Danielle Deadwyler On Being ‘Fearless’ With the Washington Family For ‘The Piano Lesson’

When Malcolm Washington’s adaptation of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson premiered at this fall’s Telluride Film Festival, co-star Danielle Deadwyler wasn’t quite ready to experience the emotional film with its first audience.

“I tried to. I tried to stand and look a little bit, but I just had to step out. I didn’t want to mess the beauty of the makeup,” Deadwyler laughed. “But, no, it’s emotional to watch, having people witness for the first time.”

The Piano Lesson stars John David Washington as Boy Willie Charles, an enterprising farmer from Mississippi who drives to visit family members in Pittsburgh. He arrives with the intent to sell locally grown watermelons, but he really wants to sell the family heirloom piano to buy land back home. His sister Bernice (Deadwyler) steadfastly refuses to relinquish the piano even though it represents the Charles family’s traumatic history.

Obviously the themes of family and the legacy of trauma play a vital role in The Piano Lesson, so it feels right that this cinematic adaptation of Wilson’s play comes from the Washington family. Malcolm Washington directs and co-writes the screenplay. John David Washington reprises his role from the recent Broadway revival. Two-time Academy Award winner Denzel Washington produces with his daughter, Katia, serving as Executive Producer.

That communal family experience generated a supportive, experimental, and collaborative environment in which Deadwyler and cast could explore their roles and find new connections and nuances that they perhaps hadn’t previously understood.

“They come with rigor. They come with a love for film. They come with a love for making film. They come with a love of art and process. Malcolm really led the way in opening up a world of playfulness and intelligence and experimentation and freedom,” Deadwyler gushed. “Everybody has the capacity to express how they feel in the process along the way, whether in the pre-rehearsals or the rehearsals and the readings and in all manners of filmmaking. He was just so present and so gracious. He just has a strong mind and vision.”

In fact, in recent interviews, John David called Deadwyler and the rest of the cast “fearless,” and you absolutely consider Deadwyler fearless in her interpretation of Bernice. She initially plays Bernice as a woman wholly focused on the minute details of her Pittsburgh life as a homemaker, an employee, and a mother. Boy Willie’s arrival in Pittsburgh seems to open a door to a life and legacy she’d sooner forget, despite her insistence on keeping the piano.

But when their repressed family trauma manifests in a spiritual / haunting sense, Deadwyler explodes with a force that can only be described as primal.

“Fearlessness is just… It’s surrendering. You have the nerves. You have the vital life force that’s pumping through you, and you don’t know what that is entirely, which I think that’s okay, especially when you’re talking about a film that’s dealing with ancestral legacy and divination and spanning a full gamut of black spirituality from black American Christianity to West African spiritualities,” Deadwyler posits. “So that means jumping into an unknown, but deeply, deeply courageous and trustworthy of all of the parties that are with you, and that’s purely what we were. Deeply trustworthy of each other. Caring, compassionate. Just the full way through. It’s one of the most supremely loving experiences on a production I’ve had thus far in my career.”

Deadwyler’s last acclaimed film role — Mamie Till in Till — saw the actress at the tops of guild and critics awards lists. The Academy failed to recognize her, but her volcanic performance in The Piano Lesson feels undeniable. To Deadwyler, the awards run for The Piano Lesson is wildly different than the campaign for her work in Till. Till focused on the love between mother and child and her pain stemming from his untimely and cruel death.

But The Piano Lesson is both in-story and behind the camera a family venture, a classic ensemble piece where each cast member travels this wild awards road together.

Deadwyler wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I love talking about the work with Malcolm and John David. We’re all deeply, deeply emotional and personal in our understanding of what it means to have put this together, to have pieced this beauty together. [The Charles] family legacy is literally carved into the piano. My family legacy is literally in the production design and others as well. My grandparents on my maternal side are literally in the images of the house,” Deadwyler shared. “And that steers something much more visceral, and you just walk with it in a different way. You can do all kinds of interior stuff that comes from a personal background, but when it’s witnessed by everybody, you can feel and see it and touch and taste it. You just carry it in a different way.”

The Piano Lesson is now playing in New York and Los Angeles. It streams exclusively on Netflix starting November 22.