On a recent Sunday morning in West Hollywood, the actress Danielle Deadwyler wore all white, clad in a pristine Tory Burch dress.
“You know what white represents?” she said. “Spiritually, it’s rebirth: You get baptized, you put on a white robe, and you allow yourself to be witnessed in a certain way and to be changed. I think I’m in the midst of all of that.”
Did she have a sense of where that change would take her?
“Hell no,” Deadwyler said. “But I’m open.”
Certainly, she appears headed in the right direction. After supporting roles in “The Harder They Fall” and “Station Eleven” established her as an actress to watch, Deadwyler’s career breakthrough came two years ago with the film “Till,” about the 1955 Mississippi murder that helped catalyze the civil-rights movement. For her deeply felt performance as Mamie Till, whose 14-year-old son Emmett was slain by white supremacists, Deadwyler won leading honors from the NAACP Awards, Gotham Awards and National Board of Review.
She’s every bit as powerful in Netflix’s “The Piano Lesson,” which premiered on the streamer last week and is once again earning the 42-year-old actress awards buzz. Based on the play by August Wilson, “The Piano Lesson” casts Deadwyler as Berniece, a widowed mother at odds with her brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington), in post-Depression-era Pittsburgh. Both siblings must contend with generational trauma that’s wrapped up in the fate of their family piano: Though Boy Willie wants to sell it to buy land, Berniece insists the piano should stay put, since it serves as a totemic reminder of what their enslaved ancestors have been through.
As Berniece deals with Boy Willie, rebuffs the preacher Avery (Corey Hawkins), who seeks to court her, and shares a surprising, erotically charged moment with her brother’s friend Lymon (Ray Fisher), Deadwyler feels compellingly real in the role. “I’ve never felt like I was watching Danielle in this, I never thought of her outside the role,” said Denzel Washington, who produced the film. Unlike other actors who are determined to show their work, Deadwyler simply embodies the character, Washington said: “If you can dissect it, then they’re probably not very good, right? It’s what you get from it that’s proof of what they’re doing — it’s what you feel.”
The ability to evoke that feeling is one of Deadwyler’s primary gifts — whatever her characters are going through, you’ll feel too — though in real life, the Atlanta-based actress is much lighter than you might expect from her often heavy roles. As she recalled picking on her co-star John David Washington in the ways that a sibling would, she couldn’t help but laugh. “It’s really me, I’m terrible,” she said. “That poor man, I feel bad! No, I don’t.” More laughter.
We met on the tree-lined terrace of a West Hollywood hotel, and as we spoke, a curious squirrel crawled closer on the eaves just a few feet away, determined to crash the interview. Deadwyler turned toward it. “You get out of here,” she said, grinning. “You don’t get to get the scoop first.”
Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.
When you’re doing a press tour for something “The Piano Lesson” or “Till,” how demanding is it compared to the time you spent on set?
Oh, they’re very different. Promo is a full day of being on, and it’s people giving energy to you in a certain way. It’s something different from morning to afternoon to night: You may do a breakfast in the morning where you’re talking to all kinds of members of different things, and then in the afternoon you’re doing screening Q & As, and in the evening you’re doing an awards gala.
With a production, that’s a succumbing, a different kind of enveloping. That creativity doesn’t feel draining in the same way that a promo tour does. Mind you, I put a different effort and practice into promo because I enjoy the conversation and I want to have a close reading of the work. People always say, “Oh, it gets boring saying the same thing over and over again.” Well, then don’t be boring! What are you doing to enrich the experience for yourself?
“The Piano Lesson” is directed by Malcolm Washington, produced by his father Denzel, and stars his brother John David. Before this movie, had you ever met any of the Washingtons? Maybe you ran into John David at a party?
No. I don’t be at the parties, I be in Atlanta. [Laughs.] I met Malcolm on Zoom. That’s my twin, an artistic twin.
What conversations did you and Malcolm have about the character?
We talked about Zora Neale Hurston and her being a woman of the era and probably an archetypal inspirational figure. Berniece’s erotic life became a major component as well: Are you actualizing yourself in the way you want to? Are you yielding or being fulfilled in your desires?
Do you think Berniece is conscious of her unfulfilled desires?
I think she quiets them because of the responsibility that she has toward her child and of presenting in a certain way. There were women who were bucking the system and doing what the hell they wanted to do, like blues women traveling the world. This ain’t her. She’s still very Southern, very Christian, and feels the need to move through that kind of traditional structure in order to find some kind of stability in life.
If stability was what she really wanted, she’d be with the preacher Avery, yet she resists him.
But that’s the tension, like does she really want to? You can’t totally give over because you know that there’s something has to be scratched that is unknown. That is a spiritual undertaking, a raw, intuitive desire that is not wholly just of the flesh but is the self, the spirit. Ancestral divination is imperative in order to get through to that, because they’re always there watching. They probably was like, “Girl, I know it looks good on paper but he’s not the one.”
And if they’re watching the kiss she shares with Lymon, they might be getting out their popcorn.
“Girl, this butter is hitting!” [Laughs.]
How did you figure out Berniece’s physicality? She holds herself in a very particular way.
I had a head start in that there’s a lineage between the ’30s and the ’50s, so with regard to “Till,” there’s a mode of womanhood that is extremely rigorous. Presentation is everything. And mind you, I’m very rough in my day-to-day life.
I don’t believe it.
I’m telling you, ask my son: He’d be like, “Where you going all dressed up?” So yeah, that femme performance is so defining of how to hold yourself, to be erect because matriarchs are the oaks of families. Also, Black folks at the time who were upwardly mobile were seeking to be something different than what they had not been afforded in the south, so they’re presenting prominence and pride with that physicality.
People who’ve worked with you praise your ability to sink into a role very easily. You’ve described it as a succumbing. Does it feel like you’re going someplace deeper?
People ask the question, “What was that experience like?” But it’s hard to know because you’re living the thing. Humans just do — there’s something beneath them that is moving the engine, and it has to be automatic in a way.
When you operate on those instincts and then you see what you’ve done later, does anything about your performance surprise you?
Yes, because I don’t watch playback.
Why not?
That is something to be yielded to my director, to my [director of photography]. We’re all in it together, and I have to trust them: I’m fighting for the heart, I’m not fighting for the frame. Plus it gives me the opportunity to rest some aspect of the self.
Did you always recognize the value of rest in your artistic process?
Hell no. Now you know I’m going to admit that! I’m just now getting to it.
How did you come to that?
When you’re dog ass tired, you think, “I should probably sit myself down.”
What do you feel when you’ve finished something as enveloping like “The Piano Lesson?”
I feel giddiness before and I’m sad when I’m done, especially when it’s so short. I could cry about it right now! You want to hit this poetry, you want to be with these people, you want to feel that energy, and you know that everything is temporary.
But there’s something to be said for an intense, temporary experience. You’ve done a lot of performance art, and in an interview with The New Yorker, you praised the ephemeral nature of it, saying, “A lot of the time I don’t want you to see it if you weren’t there.”
I know, but I don’t not get sad. It just makes me that much more driven to be present. I want to be with people, don’t you? Do you just want to be in the thing, or do you want to be with the people in the thing?
As some actors become more famous, it’s more difficult for them to be with people. They become too fortified. Is that something you work against?
I mind my business. It’s not about any of the extra stuff. I’m a simple person: I take my son to school every day when I’m at home, I make chicken wings and rice, I ask “Did you do your homework?” I’m very regular in that manner.
Two years ago, you told the Times that you did almost 100 auditions a year and that you hoped that “Till” would lead to more outright offers.
That was a thing, y’all, that was a thing. I still do auditions sometimes.
Do you?
Yeah. It’s not excessive — it’s not like 80 and 90 — but some people still want to know what they’re going to get.
By now, it had better be no more than the fingers on one hand.
I’m thinking of this year. Yeah, it’s still one hand now. Not two quite yet.
Even as you rise in the industry, you’ve stayed in Atlanta instead of moving to L.A or New York.
No, I’m not doing that. I like where I’m at. I like my proximity to my people, my proximity to land, to stillness and peace, of what I’ve known growing up and what I’ve developed in my adulthood. I am open to being in other places, but I know that grounding is substantial for who I have been reared to be and who I feel like I am becoming right now.
You don’t strike me as someone who has a problem staying steadfast to themselves, even in a business that can be very seductive.
Yeah, it’s fair to say that at this point. I’m older than other girls and I’m happy to have had the experiences that I’ve had so that I could come into it with this mind frame, because it can pull you. But I already know what it means to be pulled, right? I know what it means to be pulled as a mother, to be pulled for family, to be pulled as an artist. When you’re 20-something and this comes to you, that may be a bit more challenging, so I feel for them and I also want to encourage them: It’s OK to not.
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