With Danielle Deadwyler’s name currently one of the most buzzed-about in Hollywood, the actress adamantly gives credit to the southern roots that nurtured her talent. “My journey as an artist began in Atlanta, Georgia,” she says. “I have been reared and loved, and my creativity has been fostered, by Black women—and by Black southerners, and by Black artists of that region. Everything about me has come from that space.”
Atlanta is where Deadwyler took her first steps and first stepped foot on a college campus, having attended Spelman College as an undergraduate. It’s also where she sharpened her talent on the stage, appearing in local productions of Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow Is Enuf and Alliance Theatre’s The C.A. Lyons Project, before branching into television and film.
Her latest roles—Cuffee in the revisionist Western The Harder They Fall and Zora in the limited drama series From Scratch—have shown audiences the breadth of Deadwyler’s mastery on the screen. But it’s her portrayal of Mamie Till-Mobley in the Chinonye Chukwu–directed biographical drama Till that has brought Deadwyler critical acclaim. She says of her and Chukwu’s approach to the work, “We both knew we had a great mission, and we took every resource possible and every moment to dig into doing it right, to doing it justice.
Here, the 2023 Black Women in Hollywood honoree shares how art has always been a part of her life and how it’s Black women who have nurtured that creativity.
When did you know wanted to be an artist?
Danielle Deadwyler (DD): Goodness. I think it’s always been there. My mother always talks about me dancing in front of the TV at two or three years old. There’s a lot of discrepancy, sometimes it goes up to four. But alas, between two and four I was dancing in front of…
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