ATLANTA — Atlanta actor Taylor Polidore Williams last year landed a solid secondary role in Tyler Perry’s Amazon drama “Divorce in the Black.”
She impressed Perry so much that he hired Williams to lead his very first TV series for Netflix, “Beauty in Black,” about a stripper named Kimmie trapped in a drug-trafficking dilemma who sees an out courtesy of her interactions with a wealthy family running a Chicago beauty supply company. The first eight episodes came out last week, and eight more are planned.
“Mr. Perry requested me,” Williams told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Perry wrote in a text that he had written Kimmie as “vulnerable while possessing incredible strength. Taylor is a natural at developing a character with that kind of arc.”
Indeed, Kimmie opens the series in a miserable situation. She was kicked out of her home by her mother at age 17 and drawn into a drug deal gone bad. To stay out of prison, a pimp named Jules (Charles Malik Whitfield) forces her and her best friend Rain (Amber Reign Smith) into long-term servitude including stripping and prostitution. Kimmie naturally wants more out of her life.
Fortunately, one of her clients happens to be Roy (Julian Horton), the cheating husband of Mallory (Crystle Stewart), the driven CEO of major beauty supply company Beauty in Black, who will do anything to keep her family’s reputation intact. Kimmie also coincidentally ends up helping out strip club client Horace Bellarie (Ricco Ross), who cofounded Beauty in Black.
Williams, whose previous credits include FX’s “Snowfall” and the CW’s “All American: Homecoming,” said that during the audition process, she felt “absolutely scared” taking on Kimmie.
Perry told her that she had to trust him.
“You get to see Kimmie rise in power and strength,” Williams said, over the span of 16 episodes. “It’s gritty. It’s raw. As an actor, it’s a playground to have a character make a 180 from the bottom to the top.”
Williams added that Kimmie “is seeking vengeance. Or is she just restoring justice? She is someone you want to see win.”
The series was produced in classic Perry fashion over just 16 shooting days. Half the scenes were shot outside of Tyler Perry Studios, including at a local Walmart, the Marriott Marquis in downtown Atlanta and Peaches, an actual strip club.
The pace of production is very much like theater, she said. “You have to be ready at all times,” Williams said. “On the first day, we had 34 scenes. I was in 31 of them.”
In comparison, the standard TV show might shoot four or five scenes in one day.
Perry would shoot scenes out of order, so Williams said she had to pivot quickly, using a master script of all 16 episodes to know what her character’s mindset was at that time.
At the same time, Williams said, she never felt rushed. “It’s a great environment, a well-oiled machine,” she said. “He is very efficient and fast. You have to trust him.”
Perry, before a media screening of the first two episodes of “Beauty in Black” in Atlanta on Oct. 21, explained the show as “my crazy mind running. This is my writing a show that I just wanted to just let go and let crazy people live in my head and tell the story.”
He also said it’s a responsibility and privilege to give young actors like Williams a chance to shine. “You can’t take advantage of that,” he said. “I would lose sleep over it. They come with their dreams in your hands.”
For Williams, a Houston native, this is indeed a dream come true. Just a few years ago, she was a student at Clark Atlanta University, just a few miles from Tyler Perry Studios.
At the time, she thought she might one day work with Perry but had no idea how to get there. “This being my first lead in a television series with a major studio like Netflix exceeds anything I would have ever thought of back then,” she said.
