Danielle Deadwyler knew something wasn’t right. It was 2008, and she’d been back in Atlanta—where she’d been raised, on the old Stewart Avenue—for more than two years. Deadwyler had just spent the last year in New York, focused solely on getting her master’s degree in American studies from Columbia University. She’d always envisioned a career in academia. Everything she’d done had been in pursuit of teaching at the college level. Of course, she assumed she’d be acting on the side, too; how could she not? She’d starred in plays at Grady High School and Spelman College. At Columbia, she’d performed in a campus production of The Vagina Monologues. But the last two years, teaching at an elementary school in Southeast Atlanta, had curtailed her artistic endeavors. She was longing to create, and not doing so had become a problem. Deadwyler would regularly ask herself, What the hell is missing!? The answer was clear: “It was the daily practice of art,” she says. In the 16 years since Deadwyler stood at that career crossroads, she’s never regretted leaving teaching behind to become an actress. Instead, she’s repeatedly used her studies to inform her performances. She’s also—perhaps defiantly—stayed in Atlanta. A firm part of its artistic community, Deadwyler has performed poetry, directed and produced short films, and acted onscreen and onstage throughout the city. She’s won a Creative Loafing Atlanta Critics Pick for Best Actress, a Readers Pick for Best Performance Artist, and received residencies, fellowships, and numerous grants for her performance art pieces, which have appeared in galleries and museums all over the city. Deadwyler’s work is inventive, thought-provoking, and captivating; Hollywood was always eventually going to take notice. Station Eleven, The Harder They Fall, and Till made clear that she had the screen presence to command viewers’ attention and the emotional depth to sway their hearts. Jumping into the Hollywood machine only sharpened and heightened Deadwyler’s already considerable talents. Clearly, she was just getting started. This year has already seen Deadwyler in the feature films I Saw the TV Glow and Parallel, with two more, Carry-On and The Piano Lesson, set to follow before the year is out. In March 2025, she’ll produce and play lead in The Woman in the Yard, the latest film out of the horror juggernaut Blumhouse Productions. Deadwlyer in Station ElevenPhotograph by Warrick Page/HBO MAX “She’s a chameleon,” says director Kenny Leon, who founded the Atlanta-based True Colors Theatre Company. It was a True Colors production of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf that convinced Deadwyler she was ready to pursue acting full-time. “She’s a little bit of Viola Davis, Eartha Kitt, and Ruby Dee all squished into one,” adds Leon. “She can play any range, any age, any genre. She’s fierce; she’s courageous. She’s always rooted in the truth.” • • • When we first connect, over Zoom in the middle of March, there’s one thing Deadwyler wants to talk about first. “I love your In the Mood for Love poster!” Deadwyler says, referencing the framed one-sheet of Wong Kar-wai’s luscious 2000 romance hanging behind my head. I’m always a tad anxious before speaking to someone of her stature, but Deadwyler exudes a relatability and charm that instantly calm my nerves without my even noticing. With her computer propped up on a coffee table, she half lies, half sits on the floor, unassuming yet confident. Over the next hour, the subtle qualities that make her such a formidable actress begin to emerge. Her answer to each question is caring and considerate; one can tell she could give even more cerebral responses, breaking down her myriad influences and the artistic choices she makes for each part, but she doesn’t need to reveal more. She’s too respectful, too protective of the craft. Her performances speak for themselves. Each viewer has their own answers and truths to discover within them. Deadwyler’s journey to acting might have been a little circuitous, but she’s constantly using the skills she picked up along the way. After catching her dancing to Soul Train, Deadwyler’s mother put her in dance classes at the age of four. “Everything I do leads with the body,” she says. “With acting and dancing, there’s always choreography.” After dancing for several years, she found herself fascinated by the physicality of tae kwon do. Deadwyler credits dance, not tae kwon do, for “allowing her to harness a certain aggression.” Tae kwon do taught her about defense and being reactive; she found herself basking in its “meditative qualities.” Today on set, she prioritizes courtesy, respect, and safety—disciplines she perfected through the Korean martial art. Drawn to the performative nature of dance, and with tae kwon do honing her athleticism and competitiveness, Deadwyler says she had “a natural segue into theater.” She appeared in plays throughout school, including Christopher Durang’s Baby with the Bathwater and, in high school, her first production of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf. As a young actress she began to exhibit the chameleon qualities that have become a hallmark of her Hollywood career. In the ninth grade, she leapt at the opportunity to play a grand maternal figure, reveling in the chance to “experiment with all of the beingness of earth.” Such characters also allowed her to viscerally explore the past, an interest she once believed would become her life’s work. “It allowed me to feel the breadth of the generational experience,” says Deadwyler. She majored in history at Spelman College, inspired by her sister, Gabrielle Fulton Ponder, who chose the same field at Columbia University and whose classes Deadwyler sometimes attended on visits to New York. Being at Spelman gave Deadwyler the chance to deeply investigate history, though she also dove into the art and English departments and appeared in at least one play a year to keep her creative flame going. When Gabrielle returned to Atlanta from New York, the two began exploring the city’s creative scene together, connecting with “different folks in the arts community.” Atlanta’s artists, who welcomed Deadwyler among their ranks, became her creative home. “I have always stayed connected with them,” says Deadwyler, beaming with Atlantan pride. “Whether it’s poets, writers, or actors, and the people doing stuff at schools. It was just my world. It still is my world.” • • • When it came time to continue her education, Deadwyler decided to follow in her sister’s footsteps again, moving to New York City to pursue her masters. It would make sense if this was the part of her story where, attracted by the bright lights of Broadway, Deadwyler turned her love of the performing arts into a never-ending pursuit to make them her profession. But when Deadwyler arrived in New York, she was there “purely for the learning,” she says. “Nothing about that experience was trying to professionally practice art.” In fact, she barely even made it to a Broadway show, let alone an audition. With little money to her name, she was in the Columbia library for hours and hours at a time, studying. When her head wasn’t in a book, she says, she was either eating, drinking, or going to bed. Her work paid off. Despite being one of the youngest students in Dr. Robin D. G. Kelley’s course “The Making of the African Diaspora,” a then 22-year-old Deadwyler immediately impressed the scholar with her honesty, humor, and bold critical thinking. “She’s still my favorite student,” says Kelley. “She spoke her mind. She was very direct. Very sharp. She had an artistic flair. She was never once intimidated.” Even while she was in New York, Deadwyler regularly turned to her home city for inspiration. Under Kelley, she designed her thesis around the experiences and cultural politics of Black female strippers in Atlanta, exploring the relationship between this aspect of the adult entertainment industry and Southern hip-hop. “That was not the kind of thing people were writing about in the 2000s,” Kelley says with a chortle. “Nowadays they are. But she was basically 20 years ahead of her time.” Over the year Deadwyler studied under Kelley, she shared with him glimpses of her artistic side. He was bowled over by her writing, critiques, and topics of debate. Deadwyler invited him to the production of The Vagina Monologues and even shared her poetry with him. “I could see she was a genuine polymath,” Kelley tells me. “She could do anything.” It didn’t surprise him that after completing her studies at Columbia, Deadwyler returned to Atlanta: “A lot of our conversations were about Atlanta and how much she loved it. That’s so home for her.” He knew that she would continue to make “high-quality” art with “incredible integrity” wherever she was. It took a few years for Deadwyler to have the same confidence. After moving back to Atlanta with plans to attend a women’s studies graduate program at Emory University, Deadwyler was devastated when her application was rejected; she’d envisioned the program as the next step in her journey to academia. Instead, she turned to teaching, joining The Neighborhood Charter School as a fourth- and fifth-grade teacher. In her lessons, she’d regularly use art and creativity to try to help the kids retain information. “I’d read to them, make them write, draw, dance,” she says of her years in the classroom. “I was super active and energetic. I was just trying to figure out all different ways to connect with them.” But her own yearning to perform grew stronger and stronger. “It rang so loud,” she recalls. “When you have the void, you just run the other way.” Before long, there was nowhere left for her to hide from her own dreams: Deadwyler realized she had to put every part of herself into her creative pursuits. In June 2008, Deadwyler started a new position with The Southwest Arts Center. She worked with a variety of small theater and performance art organizations across Atlanta, helping with administration, setting up exhibitions, and even teaching at arts camps. Finding herself in the heart of the Atlanta artistic community, she began to build connections with local filmmakers and The Atlanta Film Society and Atlanta Film Festival. “Everything that has happened for me is deeply, deeply rooted in Southern culture, Southern people, Southern artists,” Deadwyler says. The Southwest Arts Center also allowed her to leave for auditions when required. She started to create performance art projects in her spare time. The daily practice of art was again becoming a habit. That August, Deadwyler starred in the True Colors production of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf at the 14th Street Playhouse, directed by Jasmine Guy. In the role of the Lady in Yellow, performing alongside veterans Nicole Ari Parker and Robin Givens, Deadwyler established herself as one of the most promising young actors in the city. That production proved so successful that the following summer, True Colors took the show to The Public Theater in New York, with Deadwyler returning in the same role. The floodgates were creaking open. Deadwyler got her first manager. She left the Southwest Arts Center to act full-time. She considered moving to Los Angeles, but realized that, for many reasons, Atlanta was where she belonged. “I had a personal maturation that was integral,” she says. “And that led me down a path where . . .” Deadwyler stops, searching for the right metaphor. “I didn’t want to throw myself into another pool where plenty of people might be. Because then you’re considering whatever they’re doing in it. I wanted to be in my own pool.” History is littered with stories of dreamers moving to Los Angeles or New York to find stardom. By staying in Atlanta, did Deadwyler worry that she might not be taken as seriously or be seen as a legitimate actor? “The question is, what do you find to be legitimate work,” Deadwyler responds emphatically. “You just have to focus on yourself and develop your own sole focus. Align with people who are right here in front of you, and do it rigorously. You’ve got to keep your own pool clean. Don’t be trying to swim in anybody else’s.” She worked all over the Atlanta theater scene for the next five years, performing at Horizon, Synchronicity, Aurora, Alliance, and Theatrical Outfit, all while producing and starring in short films and creating performance art. After a few years, the film work started pouring in. In 2015, she landed the recurring role of LaQuita Maxwell in the Tyler Perry show The Haves and the Have Nots. This was followed by roles on other locally-shot shows: Atlanta, Watchmen, P-Valley. Her work was reaching more and more people, but the parts were still relatively small. A scene from BustItOpen, a 2017 performance Deadwyler created with Living Walls AtlantaPhotograph courtesy of Danielle Deadwyler Paintings from Lenticularities, part of her 2021 exhibition Will (to) Adorn at MINT GalleryPhotograph courtesy of Danielle Deadwyler It was Deadwyler’s performance in the low-budget 2019 thriller The Devil to Pay that finally confirmed her lead-actor credentials. The film was the creation of Atlanta filmmaker couple Ruckus and Lane Skye, whom Deadwyler initially met through the Atlanta arts scene. “I remember seeing her close-ups on the first day of shooting, and it just looked like a movie,” says Lane over Zoom. “We did our best work by staying out of her way.” Ruckus leans in to add, “Her instincts were almost 100 percent right. She was just fearless.” The Devil to Pay might have drawn a smaller audience than her television roles had reached, but it expanded her profile in the Atlanta indie circuit. That role, combined with her her work on Atlanta and Watchmen, caught the attention of casting directors for big-budget, high-profile projects. By 2020, Hollywood had opened its doors to Deadwyler. In November and December 2021, The Harder They Fall and Station Eleven hit Netflix and Max, respectively, within weeks of each other. In October 2022, From Scratch and Till were released, a week apart. Till—a searing biopic by Chinonye Chukwu that follows Mamie Till-Mobley in the aftermath of the brutal lynching of her son, Emmett, in Mississippi in 1955—elevated Deadwyler’s profile as a true star. Deadwyler in Till as Mamie Till-Mobley with Jalyn HallPhotograph by Lynsey Weatherspoon/Orion Picture But despite an enthusiastic audience reception, warm reviews—especially for Deadwyler—and a slew of critic’s award nominations and wins, the film failed to earn a single Academy Award nomination. Chukwu excoriated Till’s exclusion, accusing the film industry of being “aggressively committed to upholding whiteness and perpetuating an unabashed misogyny towards Black women.” Deadwyler’s performance earned best-actress nods from the Screen Actors Guild, the British Academy Film Awards, and the Critics’ Choice Awards, among others, and won her a Gotham independent film award. She echoed Chukwu’s outrage at the Oscars snub: On the podcast Kermode & Mayo’s Take, she called it evidence of “misogynoir,” a term coined by the Black feminist scholar Moya Bailey that encapsulates the compounded hostility endured by Black women. Racism in the Academy has a long history, she noted in the same interview, saying, “Hattie McDaniel [the first Black actor to win an Oscar, for 1939’s Gone With the Wind] couldn’t even attend the ceremony. She had to be in the back.” And she threaded the prejudice embedded in the film industry with the wider context of American culture: “Nobody is absolved of . . . participating in racism,” she said, “and not knowing that there is a possibility of its lingering effect on the spaces and the institutions that you’ve created.” • • • A snub from the Academy couldn’t stop Deadwyler’s rise; the next stage of her acting ascent was undeniable. But even as Deadwyler’s career was reaching new heights, leaving Atlanta was out of the question. It just wouldn’t have felt right, she says: The city is in her every quality. She recalls the radicalism in Atlanta’s arts organizations, the stories she heard as a kid, the dances she performed, the exhibitions she saw. They weren’t just by and about women; they also covered themes of gender, racism, and sexism. “That’s the lens that I was taught through, not just academically but artistically,” she explains. “It informs everything about who and how I am. What I choose to make. Who I align with. I was reared and have been continuously loved on in Atlanta. I think it’s imperative for me to do the loving at this point.” Whether it’s watching Deadwyler subvert gender expectations in The Harder They Fall or display unimaginable heartbreak and strength in Till, Kelley sees a direct throughline from her youth to her studies to her work as an actress. “She was at Columbia to pursue certain questions about Black women’s autonomy and about sexuality. About the long history of slavery and freedom and its impact on gender, race, and class,” says Kelley. To prove his point, Kelley doesn’t mention Deadwyler’s major cinematic triumphs but rather (dis)possessed: the live mixtape, a one-woman theatrical performance art project she mounted at Spelman College’s Museum of Fine Art in 2013. “That represents where she was going,” Kelley says. “It’s a combination of all her art forms: poetry, music, dance, memory, and narrative. It’s her body as a work of visual art.” When in need of advice, Deadwyler continues to turn to the mentors, such as Kelley, who have been by her side for decades. “People in the academic world inform me in a way that’s critical to how I develop characters,” she explains. “I just happen to have known those experts before I got the opportunities.” As she prepared to shoot Till, Deadwyler and Kelley talked often about Mamie Till-Mobley’s role in the civil rights movement. Even now, with her career at its greatest heights, Deadwyler can’t help but plunge headfirst into new challenges. She signed on for I Saw the TV Glow—the visually arresting horror about two teenagers who bond over their favorite late-1990s kids horror show—because it was the “weirdest shit ever,” she says, a “different playground,” one that explored maternal themes that intrigued her. In early 2023, Deadwyler’s representatives told her there was interest in bringing her on for a planned adaptation of The Piano Lesson, August Wilson’s 1990 Pulitzer Prize–winning play. As a self-described “theater baby,” she was already well aware of Wilson’s oeuvre, calling The Piano Lesson a “quintessential, canonized work.” Deadwyler in The Piano Lesson with Skylar SmithPhotograph by Brian Douglas/Netflix To be thorough, Deadwyler asked to sit down with the film’s cowriter and director, Malcolm Washington, who would mark his feature film debut with The Piano Lesson. “I didn’t know anything that Malcolm had done,” she says. It didn’t take long for Washington to win over Deadwyler. She calls him a “wise rocket of a man, a Renaissance man, a romantic man,” whom she’d follow into anything. “He had a vision that I wanted to be in and do service to and collaborate with,” she says. “Him and the whole Washington family.” Not only is Malcolm directing, but his father, Denzel, is a coproducer, and his brother, John David, portrays Boy Willie Charles, the brother to Deadwyler’s Berniece. The film follows Boy Willie and Berniece as they argue over what to do with the family piano. Appearing in an August Wilson play that explores Black history in such a complex and thoughtful manner is very much in keeping with Deadwyler’s work, of a piece with her roles as real Black women, from Jane Manning James and Cathay “Cuffee” Williams to Mamie Till-Mobley. “I love to look at where Black women have existed historically,” she says. “With all these roles, I want to get into the details of what defiance, rigor, love, strangeness, and queerness look like. At how these people bucked the system. I want to understand—through large and small gestures—what it means to be human in this body.” What particularly excites her about Washington’s take on The Piano Lesson, though, is how he has merged his “young oeuvre” to historical material set in 1936 Pittsburgh, in the wake of the Great Depression. “You need to marry wisdom with innovation,” Deadwyler says. Using the past to inform the present. Exploring history through a modern lens. Art as healing. This is what Deadwyler has been doing her entire life and career. Hollywood is finally catching up. This article appears in our September 2024 issue. The post Danielle Deadwyler: Made in Atlanta appeared first on Atlanta Magazine.