Onscreen, the actress Danielle Deadwyler has become known for expressing with her eyes what words rarely do. She can appear at once steely and heartbroken, fierce and fragile.
She has used this ability to great effect in the HBO Max dystopian drama “Station Eleven”; in Jeymes Samuel’s 2021 western, “The Harder They Fall”; and in Chinonye Chukwu’s 2022 historical drama, “Till,” in which she played the doting mother of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old whose gruesome murder in Mississippi in 1955 helped spark the civil rights movement.
Now, Deadwyler, 43, is applying her skill to R.T. Thorne’s first feature, the horror indie “40 Acres,” which is set in the near future. She plays a mother and former soldier, Hailey Freeman, who, alongside her partner, an Indigenous man named Galen (Michael Greyeyes), is preparing her brood for the harsh truths of their famine-decimated postapocalyptic life. They must fight threats from all sides, the scariest of which are bands of ferocious cannibals.
The family tries to balance survivalist reality, including grisly encounters, with serene farm life. Days are spent training the four children to be warriors while also honoring their heritage and their land, finding surprising joy in the small things. In his critic’s pick review for The Times, Robert Daniels wrote that “Deadwyler’s forceful energy fills the frame” and that she “lends power and humor to this lovingly stern mother.”
Hailey and her family are the descendants of African American farmers who settled in Canada after the Civil War, when the United States failed to fulfill Gen. William T. Sherman’s promise of 40 acres of land for Black Americans freed from enslavement.
“It’s a unique family — R.T. said he hadn’t seen Black and Indigenous families together onscreen,” Deadwyler told me in a video interview in June. “I hadn’t either, like this.”
These are edited excerpts from our conversation.
Often in dystopian movies and shows, we learn that history and heritage are essentially the first societal cornerstones to go because the dire circumstances demand a focus on the present only. But that’s not the case in this film.
R.T. said something great about it. He imagined a Black and Indigenous family in the future, and who would know how to survive? Of course it would be them. Michael Greyeyes said this: “We have always survived in the apocalyptic times.” Indigenous people have always done that. Black people have all always done that. Well then of course they would be thriving in some capacity in the future.
They use their old ways, right? Michael was teaching me certain things about land and Indigenous practices when it comes to agriculture. If you look at the production design of the home, there’s images from the 19th century in the house. They’re record-keeping in the way that the house is designed. You’ve got these kind of plates that look a certain way, the way the food is plated and held. And the way Galen forages for herbs. All of that is employed in the upkeep of this family.
Thorne tapped into his personal history to inspire your character and the story. What did you tap into to bring Hailey to life?
I moved with an intuitive spirit. I had already had some gun training, had done some projects with some military work behind it. I’m a dancer by nature, and that’s my first medium. I am a mother to a teenage son. I’m coming with a certain multigenerational understanding of mothering. I’m a Southerner. I’m a history major from undergrad and grad school, and so I’m weaving all of this knowledge and experience into R.T.’s script.
And day by day, we were crafting the narrative together because indie filmmaking is a constant surprise, and making sure that those things make sense on every level was critical for us.
The fear of outsiders was so acute in this movie, a dynamic that to a viewer could be compounded by the us-them mentality around us in real life. How does the movie speak to that, and why do you think it’s important that this film is happening now?
I was chilling with Malcolm Washington, my homie, [who directed Deadwyler in “The Piano Lesson”] and he just made me remember the value of “Parable of the Sower.” [The prophetic Octavia Butler novel is directly referenced in the film.]
I recently read it again, and I imagine that Hailey is kind of an extension of Lauren [the book’s protagonist]. Lauren’s trying to build community. She is believing in herself deeply. And I imagine Hailey had come from an extension of that in some kind of way. It was like, “[expletive] that! These people out of their damn minds. I’m not giving nobody else anything. The only community I need is my family. And to try to take anybody else on is a deep, deep challenge. And the only way I know to maintain family is to blockade everybody else out. We can participate in an economic system. We got a trading system. I got a surveillance system.”
She knows military training, and yet that is deeply problematic in trying to rear liberation-minded children and resistance-minded adults. This is what I’m thinking about in crafting Hailey and the dynamic of the family and the dynamic of society at present.
The Freemans are also ruthless. Why is it important that the good guys are also seen as imperfect or even cruel?
I think everyone’s going to love them. [laughs] That is complicated. I know people — their 13-year-olds are learning how to shoot right now or their 8-year-olds in Georgia are learning to shoot right now. How different than them is Hailey, right? For what reason? And in the context of what? She’s just awaiting vile [expletive] to come across her borders because they want to hurt her. This is defense. It’s just about what is most urgent for your milieu, and that’s how it’s justified.
Curiosity and the dangers of curiosity are also central in this movie’s scary world. Particularly in the risky decisions made by Hailey’s eldest, Emanuel (Kataem O’Connor). Why did that matter here?
If we’re going to hit all the Octavia quotes in this one [laughs]: Everything you touch touches you. God is change. Hailey can’t fend that off, can’t shoot change away, it’s going to happen. It’s happening in the mind as well as the body.
R.T. talked about writing this during the pandemic and feeling the effects of being isolated, and imagining what it means to have that kind of experience of wanting more and seeking more. And teenagers do that. They can’t help it — take these risks to feel liberated.
What corner of the postapocalyptic film canon do you think this movie claims? What sets it apart?
It’s the family, for me, that sets this apart. We can be completely entrenched in the need to fight, but what are you fighting for? Oh, somebody’s fighting for a memory of a loved one or fighting to get back to this place where they had already been.
This family, they’re fighting to be together. I think that’s a present state thing that we’re fighting for. People are just literally fighting to remain with their family, to have this togetherness and to survive.
Maya Salam is an editor and reporter, focusing primarily on pop culture across genres.
The post Danielle Deadwyler on Balancing Brutality and Family in ‘40 Acres’ appeared first on New York Times.
