Jesse Williams Didn’t Drink While He Was on Broadway
“All of our scotch whiskey has a color, this one is Swiss Gold,” said the dapper man pouring small drams during Thursday’s tasting for Macallan’s newest offering, The Macallan James Bond 60th Anniversary release, a series of six bottles — one to signify each decade of the Bond franchise — and priced at a very on the nose $1,007. The evening went down at the historic 1926 Lloyd Wright-designed landmark, the Sowden House, in the heart of Los Feliz, which has been seen in Curtis Hansen’s L.A. Confidential and Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator.
The Macallan James Bond 60th Anniversary sold in an edition of 1,000 bottles for each decade and will be divided up between New York, Miami and Los Angeles markets and released one per month starting now. Decade 1, an homage to the 1960s Sean Connery-era Bond, features a package design that includes production sketches from 1964’s Goldfinger, 1965’s Thunderball and 1967’s You Only Live Twice.
The Sowden House was zhuzhed up for the black-tie affair with room after room dedicated to the art, history and spycraft of the Bond series and Macallan, and filled with both deep-pocketed Macallan collectors and Hollywood folk including Beck, Hollywood stylist Ilaria Urbinati, Bond franchise producer Barbara Broccoli and actors Jesse Williams, Samara Weaving and James Marsden.
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There was even a bar where you could order a drink only after you completed a ‘mission’ that included finding clues across the house and using a black light to detect the drink menu, which included libations with names like Decade I: Gold Obsession which was made with The Macallan Double Cask 12 Years Old, Calvados, pineapple, lemon, cinnamon and cider or the Decade V: License to Kill, made with The Macallan Sherry Oak 12 Years Old, Menta and cacao. This intrepid reporter stuck with one dram of Sherry Oak 18 Years, which sounds better when using a Sean Connery accent in your head.
“Macallan has come to the point where we need to start looking at other luxury industries and, in some ways, emulating the way they operate within the luxury space,” said Kieron Elliott, senior private client relationship manager for the Macallan for the Americas. Elliott, a jovial Scotsman, with a short beard and a shorn head and who hails from Airdrie, Scotland, was dressed in a white three-piece suit — “Once upon a time, I was a fit model for Valentino,” he said — and was burring at The Hollywood Reporter about the long history of the company. “We have had collectors and private clients, ostensibly for 200 years — we turn 200 next year — but we’ve never had an official department up until a year and a half ago for these collectors.”
As for how he sees the Hollywood market for Macallan and how the maker works with their connoisseurs, Elliott replied, “So there’s multiple levels to it. There are people who spend millions on the Macallan — a bottle of 1926 Macallan sold at auction in 2019 for 1.9 million dollars — all the way down to somebody who’s just discovered the brand, and to be honest, I love them all. I love somebody who has just come to the brand and their eyes are wide with excitement. They thought whiskey was this horrible rotgut and they realized that it’s this wonderful, luxurious moment to sit and savor.”
It’s the savoring part that stands out for Williams, who was dapperly dressed in a very British Thom Sweeney shawl-lapel dinner suit and a wool silk dress shirt. Williams said he came to whiskey for a similar reason.
“I didn’t drink during production during the show,” said Williams, referring to the Broadway revival of Richard Greenberg’s 2002 play Take Me Out, for which Williams was nominated for a Tony Award. “It was eight shows a week and I was the lead and it was really brutal. I was learning how to control my voice. I was learning about my vocal power — I had to get a steroid shot once in my vocal fold because of the damage filling up an 1,100 seat theater every night for eight times a week. But as things wound down and we ran into the Tonys, there was some imbibing happening. Scotch is one of my go-tos.”
Williams likes Scotch, he continued, “because you savor it, almost out of respect, it’s something that is cultivated and there is a level of complexity to it. The fact that you are savoring it is part of the enjoyment and a part of what you’re trying to decompress from in the first place.”
He likes Bond for the complexity too: “With Bond, there is this guy who’s dashing and handsome and intelligent, he’s articulate and experienced the world and he’s self realized. This is a model, I think for a lot of us, for masculinity. Having that right model, of knowing yourself and your power. I think in some ways there is a similar cultural connection between Macallan and Bond, which are both densely layered and substantial, but they don’t have to show off and be flashy.”
When asked how these models of masculinity and the idea of being self-realized impacts his drive for social justice, Williams, who is board vice chair of the civil-rights group the Advancement Project, replied, “It comes down to we are all moved — regardless of your attachment with social justice or not — and motivated by and encouraged by attainable goals and to things that you think you can do. You see people who have some similarity to you — you can find something in them that you relate to — and that’s aspirational. You think, ‘Oh, I can climb that mountain,’ and for whatever reason, because I’m left-handed or I have the same color hair as that man, or the right accent, you can look at that person and say, ‘They did it, maybe I can too.’ That exists certainly in spaces of when people are looking for a more equitable existence.”
Added Williams, “It’s folks fighting for a better life and it’s not a selfish endeavor. It’s for a collective.”
THR also spoke further with Elliott about how Macallan works with clients and just how one goes about procuring not just the one bottle of the James Bond release, but the whole limited-edition collection covering all six decades, which comes in its own Globetrotters suitcase and retails for about $20,000.
“If you’re a collector and you’re known to me, then you may be offered the opportunity to buy the Globetrotter kits — there’s only 49 in the U.S. and all of those are spoken for,” he said. “It’s a long journey but if somebody is a collector already, and they want to be part of the private client program, I’m the person to reach out to and we have a chat and we can see where we can take it.”
Elliott continued, “My advice, pick up the phone and call me, I’m easy to find, because there are not that many Kieron Elliott’s out there in Los Angeles.”
Speaking more broadly about how he works with clients, Elliott offered, “When I find somebody who is referred to as a private client — or I think might be a private client — the first thing I do is have a chat with them and find out their strategy. Find out what they have in their collection, find out what sort of money they want to spend. It’s not that I’m weeding out anyone, it’s more I’d like to tailor our conversations to what they are looking for.”
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