ESSENCE Festival of Culture attendees were treated to a first look at The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat, the new film from Sanaa Lathan, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Uzo Aduba, and director Tina Mabry, over the weekend in our annual Film Festival. But if you didn’t happen to be in person on the premises to catch what “The Supremes” have in store, you’re in luck.
Mabry, Lathan, and Ellis spoke exclusively with ESSENCE about their hotly anticipated new project, which follows the highs, lows, and unwavering friendship of three women with dynamic personalities living in the small-town South across three decades.
Based on the 2013 novel of the same name by Edward Kelsey Moore, The Supremes is a classic rooted in sisterhood in the same vein of The Women of Brewster Place, Steel Magnolias, or Waiting to Exhale.
“I love telling stories about women with women,” says Ellis-Taylor. “I’ll be honest with you, I don’t get a chance to work with women a lot. Leading up to this film, I would say in about 80% of the work I had been doing, I was only sharing scenes with men.”
“I get excited about working with women and then working with Black women particularly – that’s even more rare for me. Then they started putting the cast together…Sanaa Lathan is a legend, so getting a chance to work with her, and I have such tremendous respect for Uzo’s work, and then getting to be directed by Tina Mabry who is from Mississippi, like I’m from Mississippi. It was all a great deal of pride for me.”
Lathan, who is already the star of a string of Black cultural classic films, hopes that The Supremes is the next to be added to her list of constantly replayed, oft-quotable movies.
“I want to make movies that are new classics and classics stand the test of time,” Lathan told ESSENCE exclusively. “People want to watch them over and…
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