Q: You’ve certainly played villains before. You can’t help but get so depressed listening to something so overwhelmingly negative. I watched the Phil Donohue shows that he was on in the early 80s, which taught me a lot about his mannerisms. I read “My Awakening,” which is Duke’s autobiography and kind of a thinly veiled “Mein Kampf.” I read books about him, I watched interviews with him. It was the happiest day of my life, followed by the worst month of my life when I did my research.

Then there was that moment where Spike Lee calls you personally to say you’ve got the film, and I was so thrilled. Q: Did you know much about Duke before this?Ī: I was aware of who he was in a general way. Grace spoke about the film by phone from New York. Then he could explore and get to the dark heart of Duke. The genial Grace, 40, who admits that he relishes challenges, first had to get past the vitriolic, no holds barred hate speeches he’d have to deliver in the film, which he made it through under the comforting guidance of Lee. Though he’s played his share of good guys - Eric on “That ’70s Show” - and bad guys - Venom in “Spider-Man 3” - and even had a crack at doing self-deprecating parodies of himself (“Ocean’s Eleven” and “Twelve”) - Topher Grace found he was dealing with a whole new animal when he took on the role of David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Louisiana chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in Spike Lee’s new film “BlackKklansman.” When Grace first heard that Lee was making a film based on the true story of Ron Stallworth, a black police officer who, in the 1970s, infiltrated and exposed the Klan by “passing for white” during a series of phone conversations, he got his hands on the script, and immediately knew that he wanted to play Duke, a man he considers not just villainous but also evil.

My Awakening by David Duke