ATLANTA — Samuel L. Jackson has a long history with the acclaimed August Wilson play “The Piano Lesson.” He first performed lead character Boy Willie at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1987. Three years later, he was an understudy for Boy Willie on Broadway.
Over the next three decades, Jackson became a major movie star with hits like “Pulp Fiction,” “Snakes on a Plane” and “Django Unchained.” In 2022, his wife, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, decided to direct a new version of “The Piano Lesson” on Broadway and asked her husband to return to the stage.
“I told her I was kind of too old to play Boy Willie. She said I’ll play Doaker Charles,” the uncle character, Jackson told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in a phone interview. After the Broadway run, he stuck with Doaker for the film version now in theaters for a limited run before streaming on Netflix Nov. 22.
The movie, like the play, is set in 1936 and centers around an old family piano. Boy Willie (John David Washington, Denzel’s son) travels from Mississippi to his sister’s home after getting out of prison with a truckload of watermelons and a dream: Make enough money, including selling the piano, to buy the Sutter land where his enslaved ancestors once toiled.
His sister Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler) is mourning the loss of her husband and refuses to relinquish what she sees as a family heirloom with carvings of their ancestors created by their late father, who was killed a quarter-century earlier for trying to steal the piano from Sutter. To enhance the stakes, Sutter’s ghost pops up.
This is not one of Jackson’s aggressive, in-your-face roles like the gangster in the recent Peacock series “Fight Night.” Jackson’s Doaker Charles tries to keep the peace between his feuding niece and nephew, showing true affection for both.
But Doaker is also a realist: He believes Boy Willie’s dream of becoming an independent farmer is unlikely to happen in the Deep South in the 1930s.
“I grew up in segregation,” Jackson said. “That’s the America I know.”
Jackson, now 75, said taking on this older, more patriarchal role wasn’t difficult and he felt comfortable on set since he has socialized with Denzel Washington’s family for decades: “Having known John David since he was a child, there was no real difficulty developing an uncle relationship with him. That’s what he and his brother called me anyway.”
Jackson also loved working with Michael Potts (“The Wire”), who played his drunken brother Wining Boy Charles, both on Broadway for several months and in the Netflix film version. “We developed a wonderful relationship that made me look forward to getting on stage with him every night, letting the audience see that dynamic between him and me,” Jackson said. “That became a high point.”
But the eight shows a week on Broadway “was a lot of work for an old person,” Jackson said.
Deadwyler, known for playing the anguished mother of Emmett Till in the 2022 historical film “Till,” brings pathos and pain to the forefront in a way that deeply impressed Jackson.
“She’s a beast,” Jackson said. “Her range is incredible. She has a dedication to the character that’s astounding when you watch her. She uses her voice as this wonderful instrument of understanding.”
Deadwyler, in a separate interview with Washington at the Four Seasons Hotel in Midtown, said being in a Wilson-inspired movie after seeing many of his plays at the Alliance Theatre and True Colors was an honor. “It’s just my DNA,” she said. “It’s what you want in your life. I’ve been trained to be this kind of actor.”
Washington, too, was inspired after seeing the Wilson play “Two Trains Running” in Atlanta followed by “Fences” on Broadway.
“I felt such a surge of energy knowing there are writers who understand our experience,” Washington said.
The opportunity to take part in a Wilson masterpiece, he said, enabled him to build his artistry. “And knowing when I did it,” he declared, “I’d become a Jedi.”
Deadwyler laughed at the Star Wars reference.
John David Washington’s brother Malcolm, who directed the film and co-wrote the screenplay, had to trim Wilson’s three-hour play into a taut two-hour movie without taking away from Wilson’s dialogue or plotting.
“In the play, there are long, extensive monologues that are condensed in the movie to give you an image of certain events, be it the death of their father or Berniece remembering her late husband,” Deadwyler said. Malcolm’s direction “gives you the full breadth of understanding the monologues don’t necessarily provide.”
In the end, the piano remains the true centerpiece of the film. “It’s beyond an heirloom,” Deadwyler said. “It’s an altar. It’s a portal. It’s a story. It’s an object imbued with history and myths about the family. It provides a richer connectivity to family stories.”
