This is a big week for Denver-raised celebrities Don Cheadle and Bowen Yang.

Cheadle is more often associated with his Kansas City birthplace and sadly remains an unrepentant Chiefs fan, even though he graduated from Denver East High School in 1982. He’s starring in a new TV miniseries streaming on Peacock called “Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist,” along with Terrence Howard, Taraji P. Henson and Samuel L. Jackson.

It’s billed as “the infamous story of how an armed robbery on the night of Muhammad Ali’s historic 1970 comeback fight transformed Atlanta into ‘The Black Mecca.’”

Cheadle is a reluctant superstar, one who tolerates press opportunities not for his own aggrandizement but to call attention to humanitarian causes like his nonprofit The Sentry, which works to take down predatory networks that profit off of war crimes in Darfur, Zimbabwe and elsewhere.

Cheadle is the featured guest this week on NBC talk personality Willie Geist’s popular celebrity interview podcast “The Sunday Sitdown.” Cheadle spent much of it talking about growing up in Kansas City, Nebraska and Denver.

By the time Don was 11, the Cheadle family had settled into a quiet neighborhood in southeast Denver. Cheadle immediately got the acting bug playing Templeton – “if I remember correctly, rather famously,” he said – in a fifth-grade production of “Charlotte’s Web” at Holm Elementary School.

“You may have heard of it,” Cheadle told Geist. (It was apparently written up in one of the Denver dailies.)

“I don’t know why, but I was very serious about that part,” Cheadle said – and that seriousness set the tone for much of the rest of his working life, which has included an Oscar nomination for “Hotel Rwanda” – though Cheadle regularly decries awards for turning art into competition.

Cheadle talked at length with Geist about the value of his own arts education in music and theater – and the teachers who set him on his path. And he was naming names: Like Holm music teacher Barbara Althouse (who later also taught tiny future Colorado Rockies pitcher Kyle Freeland), and legendary Denver East theater teacher Catherine Davis.

You can’t underestimate what it means for a young person to have dedicated teachers, Cheadle said, “who are inspired and excited for you and really happy and joyful about you exploring these various things.”

Cheadle also discovered jazz at East, where he was a member of the school’s prestigious student jazz combo playing the alto saxophone under the tutelage of band director Jerry Noonan and alongside future legend Ron Miles, who died in 2022.

“I just had an amazing school experience,” Cheadle said. “I was kind of just a musician in junior high school, but when I got to high school, theater kind of kicked back into high gear. And I had a great theater teacher named Cathy Davis, who now lives in Chicago, and I still stay in touch with her. She really gave us a lot of insight into studying the craft and method acting. We wrote our own plays with her, and we did a lot of improv comedy, and we just really got to get completely enveloped in what ‘the craft’ was and how to express ourselves and how to find our voices.

“I didn’t even realize until much later how much she had really given me.”

Yang up for another Emmy

Bowen Yang, a 2008 graduate of Aurora’s Smoky Hill High School, has been nominated for a 2024 Emmy Award – his fourth for his work on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.” And here’s a true “this is your life” story: Yang’s Smoky Hill classmates named him “most likely to be a cast member on Saturday Night Live.” There’s even a certificate.

Yang, whose SNL characters range from a gay Oompa Loompa to the iceberg from the U.S.S. Titanic, is nominated for the third time in the Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series category. He also received an Emmy nomination in 2019 for his writing on “SNL.”

Much attention will be on Yang and the show when “Saturday Night Live” returns to NBC for its 50th season on Sept. 28. But that’s just one iron in Yang’s fire. He plays Pfannee, a friend of Glinda, in the two-part movie adaptation of “Wicked,” the first of which will be released Nov. 22.

He is also co-host of a popular podcast called “Las Culturistas” with Matt Rogers and has four other movie projects in various stages of production.

But first up: The Emmys.

“I feel more grateful (for the nomination) this year,” Yang told the Hollywood Reporter, after Season 48 was cut short by strikes. “There was this really truncated, unresolved feeling when the strikes happened and no one had a chance to say goodbye. This year we got to look back on two full seasons of stuff, and it’s been a very sentimental, interesting process.

“I’m going to go so far as to say that me being recognized in this category is a great reflection on the whole cast. We’re only as good as the whole ensemble.”

He’s up against some insane competition, including Ebon Moss-Bachrach of “The Bear,” Paul Rudd from “Only Murders in the Building “ and Tyler James Williams from “Abbott Elementary.”

The 2024 Primetime Emmy Awards will be held on Sunday (Sept. 15) at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles and will be broadcast from 6-9 p.m. on ABC. This year’s hosts are father-and-son actors Eugene Levy and Dan Levy.

Blink and you missed it

Weirdly, the Television Academy already has given out most of this year’s Emmy Awards at two ceremonies honoring achievement in areas like ​​hairstyling, makeup, sound editing and visual effects – without having to, you know, actually give any of those many underappreciated artists any prime-time exposure.

To throw us off the scent, though, the Emmy geniuses also went ahead and announced two of the most anticipated awards of this year’s ceremony: Jamie Lee Curtis and Jon Bernthal as guest actors in “The Bear.” Not to rip open a scab, but I’ve been waiting for 18 months for Curtis to finally get her strike-delayed (nationally televised) due for turning in one of the great performances for any sized screen as the alcoholic family matriarch with narcissistic personality disorder and a turkey baster in her hand.

It’s a joke that “The Bear” is considered a comedy by the Emmy Awards in the first place. And who knows? Maybe that’s why they buried the most monumental achievement of Curtis’ career between the sound mixing and the costuming.

Speaking of, perhaps Colorado’s most-honored Emmy darling of all is likely choreographer Mandy Moore, a graduate of Summit High School. She came away with a nomination (but rats, not a win) for her inspired work choreographing Ryan Gosling’s “I’m Just Ken” routine at the Oscars. For the record, Moore now has 13 nominations and three wins. I can’t think of another Coloradan who can likely match that.