With ‘The Piano Lesson,’ Danielle Deadwyler Goes Even Deeper With ‘The Piano Lesson,’ Danielle Deadwyler Goes Even Deeper
The New York Times
After breaking through with “Till,” the actress delivers another formidable performance. Still, when it comes to Hollywood, she’d rather keep some distance.
On a recent Sunday morning in West Hollywood, the actress Danielle Deadwyler wore all white, clad in a pristine Tory Burch dress.
“You know what white represents?” she said. “Spiritually, it’s rebirth: You get baptized, you put on a white robe, and you allow yourself to be witnessed in a certain way and to be changed. I think I’m in the midst of all of that.”
Did she have a sense of where that change would take her?
“Hell no,” Deadwyler said. “But I’m open.”
Certainly, she appears headed in the right direction. After supporting roles in “The Harder They Fall” and “Station Eleven” established her as an actress to watch, Deadwyler’s career breakthrough came two years ago with the film “Till,” about the 1955 Mississippi murder that helped catalyze the civil-rights movement. For her deeply felt performance as Mamie Till, whose 14-year-old son Emmett was slain by white supremacists, Deadwyler won leading honors from the NAACP Awards, Gotham Awards and National Board of Review.
She’s every bit as powerful in Netflix’s “The Piano Lesson,” which premiered on the streamer last week and is once again earning the 42-year-old actress awards buzz. Based on the play by August Wilson, “The Piano Lesson” casts Deadwyler as Berniece, a widowed mother at odds with her brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington), in post-Depression-era Pittsburgh. Both siblings must contend with generational trauma that’s wrapped up in the fate of their family piano: Though Boy Willie wants to sell it to buy land, Berniece insists the piano should stay put, since it serves as a totemic reminder of what their enslaved ancestors have been through.
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