his voice.
What Cletus does in the film
Cletus drills Jonathan on the left-skate weakness in the East Texas kitchen — "do that in Tokyo, they'll take your arm home for lunch" — and offers the worldbuilding ramble that places the audience in the corporate-society backstory: "Chicago's still a food city," he says, gesturing at the time "before the corporate wars, even before rollerball."b7
At the ranch party (b16), Cletus delivers the rising-action revelation. Above Bartholomew is the Executive Directorate, the names of whose members nobody knows anymore. The corporate hierarchy has gone anonymous to itself, and "they're afraid of you, Jonathan."b16
The structurally critical Cletus line comes much later. At MSG, mid-bloodbath, Cletus realizes what the no-substitutions/no-time-limit rules have done. From the Houston bench he shouts the line that Jonathan answers in the climax: "Nobody's gonna win this game!"b34 The rewinder pass on the wiki's backbeat file restored the speaker attribution of this line — for years it was sometimes attributed to Bartholomew in synopses — and confirmed that the line comes from Jonathan's own coach, on Jonathan's own bench. The climax is, therefore, not Jonathan vs. Bartholomew. It is Jonathan vs. his own teammates' pressure to end the game with the kill the rules require.b35
"Gunn's Cletus carries the most important relational beat in the film. He is the friend on the bench. He is the one who has worked the league for the answer. And he is the one, at the climax, who is asking Jonathan to be the killer the rules require — because he is on the Houston bench, watching his own team get destroyed, and he wants the game to end. Jonathan refuses his own coach. That's the climax." — Concentric Cinema (Rollerball)
After Rollerball
Gunn was Kintango in Roots (1977) — for which he received an Emmy nomination — and Booker T. Washington in Ragtime (1981). He worked steadily in television and film through the 1980s and 1990s — The Killing Floor (1984) was one of his strongest screen performances — and continued the stage career to the end. He died December 16, 1993, from complications of asthma, at sixty-four, in Guilford, Connecticut.
"He was a Black classical actor in a country that did not, in his lifetime, fully accommodate the category. He simply made the category." — BlackPast.org, Moses Gunn (1929–1993)