Danielle Deadwyler
Appearances
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
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. 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.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
As part of my practice, yeah.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
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. And they would be completely in it. The kids, yeah. Yeah, they would. What grade? Sorry, I've like really asked you. I did fourth and fifth grade.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
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. 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?
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
And I'm doing after-school programs where, you know, after-school is very much arts-driven. And so I'm like, something is... Something is missing, something is missing, something is missing. Because all through grad school, or at least my first master's, I was doing a play a year, at least. And through, you know, when I was an undergrad, a play a year.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
It didn't dominate the entirety of the experience, but it surely was present. 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...
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
the the one a year thing at least and I was like something is something's driving 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 and um I went to an audition and I leapt from there
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
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.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
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 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. I went to something else.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
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 performance.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
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, uh, natural, um, land, a certain land experience, a certain history, and, uh, a certain quietude. All of those elements are necessary for me in this moment. Um, And are they necessary for your work? Yeah. I think they are. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever I'm transitioning into. Um,
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
I need that recovery when I do the various kind of works I do. And I tend to, you know, travel to different places anyway. 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. And so... My own personal work, my personal performance art and visual artwork is about this place.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
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.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
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. And then I've seen it, you know, in numerous other ways, right? I'm from Atlanta. And so a lot of my mentors, my OGs, were people who did these works.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
Now you're going to miss your train. Bo, when you get down there... 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. 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.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
You have to be extra careful with white people. You can't risk looking at them the wrong way. I know. Beau. Be small down there. Like this?
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
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 didn't. That's such a tender scene because you think about legacy across all, you know, across these two works that we're talking about.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
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. Um, And then I'm having an experience in my present time in the build-up to the making of this scene with my son. In that moment, it's light.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
In that moment, it's light. 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. Yeah. Even if it's not like a particular kind of sadness, grief, loss, blah, blah, blah. It's more, you know, what you fear, what you want to do to just keep them alive.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
The same way Bernice is trying to keep Marita alive in a certain way and pushing her upward. It's like just in that moment, she's just trying to keep Emmett alive.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
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. 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.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
And so in preparing, I have that understanding. I have a history of working and learning together. under the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
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. And I know that he worked extremely closely with Kenny. And so these are the folks who reared me.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, SCLC, is an organization that was started by Dr. King and Joseph E. Lowry and others for activism purposes. So my siblings and I, my sister first, of course, essentially interned in this space, learned so much about their work, did, you know, youth work with the organization. And then therein you learn about history. You learn about Atlanta's place.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
You learn about the South's place and history. inactivating, you know, fight for civil rights. And so that knowledge, that very personal knowledge is informing what I understand in bringing that artistic form to life. And it's a driving force for me as a person, you know. And the women who were integral, so many women, male leaders tend to be, you know, platformed and yet
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
I was learning from a host of women in these spaces, mothers in these spaces. And so I take that very 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.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
I didn't see it until we did the first take. So when I first saw it was when you first saw it. I remember reading her detailing what that experience was like, kind of mapping of him and their history. 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.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
These are the people who I saw doing this work and understood the kind of performative quality that I wanted to inhabit. Those are the people who instilled in me how to do it.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
It's what you know, where you know scars from, where you know the DNA and
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
has really imprinted itself in this place because it just looks just like you know like her or 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 an unknown with the unknown violence so it's a this duality of the experience
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
And how she said she needed to be a scientist of sorts, a doctor of sorts in 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. And so I traveled those lines with her. And that was what was revealed in the scene.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
You will not. 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. And so I have 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.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
And I have a soft spot for understanding black womanhood and black Southern womanhood on, um, in myriad disciplines and am continuing to explore that, um, happily, you know, intensely in some of the works. And they tend to, they've come out in this film, in these two films, at least. And I hope to do more. I think we have to encourage this understanding.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
When will that happen? Probably sometime next year. Okay, great. But yeah, you know, 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. 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.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
These stories are about legacy. How do we hold them? How do we extend them? How do we connect them to others? It's like, how do Black women create a grand web? That's what my exploration is.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
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.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
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. And the piano is the conduit for both of them to get to that, even though, you know, they're both in denial of where they are to go.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
His presumption is to go towards economic growth, physical land growth, and a personal power, an individualistic power, which is very much driven in the moment of 1936 America. There's an industrial happening in the North, but You know, wanting to obtain a certain capital empowerment is what he's moving towards. Hers is moving towards the North, but not necessarily in the industrial manner.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
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.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
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.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
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 pillow? For a piece of wood? To get even with somebody? I look at you.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
And y'all say, you, Papa Boy Charles, Winey Boy, Doca, Crawley, y'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. People getting burnt up, people getting shot, people falling down their wells. It'll never stop.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
We've got a host of other beautiful women that are hanging out in the bar, right? Yes, right, right, right. But the soul woman articulating a kind of agency in the space amongst men. 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?
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
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. 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.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
And that is what Bernice had to witness. Bernice had to witness her mother wanting connection to her father in this spiritual capacity. And that became Bernice's job. 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.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
Oh, well, you know, with film, you can, I mean, 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. I need to know—because the guys were already—the majority of the guys—
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
had already come off of doing the Broadway production from 2022.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
Yeah, Michael Potts and Ray Fisher, right? And so myself and Corey are coming in, and you... 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. 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.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
And so over-preparing is living in it differently with regard to theater. It inhabits you. Every day, right? Like, it's like, it's with me all day long. Resorting to it throughout the day.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
It's with me all day. It's with me every day. Yeah. And referring to it, thinking about it all day. It's a ghostly figure in a way. Yeah.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
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 starts with who's leading. Malcolm Washington is our director. He's also a co-writer with Virgil Williams. And... That's obviously felt, right?
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
And there's a family experience that is already happening and that the Washingtons are at every facet, from producer to director to actors. And then that feeling just, it weaves into every other aspect of filmmaking.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
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. You know, I want to lean in for all of it, not just in the scene, but when I'm engaging with my director. 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.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
That's my first medium since I was four or five.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
Yeah, 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. 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?
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
You can infer certain things from the way people look at you. 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. I move my whole body to have an experience, to have a connection. And it might be within stillness. It might be slight. But But that communicates something, too.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
Stillness is still a particular kind of motion or, you know, non-motion. It's something. Silence articulates something as much as a whirlwind communicates something. And so I'm just trying to speak in all those ways.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
You did three degrees? Why?
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
Here's the thing. I mean, Atlanta is 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. And so I'm, you know, as the younger person, A kid, you get to be a part of these worlds, even though you may not necessarily be doing them.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
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. I didn't necessarily think that that was something that I, you know, needed to do. I just know that it's—art is a part of my every day. the Atlanta art scene is, is just, it's your quotidian experience. I'm going to dance over here.
Fresh Air
Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'
I'm doing, uh, my mom's one of her great, great friends is a visual artist who would do the national black arts festival every year. Um, um, it's just so much happening. Theater is happening and dance is happening and, and, and, I don't know. I felt like I needed to secure something steadier.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Danielle Deadwyler on August Wilson and Denzel Washington
I think the word that keeps rolling around in my head is inheritance, right? Because it's about inheriting from the generation prior, whether that is from actual people, their lives, their histories, but also the work that they created. And with this film adaptation, which inherits prior stage reproductions, the TV adaptation...
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Danielle Deadwyler on August Wilson and Denzel Washington
All I can think about is how interesting it will be to see in 10, 15, 20 years an artist react to this version. There's a sense of Wilson being almost like a creator of like a folktale that every generation is then able to bring to bear their own experiences on. And I welcome that.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Danielle Deadwyler on August Wilson and Denzel Washington
Boy Willie has driven up from Mississippi to Pittsburgh to confront her about this piano. He wants to sell it, and he wants to use the money that he can make from the sale to buy the farm that his family worked on as sharecroppers.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Danielle Deadwyler on August Wilson and Denzel Washington
Bernice can't fathom that, and she feels that the piano is the representation of the Charles family, of her mother's grief, and that to let it go would be to lose identity.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Danielle Deadwyler on August Wilson and Denzel Washington
I think about Bernice as having made a tremendous kinetic movement when the story begins, right? Having made that journey to Pittsburgh, having made that so-called great migration during the Great Depression. That's so crazy. Right?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Danielle Deadwyler on August Wilson and Denzel Washington
Right, exactly. It's not for her. And so when boy Willie comes busting in in the middle of the night. We go busting again. With this like large energy and his secret purpose of wanting to get that piano back to sell it. Bernice, that fragile stability that she has is completely torn asunder.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Danielle Deadwyler on August Wilson and Denzel Washington
And there's this wonderful scene that I want to play right now where you talk to boy Willie about this piano that Bernice typically doesn't want to talk about. She doesn't want to play it, but she wants to keep it. And so let's listen to that scene right now.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Danielle Deadwyler on August Wilson and Denzel Washington
In Malcolm Washington's adaptation of this play, we have flashback. So we see a young Bernice playing the piano for her mother, which leads me to ask, how do you interpret the piano, you know, as both symbol of history, of tradition, of ancestry? What's your relationship to the piano?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Danielle Deadwyler on August Wilson and Denzel Washington
The piano lesson, to me, is one of the more interesting Wilson plays because you see him confronting, I think, the ideas that he was raised with, given that he was so enamored of his mother. Wilson was obsessed with his mother and in some ways pedestalized her for that. And when she didn't give him love, he was, you know, traumatized by that.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Danielle Deadwyler on August Wilson and Denzel Washington
I first saw Danielle Dedweiler perform in Station Eleven on HBO. And in Danielle's latest role, she plays Bernice in the film The Piano Lesson, a period piece set in 1936. So we have the backdrop of the Great Depression and the Great Migration. It's a chamber drama about family, about the creation, the potential dissolution of the Black family at the beginning of the 20th century.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Danielle Deadwyler on August Wilson and Denzel Washington
I think Bernice is such a prismatic character because we see him looking at the Black woman who is sometimes made into the Black matriarch from so many different perspectives. I was curious, when you came into this group of actors, many of them who had already either worked in the revival on Broadway that was directed by LaTanya Richardson in 2022, You hadn't been in a part of that group.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Danielle Deadwyler on August Wilson and Denzel Washington
Did you have conversations with your actors about who they thought Bernice was? No, I'm not talking about who Bernice is.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Danielle Deadwyler on August Wilson and Denzel Washington
We talked about— Oh, that's really interesting. Can you say more about—what about Zora?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Danielle Deadwyler on August Wilson and Denzel Washington
You know, at one point, all the adults are downstairs and they're talking and they're arguing. Maritha is alone upstairs and she feels a presence, a spectral presence. And it is scary for her because a ghost is a ghost. But it's also scary because her mother, Bernice, has not actually given her the knowledge, has not done that transmission of family history before.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Danielle Deadwyler on August Wilson and Denzel Washington
I wanted to hear you talk about the different kinds of histories that you have a relationship to as an artist, but also that this character has a relationship to being the oral, being, you know, the written record. How do you think history is made? How is it passed down? Just a light question.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Danielle Deadwyler on August Wilson and Denzel Washington
Almost subconscious.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Danielle Deadwyler on August Wilson and Denzel Washington
Absolutely. This is a film about family, about the difficulty of maintaining family. But it's also made by a family, which I find very interesting. I think the emergence of the Washington family as a troop in and of itself is interesting, right? Because Malcolm directed... His brother John David plays Boy Willie in the film. Olivia Washington, his sister, has a cameo in the film.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Danielle Deadwyler on August Wilson and Denzel Washington
In the piano lesson, the Charles family is rent asunder by this object, this talisman, which is a piano, on which are carved the likenesses of their ancestors. Bernice is the sister of the Charles family. She is a widow. She has lost her husband. She is a mother to young Maritha. We meet Bernice in the middle of the night. She's awoken by her brother, Boy Willie.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Danielle Deadwyler on August Wilson and Denzel Washington
Katya Washington produced. And of course, Denzel is the one who had said, I'm going to commit to adapting every single one of the plays in August Wilson's American Century Cycle to film. And so The Piano Lesson is the third adaptation. And Pauletta. And Pauletta. Exactly. What's your impression of the family and their relationship to art?