🎧 Danielle Deadwyler's Golden Silence

'The Piano Lesson' star on using stillness to make noise. Plus: Movies that give you hope

LIFE LESSON “I always do it for them . . . There’s a lot of people who made space for me to be where I am,” says Danielle Deadwyler of why she did The Piano Lesson. (Netflix)

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Danielle Deadwyler knows there’s a power in her onscreen stillness. It’s been a distinctive quality of so many characters she’s played, from the grief-stricken mother at the center of Till to her latest role as Berniece in The Piano Lesson, a woman so haunted by the past it sometimes literally freezes her in place. But don’t mistake stillness for inaction, she tells me on this week’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast: “Stillness is movement. Silence is loud. These are choices.”

With masters degrees in American studies as well as creative writing, Deadwyler, 42 and a native of Atlanta, is a student of just about everything. It shows in the way she talks about her work: “I’m reading multiple books at a time, but also interfacing in all of these different disciplines at a time.” She references Octavia Spencer and the idea of primitive hypertext as easily as she references Lisa Simpson, and describes building her working relationship with The Piano Lesson director Malcolm Washington as both shared ideas of “art and modes of thinking” but also some very simple Atlanta slang that sums up their like-minded natures: “Twin!”

Much of the cast of Netflix’s film version of The Piano Lesson, now playing in theaters in a limited run and hitting the streamer on Nov. 22, also starred in the 2022 Broadway production. But Deadwyler steps into a role that was played on Broadway by Danielle Brooks and had to build a relationship with co-stars who had been playing their parts together for years.

For this story about ancestors and family adapted from August Wilson’s play, The Piano Lesson took steps to include everyone in the film’s family — including working images of Deadwyler’s actual ancestors into the film’s production design. “That makes it a deeply personal endeavor for everybody,” Deadwyler says. “It makes the art a blood intention.”

My conversation with Deadwyler on this week’s podcast follows a conversation between me and Richard Rushfield about something it seems everyone could use this week: movies that give you hope about the world. Both Richard and I have published our personal lists on Letterboxd (find his here and mine here), and in the episode discuss the themes that unite them, from stories of people banding together for a greater purpose to the enduring message of learning to be happy with what you have. If you decide to put on “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and have a cathartic cry after you listen, you surely won’t be alone.