EXCLUSIVE: Danielle Deadwyler achieved “artistic love” working with director Malcom Washington and his sibling John David Washington on the screen adaptation of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Piano Lesson.
“I’m with these beautiful men,” she says. ”They’re like brothers to me.”
Deadwyler, acclaimed for her portrait of heartbreak in the 2022 movie Till, tells me that her own “beautiful family” upbringing informed how she sought work and “gives me great responsibility to connect to people who want to embolden me in my work and I them.”
She is steadfast in finding such people. “I’ve had some really great experiences, this being one of them,” she says of The Piano Lesson, which Netflix will release into select cinemas Friday in the U.S. and UK. The streamer will launch the film on its service November 22.
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However, Deadwyler laments that it’s “really hard to go do other stuff after you’ve had these kind of expressions of artistic love, and it happened so fast. Six weeks on set with something that’s so rigorous and yet loving. That’s hard-pressed to find.”
From left: ‘The Piano Lesson’ stars John David Washington and Danielle Deadwyler with director Malcolm Washington
Michael Buckner for Deadline
Actors often make eye-rolling declarations about how wonderful it was to work with such and such. And more often than not, it’s just guff.
But I witnessed firsthand during Telluride, the London Film Festival and at our own London Contenders, that when Deadwyler and the Washington family gathered, the love and friendship was genuine.
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Plus, having been around her a lot during the past three years, I know Deadwyler doesn’t do hogwash — on screen or off.
There’s something so compelling about her as an artist. Watching her as Berniece in The Piano Lesson is a case in point.
Danielle Deadwyler in ‘The Piano Lesson’ (Netflix)
David Lee/Netflix
Malcom Washington and Virgil Williams penned the screenplay for their haunting version of Wilson’s tale about two siblings — Berniece and her younger brother Boy Willie (John David Washington) — who argue over what should happen to a family legacy, in this case a piano that has a vaulted significance in their lives because it has been handed down over generations.
Their great-grandfather carved scenes from the family history into the musical instrument. Loved ones, drenched with blood, gave their lives to protect that piano, and Berenice is fierce in her determination to keep it in Pittsburgh, where she and her daughter now reside with their uncle, Doaker (Samuel L. Jackson).
But Boy Willie drives up from Mississippi to claim it. His reasons are just as honorable as Berenice’s: He wants to sell it in order to purchase land back in the South where their forebears once toiled.
Their ancestors live on in that piano. “It’s haunted,” Deadwlyer explains. “It belongs in the family.”
Can’t deny that I have been haunted too, by watching The Piano Lesson.
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Deadwyler’s not at all surprised because, she says, that’s what spirits do. “We are just echoes, I think, in material form. And there are stories, there are lessons, there are reckonings that have to come through us as vessels. And if we so choose to deal, then that information will come through.”
If we do not, she warns, “I feel like there’s a tension and stagnant chaos occurs.”
From left: Michael Potts as Wining Boy, Danielle Deadwyler as Berniece, Samuel L. Jackson as Doaker Charles, John David Washington as Boy Willie and Ray Fisher as Lymon in ‘The Piano Lesson’ (Netflix)
And “it’s harrowing not to grow. And, we are, I believe in growth in all of its forms in just steady and incremental centimeters at a time. But I think we are living with them, the spirits, if we know it or not. There are daily conversations in my life, and others as well.
“So Berenice and Boy Willie are two people who are haunted,” she adds. “And I think the true reckoning begins when the ghosts and specters of the families begin to wake them up and not allow them to sleep any longer.”
We see Berenice and Boy Willie get to witness traumas that their forebears endured, and their stories are urgent enough “ to awaken her and him to what they need.”
Awakens us as well. And boy-oh-boy, have I been awakened from my slumber by The Piano Lesson and, I must note, by RaMell Ross’ movie Nickel Boys, based on Colson Whitehead’s insightful novel The Nickel Boys.
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Deadwyler points out that it’s not just the younger scions in The Piano Lesson who have witnessed ghosts. Doaker has communicated with them too, but he doesn’t admit it outwardly at first.
That’s an indication, says Deadwyler, of the need “to have an intergenerational conversation,” and she worries that “I don’t know if we’re always having that anymore. I don’t know if the reverence is there the way that it used to be.”
Which brings her to a matter of grave concern. “The way Black American families reared their children was strictly to keep you from dying as a task: ‘It was my task to keep you alive.’ And so it was hard love. Very, very tough love. Extremely strict, informed by the violence of the West and of enslavement.”
Younger generations assert themselves in a different way, she feels, but she’s alarmed that they might not be listening to their elders about historical indignities — especially, she cries, when in the United States, there are “right-winged initiatives to mute history, mute specifically Black American history.”
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Danielle Deadwyler at Deadline Contenders London 2024
It fascinates both of us that such conversations can spring from cinematic art.
“That’s what they’re supposed to do,” Deadwyler reasons. “We’re supposed to have rich conversation after we witness something. It’s supposed to jar us, supposed to move us, supposed to rupture us — to open you up, to connect the dots to any kind of global issue.
The movie’s also about the art of memory or, as she puts it, “the archiving of remembrance,” and of how that impacts and influences “how we continue to move.”
Malcolm Washington encouraged that sense of “archiving of remembrance” by asking cast members to bring faded photographs of relatives to the set to be woven into the production design. I wrote back in September how he, along with his mother Pauletta Pearson Washington, visited the home of his maternal grandparents in North Carolina, where he discovered old images including a picture of his grandmother aged about 4.
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Deadwyler reached out to her own family in Georgia — her parents and grandparents live not far from where some of The Piano Lesson was shot — and unearthed photos of her maternal grandparents. She took the photos in and, along with others, “it’s in the DNA of movie. Everyone’s there. So when you talk about having those spiritual moments in the house, in the filming of the work, that’s why.”
Malcolm Washington also set the tone with candles and music, from Stevie Wonder to contemporary alternative instrumentals. “He brings ease,” she says of the director. “He brings an allowance for the fullness of yourself. It’s hard to work your best if your nervous system is out of whack. And so just someone creating space for you to be comfortable, to explore all aspects of you.”
In so doing, the filmmaker allows Deadwyler to breathe, and as God is my witness, she breathes life into Berniece — a jolt of electricity that gives the film extra energy.
We’re meeting in London, and Deadwyler is wearing jeans and a comfortable sweater. She has discarded the designer frocks and dazzling gems I often see her in at premieres and swanky events. “Honestly, this is me daily. To be comfortable,” she says. “I’m a country girl at this point. It’s all about comfort and being ready for anything.
“You can’t be ready for anything in a set of stilettos,” she says, laughing as she downs hot tea with oat milk and jokingly mocks me for having mine with milk from a cow. “Look, I got to be a little millennial sometimes.”
She much prefers to be at home in Atlanta with her 15-year-old son. Deadwyler feels connected to the land and loves Georgia’s rich red earth. “The older I get, the more I just want to be where our hand has not been heavy, where human hands have not been heavy. I love to be in nature” and likes to walk. “Hiking is for other people.”
Walking is often done alone, “but I walk with ancestors. I like to be out in the outer skirts of the city, and I talk to the deer; they’re my buddies. They don’t walk with me. They just look at me.” She’s also interested in the birds — the cardinals and the blue jays — and enjoys communing with them as well. “You just have to learn how to listen to them, and we take it in intuitively.”
There’s no room in her life for nightclubbing and being snapped at fancy restaurants. “Everything else is a distraction and a distraction from the conversations about how to be in the world, how to be better in the world.”
All of this she attributes to success “happening at this specific time in my life. I don’t know what it would have been if I were 20, or 30, for that matter. So I came into the system of the film industry a hardcore adult.”
Her work has been steady, whether on stage, on screen or doing performance art on the street. Jeymes Samuel gave her a plum part in his The Harder They Fall, but it was her role in Chinonye Chukwu’s Till — playing Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till — that propelled her.
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Along with others, I was crestfallen when she was not nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for Till.
She’s more sanguine. “It’s never about the awards,” Deadwyler says. “People can think that’s bullshit or not, that’s fine. But you make stuff to be with community and to have conversations about the story passed down so that it can impact the hell out of us and make us move differently, give us answers to how to be in the world.”
The experience with The Piano Lesson is different from being in Till, because “this is hyper-ensemble. I’m with these beautiful men who are brothers to me.” Plus, it’s campaigning on a supporting platform “that’s not as intense.”
And she feels that she’s “moving with a particular intentional need for joy” while the world is “chaotic.”
Her own life is not chaotic, however. Although she has been shooting movies, often back-to-back, she feels that she has “balance” in her life.
After The Piano Lesson the actor worked with director R.T. Thorne on the post-apocalyptic drama Forty Acres. That was followed by Jaume Collet-Serra’s crime thriller Carry On with Taron Egerton and Jason Bateman.
After that she shot The Woman in the Yard, again with Collet-Serra. It’s a psychological horror movie that she executive produced.
And she’ll be working with other “Southern folks” on Otis & Zelma, on which she’s an executive producer, for director Channing Godfrey Peoples. She’s excited that John Boyega has been cast to portray music legend Otis Redding and she will portray his wife Zelma. “He died very young. They only had a short 10 years together. The film’s about them and the way in which she carried and continues to carry his legacy.”
Referring to Zelma as “my homie,” Deadwyler has enjoyed meeting with her, seeing as she resides in Macon, just 90 minutes from Atlanta.
She scoffs when I ask in my nice English way whether she and Zelma had tea together. “Tea! You think we’re going to have tea? No, we ain’t had no tea. We had some spirits!”
Actually, they had some wine. “Something for the blood.”
Deadwyler’s also exploring a return to the stage, and she’s open to it happening in Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles or even in London. “We’re reading plays, we’re having conversations,” she reveals, although for now, she declines to say what, where and when.
“I’ve met a few people,” is all that she’ll say.
But then she lets slip that she has sought advice from Wendall Pierce about what it was like to work in the West End.
Pierce and Sharon D. Clarke raised the roof here a few years ago in a moving, heartbreaking revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman co-directed by Marianne Elliott who also produced it with producer Chris Harper.
“Are you crazy? I’d love to be in the West End,” she says with a cry loud enough to awaken those ghosts in The Piano Lesson.
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