An actress and omnivorous creative who appeared in her first professional equity show at Atlanta’s True Colors Theatre, actress Danielle Deadwyler has managed to remain a local hero while building a distinctive body of work in Hollywood. And her fan base is about to expand exponentially with the release Oct. 14 of “Till” in theaters.
Her lead performance as Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of the 14-year-old Chicago boy Emmett Till who in 1955 was kidnapped and murdered while visiting family in Money, Mississippi, has already generated Oscar buzz from Variety and Indiewire and garnered Deadwyler profiles in Vanity Fair and New York magazine.
The role blends the fragility and grit that has defined so many of Deadwyler’s performances in the “The Harder They Fall,” “Watchmen” and “Station Eleven.” Delicate and slight in person, on screen in “Till” Deadwyler is astounding for the torrent of agony, rage and ferocity bubbling up from beneath Mamie’s immaculate, ladylike facade. This is not a vision of ‘50s-era womanhood we’ve seen before.
Emmett’s murder and Mamie’s decision to show the viciousness of the racism that killed him in an open casket funeral made her a pivotal crusader in the American civil rights struggle.
“Being a warrior is not always [about] aggression,” says Deadwyler of Mamie’s steely, dignified crusade for justice. “Fierceness looks like softness; fierceness looks like quietude.”
The images of Emmett’s brutalized, unrecognizable body that Mamie made sure the media shared forced a reckoning with the fear Black Americans lived with, a revelation that has unfortunately continued with the subsequent deaths of Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and countless others.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Playing a Black mother who lost a son to racist violence has led to numerous encounters while promoting the film, says Deadwyler, with the mothers of Michael Brown, Amadou Diallo, Trayvon Martin and others who have shared Mamie’s experience. Myrlie Evers, the widow of assassinated civil rights activist Medgar Evers, told Deadwyler after the film’s Los Angeles premiere, “she said something along the lines of ‘You know, we haven’t come far, you know, and we still have to fight.’”
“And yet this film is deeply necessary,” says Deadwyler. “This is a cinematic humanization of what it is like to lose someone.”
Director Chinonye Chukwu (“Clemency”) made a decision because of that contemporary litany of televised deaths, not to show Emmett’s murder onscreen.
Instead, we see the trauma of his death displaced onto the face of his mother, in the excruciating scene of Mamie receiving her son’s casket at the Chicago Train Station or her first encounter with his ravaged body at the A.A. Rayner Funeral Home, scenes of harrowing loss that Deadwyler plays with a devastating intensity.
But one of the most subtle, emotionally complex scenes in “Till” happens before Emmett leaves for Mississippi, as Mamie tries to convey to her joking, vivacious son, how he should behave in the South.
The “talk” that Mamie has with Emmett is one, says Deadwyler, that she’s had to have with her own 13-year-old son Ezra through the years.
Credit: Courtesy of Orion Pictures
Credit: Courtesy of Orion Pictures
“And you want to protect as much as you possibly can, but you don’t want to mute — you don’t want to douse the fire of their joy, their abundance. So it’s a weird, difficult balancing act of empowering and warning.”
Ezra actually played a role in securing the part for Deadwyler by assuming the Emmett role in her audition for the film.
Deadwyler hadn’t been on a production in Atlanta for several years, so “Till” was a welcome opportunity to shoot in her hometown, on a set populated with familiar faces. A graduate of Grady High School (now Midtown High) and Spelman, who grew up in Southwest Atlanta, Deadwyler studied American Studies at Columbia University’s grad school in New York and then writing at Ohio’s Ashland University before embarking on an acting career when she returned to Atlanta. And for Deadwyler, Atlanta is still very much the center of her identity and her art.
Credit: Lynsey Weatherspoon / Orion Pict
Credit: Lynsey Weatherspoon / Orion Pict
“It’s been the foundation of everything that I do,” she says. “Black theatre in Atlanta is my core. Black dance in Atlanta is my core, those communities, those old school institutions have been integral to my work ethic and my understanding of my self worth, in my understanding of my creative ability.”
“Those folks have shaped the way I look at the world, the way I look at art.”
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