Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson' AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Fresh Air

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson') to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Go to PodExtra AI's podcast page (Fresh Air) to view the AI-processed content of all episodes of this podcast.

Fresh Air episodes list: view full AI transcripts and summaries of this podcast on the blog

Episode: Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'

Author: NPR
Duration: 00:44:16

Episode Shownotes

Danielle Deadwyler stars in the Netflix adaptation of the August Wilson play The Piano Lesson. She spoke with Tonya Mosley about her journey from the Atlanta theater scene to the big screen, her three masters degrees, and playing Mamie Till, mother of Emmett, in the 2022 movie Till. Also, our

book critic Maureen Corrigan shares her top 10 books of 2024. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Summary

In this episode of Fresh Air, actress Danielle Deadwyler discusses her role as Bernice in the Netflix adaptation of August Wilson's 'The Piano Lesson.' She reflects on the symbolism of the piano as an heirloom and its connection to family heritage amidst the struggles of Jim Crow America. Deadwyler highlights her meticulous preparation for the role and how her experiences in the Atlanta art scene influenced her journey. She also shares insights on portraying Mamie Till in the film 'Till,' emphasizing the significance of storytelling, especially around Black womanhood and legacy in her artistic endeavors.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson') to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_00
This message comes from Capital One. Your business faces unique challenges and opportunities. That's why Capital One offers a comprehensive suite of financial services backed by the strength of a top 10 commercial bank.

00:00:12 Speaker_00
Visit CapitalOne.com slash commercial. Member FDIC.

00:00:17 Speaker_03
This is Fresh Air, I'm Tanya Mosley, and my guest today is actress Danielle Dedweiler.

00:00:23 Speaker_03
She's known for her powerhouse performances in shows like the HBO Max dystopian series Station Eleven, the Netflix western The Harder They Fall, and the critically acclaimed film Till, where she portrays Mamie, the mother of Emmett Till, whose brutal murder in the 50s became a flashpoint in the civil rights movement.

00:00:42 Speaker_03
Danielle Dedweiler now stars in the new Netflix adaptation of August Wilson's The Piano Lesson as Bernice, a widowed single mother living in 1930s Pittsburgh, locked in a fierce battle with her brother, Boy Willie, over the family's heirloom piano.

00:00:59 Speaker_03
It was a family production behind the scenes,

00:01:02 Speaker_03
Denzel Washington produced it, his son Malcolm directed, and his other son John David stars opposite Deadweiler as the boisterous boy Willie, an enterprising sharecropper from Mississippi who wants to sell the piano to use the money to buy the land his ancestors worked on as slaves.

00:01:19 Speaker_03
Deadweiler's character Bernice insists the piano stay in the family. As the siblings battle it out, they are haunted by the ghosts of their past. Danielle Deadweiler grew up performing, but didn't start her professional career as an actor.

00:01:34 Speaker_03
She has three master's degrees and spent time teaching elementary school before returning to the stage. Her first big break was as Lady in Yellow in the play for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enough.

00:01:48 Speaker_03
Danielle Dedweiler, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here. I am very curious. You know, almost every Black actor in theater that I've spoken to talks about this moment.

00:02:02 Speaker_03
There is a moment where they first experience Wilson's work, August Wilson, and they talk about it in a romantic way, in a way that almost was like an awakening. Do you remember when you first encountered his plays?

00:02:19 Speaker_06
I remember seeing Seven Guitars on Broadway. You know those people? That is your uncle or that is your cousin or your aunt or whomever. It is an awakening. It's rupturing to see that on stage.

00:02:40 Speaker_06
blackness in its fullness, the rhythms and the silences and the beats and the combustion and just the electricity of what it means to come from a certain private cultural space, to see that magnified, it is deeply awakening.

00:02:57 Speaker_06
And then I've seen it, you know, in numerous other ways, right? Like I'm from Atlanta. And so a lot of my mentors, my OGs, were people who did these works

00:03:10 Speaker_03
Because you were in the theater scene in Atlanta.

00:03:12 Speaker_06
I am deep in the theater scene of Atlanta. That's everything about how I approach art in all forms. But, you know, Kenny Leon's True Colors Theater Company, the Alliance Theater, these are spaces where I was going to see Wilson's work.

00:03:29 Speaker_06
And I know that he worked, you know, extremely closely with Kenny. And so these are the folks who reared me. These are the people who I saw doing this work and understood the kind of performative quality that I wanted to inhabit.

00:03:42 Speaker_06
Those are the people who instilled in me how to do it.

00:03:47 Speaker_03
Let's talk a little bit about the piano lesson because the story goes like this. There's boy Willie who has this idea that selling the family piano and buying land in Mississippi with that money is going to maybe unlock power and prosperity.

00:04:05 Speaker_03
And your character, Bernice, wants to preserve this hard-won freedom by keeping the family piano. But there is this undercurrent, and the undercurrent is the fact that they're living during Jim Crow.

00:04:21 Speaker_03
Can you talk about the symbolism of the piano as an heirloom to articulate this larger story of this time period, a black family in 1930s Pittsburgh.

00:04:33 Speaker_06
Yes, the piano is more so an altar, a spiritual representation of connectivity for the both of them. Boy Willie's is moving towards this notion of value and power. And Bernice's is more erotic.

00:04:59 Speaker_03
And when you say erotic, you don't mean like sexual erotic.

00:05:03 Speaker_06
Well, I mean, those things hint, but it is about life force. It's about vitality. It's about manifesting a certain kind of self and the energy that you employ.

00:05:15 Speaker_06
And the piano is the conduit for both of them to get to that, even though they're both in denial of where they are to go. His presumption is to go towards economic growth, physical land growth. and a personal power, right?

00:05:37 Speaker_06
An individualistic power, which is very much driven in the moment of 1936 America, right? There's an industrial, you know, happening in the North, but, you know, wanting to obtain a certain capital empowerment is what he's moving towards.

00:05:56 Speaker_06
Hers is moving towards the North, but not necessarily in the industrial manner. It's just a seeking of upward mobility. and what it looks like to have a good job and to imbue that into Maritha with good schooling.

00:06:11 Speaker_03
And Maritha's her daughter.

00:06:13 Speaker_06
Yeah, yeah. Both of their desires through the piano are stemming from trauma, stemming from grief and loss. And the conflict is over how to get to this upward mobility, whatever that really means.

00:06:32 Speaker_03
Right. That trauma, that loss, one of the losses is Bernice and Boy Willie's father, Boy Charles, who died over this piano. And I want to play a clip.

00:06:44 Speaker_03
It's a climactic point in which you're speaking to your brother about the choices your father made and the harm it caused.

00:06:52 Speaker_03
And in this scene, you're talking to boy Willie, played by John David Washington, who is really, really trying to persuade you to let him sell this piano. And let's listen.

00:07:05 Speaker_04
You always talking about your daddy. But you'll never stop to look at what his foolishness cost your mama. 17 years worth of cold nights in an empty bed for what? For a piano? For a piece of wood? To get even with somebody? I look at you.

00:07:29 Speaker_04
And you're all the same. You, Papa Boy Charles, Whining Boy, Joker, Crawley, you're all alike. All this thieving and killing and thieving and killing and what it ever lead to. More killing and more thieving. I ain't never seen it come to nothing.

00:07:43 Speaker_04
People getting burnt up, people getting shot, people falling down their wells. It'll never stop.

00:07:50 Speaker_03
That was my guest today, Danielle Deadweiler, in the film The Piano Lesson. Oh, that was such a powerful scene, Danielle.

00:07:57 Speaker_03
And can you describe the burden you carry in this story, your role as you're really the sole woman besides your young daughter in this narrative? Right.

00:08:09 Speaker_06
We've got a host of other beautiful women that are hanging out in the bar, right? Yes, right, right. But the soul woman articulating a kind of agency in the space amongst men.

00:08:25 Speaker_06
And that burden is very much a gendered understanding of what it means to labor. What it means to, who are you laboring for, and what are you laboring for?

00:08:37 Speaker_06
And in this moment, she's articulating that they do not understand what it means to be her mother. The loss that she endured as a result, which is as a result of him, their father fighting to get the piano, taking back power.

00:08:57 Speaker_06
But in that taking back of power, he is killed. And that taking back of power sucks a kind of life force out of their mother and moves her into grief. And that is what Bernice had to witness.

00:09:12 Speaker_06
Bernice had to witness her mother wanting connection to her father in this spiritual capacity. And that became Bernice's job.

00:09:24 Speaker_06
to be this conduit for her mother to connect to her father and to connect to whomever, whatever other ancestral spirits are inhabiting the space.

00:09:33 Speaker_03
I've heard you say that you over-prepared for this role and I was just wondering what that meant. How did you over-prepare?

00:09:42 Speaker_06
With film, you do different things for each project. Sometimes you take it day by day and the scenes change and whatnot, but in this, we're straight up doing the play. And so I understood myself to prepare for a play. I need to know everything.

00:10:01 Speaker_06
Because the majority of the guys had already come off of doing the Broadway production from 22 to 23.

00:10:09 Speaker_03
Right, John David had performed in the Broadway production and of course we know Samuel L. Jackson and many of the other characters as well.

00:10:17 Speaker_06
Yeah, Michael Potts and Ray Fisher, right? And so myself and Corey are coming in. you're going to establish a new thing, but they're already rooted. And so it just took a lot of extra time to let the language sit in.

00:10:34 Speaker_06
And when you're talking about this caliber of work, when you're talking about this kind of legacy, you want to honor it in that manner. And so overpreparing is living in it differently. And with regard to theater, it inhabits you every day.

00:10:52 Speaker_06
It's with me all day long. Resorting to it throughout the day. It's with me all day. It's with me every day. Referring to it, thinking about it all day.

00:11:03 Speaker_03
It's a ghostly figure in a way.

00:11:19 Speaker_06
In the same way that Bernice is haunted and the family is haunted by Sutter. It's on you until you're not with it anymore and it takes time to release that too.

00:11:31 Speaker_03
Oh, I can imagine because you all have wrapped from this production a while ago. You've now done probably many more productions since then. Just a few. Yeah, it takes you a minute to to let it come off you, to like truly exit from the work.

00:11:49 Speaker_06
Mm-hmm. Especially in this experience. This is one of the most beautiful experiences I've ever had on set. What made it that way? The family dynamic. The family dynamic is... starts with, you know, who's leading. Malcolm Washington is our director.

00:12:09 Speaker_06
He's also a co-writer with Virgil Williams and... that's obviously felt, right? And there's a family experience that is already happening and that the Washingtons are at every facet from producer to director to actors.

00:12:29 Speaker_06
And then that feeling just... it weaves into every other aspect of filmmaking.

00:12:39 Speaker_03
You know, Danielle, everyone who has ever worked with you including director Malcolm Washington, he calls you a physical actor. And I was trying to figure out what that meant. I think I understand it in the context of theater.

00:12:56 Speaker_03
There's so much physicality there. And it's very evident in watching you in all of your work, like you convey so much meaning with your eyes. But what does it mean for you when you hear that you're a physical actor? What does that mean?

00:13:13 Speaker_06
The whole body is to be utilized, right? So the eyes are deeply physical too. I'm up on it, I'm up in it. It's coming out. I feel it very deeply. I want to lean in for all of it, not just in the scene, but when I'm engaging with my director.

00:13:33 Speaker_06
I'm trying to find the language in the body, not just out of the tongue, off the tongue, you know? Yeah, I'm a dancer first. That's my first medium since I was four or five.

00:13:45 Speaker_03
You started off as a dancer as a young girl.

00:13:47 Speaker_06
Yeah, and so, and then that's a natural segue into theater. It's like those two things were happening almost at the same time. Dance is, you know, a first language. It's an immediate language.

00:13:59 Speaker_06
You don't have to, if somebody says hello in various languages, you may not know it, but if someone raises their hand, that's a gesture that signifies hello, right?

00:14:15 Speaker_06
You can infer certain things from the way people look at you, like the totality of the human body is can be a part of choreography. It is defining of who and how a person is. And so taking all of that in, I mean, I talk with my hands.

00:14:34 Speaker_06
I move my whole body to have an experience, to have a connection. And it might be within stillness. It might be slight. But that communicates something too. Stillness is still a particular kind of motion or non-motion. It's something.

00:14:59 Speaker_06
Silence articulates something as much as a whirlwind communicates something. And so I'm just trying to speak in all those ways.

00:15:09 Speaker_03
Can you take me to that moment when you realized, when you decided, I need to act as a career?

00:15:15 Speaker_03
Because you were on the academic track, so you were a dancer as a young child, moved into theater, it was always something you did and loved to do, but you never really saw it as a career.

00:15:30 Speaker_03
You went to school, got two degrees, teaching elementary school, and then- Three. Okay, three, yeah, and then teaching. Sorry, don't want to- No, I'm laughing at myself.

00:15:43 Speaker_04
You did three degrees? Why?

00:15:44 Speaker_03
Well, you did three degrees. I mean, you're deep in academia at this point, teaching kids. Take me to that moment when you decided, I need to be in this world as a performer.

00:15:56 Speaker_06
Here's the thing. I mean, Atlanta's just this great place. And my mom, you know, my sister, my mom is creating, you know, opportunities for us to be in these spaces. I'm seeing my sister. My sister has desires to do all these different things.

00:16:12 Speaker_06
And so I'm, you know, as the younger kid, you get to be a part of these worlds, even though you may not necessarily be doing them. And so then you do begin to enact them as you get older. And you, it's just your life. It's just my life.

00:16:28 Speaker_06
I didn't necessarily think that that was, something that I, you know, needed to do. I just know that it's art. It's a part of my every day. The Atlanta art scene is just, it's your quotidian experience. I'm going to dance over here.

00:16:46 Speaker_06
I'm doing, my mom's one of her great, great friends is a visual artist who would do the National Black Arts Festival every year. It's just so much happening. Theater is happening and dance is happening and,

00:17:02 Speaker_06
I don't know, I felt like I needed to secure something steadier and this idea that academia was it, education, to do it on a collegiate level, to be an educator. on the collegiate level was the driving goal.

00:17:24 Speaker_06
I always knew art would be, I was like, oh, art should be a part of it, right? I should blend these two things. I remember writing a grant for that.

00:17:30 Speaker_03
As part of your teaching practice.

00:17:32 Speaker_06
As part of my practice, yeah.

00:17:34 Speaker_03
Because what were you teaching in elementary school?

00:17:37 Speaker_06
Well, in elementary you're teaching everything, right? You're doing math, science, English, and all these things. And so the critical thing is, oh, I'm doing read-alouds. And read-alouds are performative. Or at least I made them performative.

00:17:52 Speaker_06
And they would be completely in it.

00:17:55 Speaker_03
The kids, yeah?

00:17:56 Speaker_06
Yeah, they would. And then I would- What grade? Sorry, I've like really- I did fourth and fifth grade. Fourth grade, the first year, fifth grade, the second year. And so, I mean, yeah, like everybody wants to be read too. It's such a beautiful thing.

00:18:10 Speaker_06
And so I'm doing this and I'm like, oh, parts of me are, you know, there's an undulation of energy that's happening that's not at its fullness, but it's happening. And I'm like, oh, I remember that. What's this feeling?

00:18:25 Speaker_06
And I'm doing afterschool programs where, you know, afterschool is very much arts driven. And so I'm like, something is, Something is missing, something is missing, something is missing.

00:18:35 Speaker_06
Because all through grad school, or at least my first master's, I was doing a play a year, at least. And when I was an undergrad, a play a year. It didn't dominate the entirety of the experience, but it surely was present.

00:18:50 Speaker_06
And so to get to a point where I'm teaching, and I'm like, oh, this is my adult, like super adult responsibility right now, and I'm not having the one-a-year thing at least. And I was like, something's driving.

00:19:05 Speaker_05
Oh, it's this. It's this. Oh, I need this. I need this fuller. I need this more every day. I need this in all the ways.

00:19:15 Speaker_06
And I went to an audition and I leapt from there. You went to the audition. Did you get the role? I sure did. I sure did. I got Lady in Yellow for Jasmine Guy's directorial debut.

00:19:33 Speaker_03
For colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enough. Did you quit right on the spot teaching? Did I?

00:19:45 Speaker_06
I think that was I think it was in the, that may have been the summer. I knew I wasn't going back. I knew I wasn't going back. I told my sister, I said, I need to do, I need to do more. And she's like, yeah. And I was like, yeah. And so I didn't go back.

00:20:04 Speaker_06
I went to something else.

00:20:06 Speaker_03
Our guest today is actor Danielle Deadweiler. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air.

00:20:12 Speaker_00
This message comes from Capital One, offering commercial solutions you can bank on. Now more than ever, your business faces unique challenges and opportunities.

00:20:23 Speaker_00
That's why Capital One offers a comprehensive suite of financial services, all tailored to your short and long-term goals. Backed by the strength and stability of a top 10 commercial bank,

00:20:34 Speaker_00
Their dedicated experts work with you to build lasting success. Explore the possibilities at CapitalOne.com slash commercial, a member FDIC.

00:20:45 Speaker_01
This message comes from BetterHelp. This holiday season, do something for a special person in your life. You. Give yourself the gift of better mental health.

00:20:54 Speaker_01
BetterHelp Online Therapy connects you with a qualified therapist via phone, video, or live chat. It's convenient and affordable and can be done from the comfort of your own home.

00:21:03 Speaker_01
Having someone to talk to is truly a gift, especially during the holidays. Visit betterhelp.com slash NPR to get 10% off your first month. This message comes from GiveWell.

00:21:14 Speaker_01
GiveWell provides rigorous, transparent research about the best giving opportunities so that donors can make informed decisions about high-impact giving. To learn more, go to givewell.org and pick podcast and enter NPR at checkout.

00:21:29 Speaker_03
My guest is Danielle Dedweiler. She stars in The Piano Lesson, a new film on Netflix. It's an adaptation of August Wilson's Broadway play, directed by Malcolm Washington.

00:21:40 Speaker_03
Dedweiler plays the character of Bernice, a widowed single mother in conflict with her brother, Boy Willie, over the family piano.

00:21:49 Speaker_03
Boy Willie wants to sell it to buy the land the family was once enslaved on, and Dedweiler's character Bernice wants to keep it. Deadweiler is known for her ability to take on historical narratives.

00:22:00 Speaker_03
In 2022, she starred in the biographical film Till as Mamie Till, an educator and activist who pursued justice after the murder of her 14-year-old son Emmett, and the Canadian post-apocalyptic thriller Forty Acres.

00:22:15 Speaker_03
Deadweiler has also performed in several shows and miniseries, including Station Eleven and Watchmen.

00:22:21 Speaker_03
She got her start in theater, performing the role of Lady in Yellow in the play for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enough. Atlanta is such a, I mean, of course, it's your hometown.

00:22:35 Speaker_03
It was where you were born, where you were raised. But it's also like you keep your feet firmly on the ground there, even though, you know, you now, you're a bona fide award nominated actor. You could be in L.A., you can be in New York.

00:22:55 Speaker_03
What keeps you grounded in your hometown? But you can move your family to LA.

00:23:04 Speaker_06
No, no I can't. I've got a rhythm that I'm connected to in that space. It's beyond just Atlanta. I'm very much connected to a certain natural land, a certain land experience, a certain history, and a certain quietude.

00:23:28 Speaker_06
All of those elements are necessary for me in this moment. And are they necessary for your work? Yeah. I think they are. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever I'm transitioning into.

00:23:44 Speaker_06
I need that recovery when I do the various kind of works I do and I tend to travel to different places anyway.

00:23:53 Speaker_06
So it's almost like moving to another place just to do the thing that you're already doing, traveling incessantly to be in these spaces to do the work. My own personal work, my personal performance art and visual artwork, is about this place.

00:24:10 Speaker_06
It's about a Southern experience. And I need to be with this Southern experience in order to express those things. And it happens to connect to the television and film experience as well.

00:24:22 Speaker_03
I want to talk to you a little bit about the film Till. It was critically acclaimed, 2022, directed by Chinoya Chukwu. You starred as Emmett Till's mother, Mamie Till Mobley.

00:24:38 Speaker_03
And just to remind folks, Emmett was murdered in 1955 when he was 14 for allegedly flirting with a white woman while visiting his family in Mississippi, Money, Mississippi. I want to play a clip from this movie.

00:24:53 Speaker_03
So the movie starts with Emmett preparing for his train trip from his home of Chicago to Mississippi and Mamie, his mother, makes a point to give him some directos on how to be while he's down there. So in this scene, you're talking to him.

00:25:10 Speaker_03
Emmett is played by Jalen Hall on how to act while he's down south. Let's listen.

00:25:16 Speaker_06
All right, now you're gonna miss your train. Bo, when you get down there... Oh, not again, Mama. I've already been to Mississippi. Only one time before, and you started a fight with another little boy. He was picking on me.

00:25:36 Speaker_06
You're in the right to stand up for yourself, but that's not what I'm talking about. They have a different set of rules for Negroes down there. Are you listening? Yes. You have to be extra careful with white people.

00:25:53 Speaker_06
You can't risk looking at them the wrong way. I know. Bo, be small down there.

00:26:05 Speaker_00
Like this?

00:26:10 Speaker_03
That was my guest today, Danielle Dudwiler, along with actor Jalen Hall and the 2022 film Till. And in that moment that we just hear, when you tell him to make himself small, then he kind of does it like a joke. He's a 14-year-old boy.

00:26:26 Speaker_03
He squinches down and kind of makes fun of it. And there is so much power in that scene, in his performance, in the performance that you give, because it's everything that you're saying in between the words.

00:26:40 Speaker_03
The nervous way that you fuss with his tie, the way that you're trying to save his life, you know, casually saying these things. but you're trying to backstop something that you know is a potential.

00:26:53 Speaker_03
And is it true that for the audition you submitted a real self-tape using your own son as a stand-in for this very scene?

00:27:04 Speaker_06
Yeah it's true. I had to do the tape, the self-tape, and I needed some help. And my son has done some work with me before and I just implored him to give a girl another go. But it

00:27:27 Speaker_06
That's such a tender scene because you think about legacy across these two works that we're talking about.

00:27:36 Speaker_06
We're talking about 1936 Pittsburgh and people who have moved from Mississippi to Pittsburgh and then we're talking about 1955 Chicago where Emmett and Mamie lived and where they are in that scene and how their family moved from Mississippi to Chicago.

00:27:57 Speaker_06
And then I'm having an experience in my present time at that, in the making of, in the buildup to the making of this scene with my son. And in that moment, it's just, it's light. In that moment, it's light.

00:28:14 Speaker_06
You feel the weight and the buoyancy of it too. The children make it lighthearted. And to do it with my son is just, you know, it makes it that much more deep and real that the emotion comes from.

00:28:34 Speaker_06
Even if it's not a particular kind of sadness, grief, loss, blah, blah, blah. It's more what you fear, what you want to do to just keep them alive. The same way Bernice is trying to keep Maritha alive in a certain way and pushing her upward.

00:28:50 Speaker_06
In that moment, she's just trying to keep Emmett alive.

00:28:54 Speaker_03
You know, what's remarkable with this film is that you all chose to show us the interior of Mamie.

00:29:03 Speaker_03
And, you know, the thing about Emmett Till's story is that I think for so many Black Americans, like, he's deeply embedded in our consciousness because we know that story as a cautionary tale, but we also just learn it as a piece of history.

00:29:21 Speaker_03
It sparked, like, what we knew as the civil rights movement and how did you prepare to play her?

00:29:31 Speaker_06
I know it's bigger than a cautionary tale. It's changed the way a generation of people move through the world. It changes the way mother's mother. You're literally rearing for survival.

00:29:48 Speaker_06
And everybody that I've talked to of a certain generation knows, oh, that could have been my cousin or that could have been me or I see myself, not just men, women as well. And so in preparing, I have that understanding.

00:30:05 Speaker_06
I have a history of working and learning. under the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

00:30:14 Speaker_03
Did you go to that as a child? And can you talk a little bit about what that is?

00:30:18 Speaker_06
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, SCLC, is an organization that was started by Dr. King and Joseph E. Lowry and others for activism.

00:30:31 Speaker_06
My siblings and I, my sister first, of course, essentially interned in this space, learned so much about their work, did youth work with the organization.

00:30:46 Speaker_06
And then therein you learn about history, you learn about Atlanta's place, you learn about the South's place. in activating, you know, fight for civil rights.

00:30:58 Speaker_06
And so that knowledge, that very personal knowledge is informing what I understand in bringing that artistic form to life. and is a driving force for me as a person.

00:31:15 Speaker_06
And the women who were integral, so many women, male leaders tend to be platformed and yet I was learning from a host of women in these spaces, mothers in these spaces. And so I take that, I take that very,

00:31:34 Speaker_06
subconscious understanding of the experience, as well as the historical knowledge, as well as my own, as well as other unknowns, and put them into the work.

00:31:48 Speaker_03
If you're just joining us, my guest is award-winning actor Danielle Dedweiler. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is Fresh Air.

00:31:57 Speaker_00
This message is brought to you by Leesa in collaboration with West Elm. Discover the new natural hybrid mattress, expertly crafted from natural latex and certified safe foams. Designed with your health and the planet in mind.

00:32:11 Speaker_00
Visit leesa.com to learn more. This message comes from NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform.

00:32:26 Speaker_00
Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash story. This message comes from Carvana. With Carvana Value Tracker, you can track your car's value anytime, anywhere.

00:32:40 Speaker_00
Carvana will even let you know when your car's value changes with updated emails. However you value your car, know its worth with Carvana Value Tracker.

00:32:51 Speaker_03
This is Fresh Air, and today my guest is actor Danielle Dedweiler. She stars in the new film The Piano Lesson, an adaptation of August Wilson's Broadway play.

00:33:01 Speaker_03
She's also appeared in the HBO Max dystopian series Station Eleven, Watchmen, the Netflix Western The Harder They Fall, and the critically acclaimed film Till, where she portrayed Mamie, the mother of Emmett Till, whose brutal murder in the 50s became a flashpoint in the civil rights movement.

00:33:21 Speaker_03
One of the most powerful scenes in Till was watching your character, Mamie, see her son's mutilated body for the first time.

00:33:30 Speaker_03
And it's such an intimate scene because, of course, Mamie sparked this new era of the civil rights movement by deciding to have an open casket so we could see, so the world could see what was done to her son.

00:33:45 Speaker_03
And the intimacy, though, of being able to see it first with you, it was such a powerful scene. Can you take me to when you first saw this? It was a prosthetic, it was makeup, but the full result of that and seeing his body for the first time.

00:34:04 Speaker_03
Even as, you know, you're an actor, but as a person who had lived with this story all of your life.

00:34:11 Speaker_06
I didn't see it until we did the first take. So when I first saw it is when you first saw it, when I first saw it. I remember reading her detailing what that experience was like, a kind of mapping of him and their history.

00:34:30 Speaker_06
starting at his feet and going to the top of his head. And I just, I followed her path, her kind of spiritual cartography of his being, and recalling all of the things that she recalled.

00:34:49 Speaker_06
It's what you know where you know scars from, where you know the DNA has really imprinted itself in this place, because this looks just like

00:34:58 Speaker_06
you know, like her, and her also understanding or trying to understand where the violence was enacted on him at the same time, in these places of fondness, of memory, coupled with the unknown violence. So it's this duality of the experience.

00:35:23 Speaker_06
And now she said she needed to be a scientist of sorts, a doctor of sorts, and looking at his body and seeing what had happened to him. And not just seeing what had happened to him, but also seeing, remembering who he was.

00:35:42 Speaker_06
And so I traveled those lines with her. And that was what was revealed in the scene.

00:35:49 Speaker_03
You take on historical characters so well, and you've shed some light on that infusion of history that you learned as a young person growing up in the South. I can feel all of that in your work. Do you have a soft spot for period pieces?

00:36:06 Speaker_03
Is this intentional work? Will we see you take on everybody from Reconstruction on?

00:36:13 Speaker_04
You will not. You would not.

00:36:16 Speaker_06
I have a soft spot for connecting dots. That's what I have a soft spot for. And I think you have to understand history in order to connect dots to how and why we activate our lives the way we do presently.

00:36:31 Speaker_06
And so I have, you know, a plethora of other sci-fi or contemporary works that can go in tandem with these. But I just These are just works that really spoke to me, right?

00:36:48 Speaker_06
And I have a soft spot for understanding Black womanhood and Black Southern womanhood in myriad disciplines and am continuing to explore that. happily, intently in some of the works. And they've come out in these two films at least.

00:37:11 Speaker_06
And I hope to do more. I think we have to encourage this understanding.

00:37:18 Speaker_03
Are you taking on Otis Redding's story? His wife, is that right? That is right. That is true. The Otis and Zelma.

00:37:26 Speaker_06
When will that happen? Probably sometime next year. I think it's a beautiful story about the women behind these monumental figures, these iconic figures and the love that they had between each other.

00:37:47 Speaker_06
in such a short period considering he transitioned at such a young age and yet left this massive imprint and she upheld that legacy. That's the connective tissue. These stories are about legacy. How do we hold them? How do we extend them?

00:38:06 Speaker_06
How do we connect them to others? It's like, how do black women create a grand web? That's what my exploration is.

00:38:20 Speaker_03
Danielle Deadwyler, thank you so much for your time. Thank you.

00:38:40 Speaker_00
Edward Jones Financial Advisors are people you can count on for financial strategies that help support a life you love. Edward Jones, member SIPC.

00:38:52 Speaker_01
This message comes from NPR sponsor, Shopify. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business.

00:38:59 Speaker_01
From the launch your online shop stage, to the first real life store stage, all the way to the, did we just hit a million orders stage? Shopify is there to help you grow. Sell without needing to code or design.

00:39:11 Speaker_01
Just bring your best ideas and Shopify will help you open up shop. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash NPR.

00:39:22 Speaker_03
This is fresh air. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan's picks for the best books of the year range from alternative history to suspense and satire to some of the most extraordinary letters ever written. Here's her list.

00:39:36 Speaker_02
Unprecedented surely was one of the most popular words of 2024. So it's fitting that my best books list begins with an unprecedented occurrence. Two novels by authors who happened to be married to each other.

00:39:52 Speaker_02
James, by Percival Everett, reimagines Huckleberry Finn told from the point of view of Jim, Huck's enslaved companion on that immortal raft ride.

00:40:04 Speaker_02
Alternating mordant humor with horror, Everett makes readers understand that for Jim, here called James, the Mississippi may offer a temporary haven,

00:40:15 Speaker_02
but given the odds of him making it to freedom, the river will likely be a vast highway to a scary nowhere. Everett is married to Danzey Senna, whose novel, Colored Television, is a revelatory satire on race and class.

00:40:34 Speaker_02
Senna's main character, Jane, is a mixed-race writer and college teacher struggling to finish her second novel. Desperate for money, Jane cons her way into a meeting with a Hollywood producer who's cooking up a biracial situation comedy.

00:40:52 Speaker_02
Disaster ensues. Senna's writing is droll and fearless. Listen to Jane's thoughts about teaching. One of the worst parts of teaching was how, like a series of mini-strokes, it ruined you as a writer.

00:41:10 Speaker_02
A brain could handle only so many undergraduate stories about date rape and eating disorders, dead grandmothers and mystical dogs. Two other novels invite readers to catch up with familiar characters.

00:41:26 Speaker_02
Long Island is Colm Tobin's sequel to his 2009 bestseller, Brooklyn, whose main character, Eilish Lacey, is now trapped in a marriage and a neighborhood as stifling as the Irish town she fled.

00:41:44 Speaker_02
It's Tobin's omissions and restraint, the words he doesn't write, that make him such an astute chronicler of this working-class Catholic world.

00:41:55 Speaker_02
I've come to dread a new novel by Elizabeth Strout because I usually can't avoid putting it on my best of the year list.

00:42:05 Speaker_02
Tell Me Everything reunites readers with writer Lucy Barton, lawyer Bob Burgess, and retired teacher Olive Kitteridge, all living in Maine.

00:42:16 Speaker_02
Nobody nails the soft melancholy of the human condition like Strout, and that's a phrase she would never write because her style is so understated.

00:42:30 Speaker_02
Martyr is Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar's debut novel about a young man named Cyrus Shams struggling to make sense of the violent death of his mother and other martyrs, accidental or deliberate, throughout history.

00:42:47 Speaker_02
Akbar's tone is unexpectedly comic, his story antic, and his vision utterly original. Two literary novels on my best list are indebted to suspense fiction.

00:43:01 Speaker_02
Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake is an espionage thriller sealed tight in the plastic wrap of noir. Her main character, a young woman, is a former FBI agent turned freelance spy who infiltrates a radical farming collective in France.

00:43:20 Speaker_02
You don't read Kushner for the relatability of her characters. Instead, it's her dead-on language and orange threat alert atmosphere that draw readers in.

00:43:33 Speaker_02
In Cahokia Jazz, Frances Spufford summons up a femme fatale, crooked cops and politicians, and working-class resentment as bitter as bathtub gin.

00:43:46 Speaker_02
He weds these hard-boiled elements to a story about the actual vanished city of Cahokia, which before the arrival of Columbus, was the largest urban center north of Mexico.

00:44:00 Speaker_02
Spufford's novel is set in an alternative America of 1922, where the peace of Cahokia's indigenous, white, and African-American populations is threatened by a grisly murder.

00:44:16 Speaker_02
One straightforward suspense novel sits on this list, Liz Moore's The God of the Woods.

00:44:23 Speaker_02
There's a touch of gothic excess about Moore's story beginning with the premise that not one but two children from the wealthy Van Laar family disappear from a camp in the Adirondacks some 14 years apart.

00:44:39 Speaker_02
Moore's previous book, Long Bright River, was a superb novel about the opioid crisis in Philadelphia. The God of the Woods is something stranger and unforgettable. Non-fiction closes out this list.

00:44:56 Speaker_02
I've thought about A Wilder Shore, Camille Perry's biography of the bohemian marriage of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson ever since reading it this summer. In her introduction, Perry says something that's also haunted me.

00:45:14 Speaker_02
She describes her book as an intimate window into how the Stephensons lived and loved. A story that is, I hope, an inspiration for anyone seeking a freer, more unconventional life. That it is.

00:45:32 Speaker_02
I began this list with the word unprecedented and I'll end it with an unprecedented voice, that of Emily Dickinson. A monumental collection of the letters of Emily Dickinson was published this year.

00:45:48 Speaker_02
Edited by Dickinson scholars Chris Dan Miller and Donald Mitchell, it's the closest thing we'll probably ever have to an autobiography by the poet. Here's a thank you note Dickinson wrote in the 1860s to her beloved sister-in-law.

00:46:07 Speaker_02
Dear Sue, the supper was delicate and strange. I ate it with compunction as I would eat a vision. 1,304 letters are collected here, and still, they're not enough. Happy holidays, happy reading.

00:46:28 Speaker_03
Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. Find her list on our website, npr.org slash freshair. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air.

00:46:52 Speaker_03
Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.

00:46:58 Speaker_03
Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Sam Brigger, Lorne Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yacundi, and Anna Baumann. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper.

00:47:14 Speaker_03
Roberta Shorrock directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.

00:47:34 Speaker_01
This message comes from NPR sponsor Betterment. The drama of having an enemy turned lover is never chill, but your investing portfolio should be. Betterment is the investing app that lets you be totally chill about your finances.

00:47:48 Speaker_01
Their automated tech makes it easy to get in the market and stay in the market. Save the drama for that moment when you realize your mortal enemy is actually your soulmate. Betterment, be invested and totally chill. Learn more at betterment.com.

00:48:02 Speaker_01
Investing involves risk. Performance is not guaranteed.

00:48:05 Speaker_00
This message comes from ADP. Whether it's a last minute policy change or adding a new company holiday, anything can change the world of work. From HR to payroll, ADP helps businesses take on the next anything. ADP, always designing for people.

00:48:23 Speaker_00
This message comes from Sun & Ski Sports, offering up to 50% off premium outdoor gear this holiday season, along with free setup and binding mount for skis or snowboards purchased before December 30th. Shop in-store or at sunandski.com.