After ‘Till’ Thrust Her Into the Oscar Race, Danielle Deadwyler Owns ‘The Piano Lesson’
Danielle Deadwyler almost reached the Oscar circle in 2023 with her extraordinary performance as a grieving mother in “Till.” But it was one of those tough-sit dramas that just wasn’t seen by enough people. This time, Netflix is behind her next likely awards contender, “The Piano Lesson” (November 8 in theaters, November 22 streaming). The film is the third Denzel Washington-produced August Wilson adaptation after “Fences” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” — and arguably the best so far.
Directed by Malcolm Washington in his debut, the movie is set in Pittsburgh (per usual) and co-stars John David Washington as the brother who urgently tries to persuade his sister Berniece (Deadwyler) to sell their family inheritance, a giant piano engraved with the faces of their ancestors, and Samuel L. Jackson as their bemused uncle, watching and commenting on the proceedings.
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All are superb, but Deadwyler stands out, not only for her powerful female energy among all the men in the house, but because she is the drama’s moral center. She will never bend. She will prevail.
Over a Zoom interview with Deadwyler, I learned a few things I did not know about her and the film.
The brainy Old Stewart Avenue Atlanta native has earned three degrees — a B.A. in History from Spelman, a Masters in American Studies from Columbia, and an MSA in creative writing and poetry from Ashland University — and was heading for a career in academia before she wound up teaching elementary school for two years. “That was what brought me back to the lack of daily performative artistic expression that I did not have in teaching,” she said.
Deadwyler returned to her love of theater and dance. She landed a play that Jasmine Guy was directing and began turning her artistic practices into a professional endeavor. “But I’ve been performing since I was four years old,” she said. “It’s been a part of my life, initially starting with dance and theater. Dance doesn’t go away. It’s still a manner of being physically in the world, and an understanding of space, time, and beats, and the body as language, gestures.”
2021 was a breakout year for Deadwyler, who earned raves in both the post-apocalyptic mini-series “Station Eleven” and Jeymes Samuel’s Western “The Harder They Fall.” “Jeymes allowed me to have a certain breadth in how [Cuffee] was and the metaphors and playfulness,” she said. “It was hyper-physical, anything physical I’m down for. I had ridden horses before, but gained a different relationship with horses as a result of it. Horses are freaking majestic.”
With her success in “Till,” Deadwyler had to learn some new skills, like navigating the promo circuit. “I felt a certain level of anxiety,” she said. “You’re coming into a space where you have to be public-facing quite often. I’m a ‘be quiet and do the work’ person. I’m happy on any kind of production, whether it’s me in the studio working on performance art or visual art or commercial film and TV. I truly understand and value and appreciate the conversations that come from promo tours, that it is an encouragement and an opening up of the work, an invitation to have dialogue. And so I eventually settled into it.”
The role of Emmett Till’s mother was a daunting challenge. “That’s because people in America have a certain relationship with that knowledge of the torture and the tragedy of the death of Emmett,” she said, “and the mourning tour and the awakening tour to inform the globe about the experience, about her love for Emmett and the change that was necessary for the American Southern experience. If there’s an injustice happening to anyone anywhere in the world, then we need to be speaking up about it. We need to be articulating resistance to it.”
When “The Piano Lesson” came around, it was like welcoming an old friend. “I engaged with August Wilson since middle school,” she said. “I’ve watched or read or seen or participated in readings of all of his work to some degree.” The first three Washington-produced adaptations were the most popular plays, “Fences,” “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” and “The Piano Lesson.” “They’re all about the family to some degree, as well as the spiritual component. August is always dealing with conjuring.”
While the adaptation to film is faithful, Deadwyler likes the way Malcolm Washington opened things up. “On screen, you get to see the interiority of different characters, like Boy Willie [John David Washington],” she said. “You get to engage with memory. Visually, you get to understand what they are thinking of when they are considering the shared trauma of the loss of their father or what their mother looks like, and her engagement with the piano. And then you get to go out in the world with them. You get to be in Pittsburgh, at the juke joint. But there is just compression that makes it that much more of a succinct cinematic experience.”
Malcolm Washington’s Steadicam picked up reaction shots of these characters through their intense interactions. “You want to honor August Wilson and Malcolm put his stylistic spin and Renaissance perspective onto the making of the film,” she said. “And we did it over and over and over and over, because we were committed. Everyone had a theater background.”
In the play and the film, the supernatural breaks open the family, and allows them to come to reconciliation. “Ancestral divination is in every element of Black American life and faith,” said Deadwyler. “The piano, in a lot of ways, functions as an altar. It is literally carved with the family lineage, the images of the Washington family. And fused also within the house are other people’s personal photographs of family, my family and my grandparents particularly, are in the production design and so it has this rich personal history attached to it. And that is a positive haunting.”
Boy Willie wants to move forward with his life and buy a farm with the proceeds of the sale of the piano. “What pushes Boy Willie to come to Pittsburgh is to move the altar as capital, as a material resource to bolster himself,” said Deadwyler. “But Berniece is holding on to this spiritual object because it bears such weight, because it is a grief object that is connected to the deaths of both of her parents, and it is also the thing that she cannot quite reckon with, because she knows what the ancestral Spirit can do to you, having to confront each other, having to literally touch and feel the energy, the spirit, the glory of the piano, the ancestral energy, which moves through the both of them to get to who they have to become, so that their family can persist and that they can come together.”
Next up: “Carry On” is a December Netflix actioner in which she costars with Taron Egerton and Jason Bateman. “I’m getting to play in a raw, very physical way,” she said. “It’s an airport thriller. And everybody knows that that can be a little scary.” “The Woman in the Yard” is a psychological horror thriller coming out in the first quarter set in a country estate. “How do you protect people? How do you protect family?”
Also coming up is “Otis and Zelma,” based on the biography of musician Otis Redding and his wife. “His widow, Zelma, was integral in what we know and understand as the legacy of Otis Redding. This film is about their love, however short-lived and however beautifully extended in the way in which she cared for his work, for their progeny, and for his contribution to the world.”
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