David Remnick: A new version of The Color Purple is in theaters now. It was released just at the end of the year, just in time for award season. It's a story that's been told and retold over four decades since Alice Walker's bestselling novel was first published.

Doreen St. Félix: The Color Purple is unique in the canon of Black female literature because of how many lives and shapes it has taken over the years.

David Remnick: Doreen St. Félix is a critic for The New Yorker.

Doreen St. Félix: Alice Walker's novel was first adapted in the Steven Spielberg film, which I think we're all very familiar with in part because there are these scenes that became so iconic.

Sofia: You told Harpo to beat me.

Harpo: It was that mule, Pa. Old Joey. Old Joey, the mule. I was plowing the north field and the mule just went crazy.

Doreen St. Félix: I think we live in an era of remake after remake after remake. I wasn't convinced that we needed necessarily to have a new envisioning of the story, which has been a novel, which has been a film which has been a musical twice over. All of the intellectual worries or anxieties that I had dissipated in the room because what the film created was a sense of fantasy, a sense of magical realist escape.

I was very moved by the idea that a young Black male director and his young cast could decide to take this monolith, this cultural story that is absolutely, it's an amber and decide to change it, decide to make it reflect what they see to be the concerns of Black millennials of today. I think of The Color Purple, the musical, but you walk out of it feeling a lot lighter, almost as if you've just watched a fairytale. It's a very interesting choice. I loved talking to Danielle about the reasons, the justifications with respect to choosing to tell the story on that register.

David Remnick: Danielle, of course, is Danielle Brooks, who starred in both the 2015 stage version and in the new film. She plays the character of Sofia, who was first portrayed on screen by Oprah Winfrey. Doreen spoke with Danielle Brooks about acting in Winfrey's shadow and much more.

Doreen St. Félix: I saw the movie maybe two months ago. It was a really small screening. It was a bunch of journalists, and you know journalists don't like to be emotional when they watch a movie.

Danielle Brooks: Oh, really?

Doreen St. Félix: They like to be professional. For me it was a completely emotional experience, specifically because I kept thinking, I kept doing this like twinning in my mind. Colman Domingo playing Mister, you're thinking of Danny Glover. You're thinking of him inheriting that. I'm watching you playing Sofia and I'm thinking of you inheriting Oprah.

Danielle Brooks: That was deep. Yes.

Doreen St. Félix: Fantasia inheriting Whoopi. This is also Fantasia's first feature film. That is what is so particular, I think, about the Black performer community, is that it is small forcibly, for reasons that we all understand, but then it does create this amazing, yes, I don't know, inheritance is the word to use for it.

Danielle Brooks: I love that there is this inheritance, this symmetry that happens is crazy. This lineage that you start to find yourself in.

Doreen St. Félix: I also have met a full circle moment sitting here with you and talking because I saw you-

Danielle Brooks: Oh my gosh.

Doreen St. Félix: -on Broadway. I went with my friend. I had mostly known The Color Purple at that point as Alice Walker's text, and then Steven Spielberg's film. I think sometimes it can be hard to track what is adapted from what. The musical is adapted from the film. There's these leggers of change and adaptation. Now having seen the film, I was wondering if you could speak to how this story maybe expands or contracts when it's just having to be just on the stage vs. I think you guys shot down south, right?

Danielle Brooks: Yes. We shot in Georgia.

Doreen St. Félix: What's your experience of having the location change and how it changes this story?

Danielle Brooks: That's a great question. Is night and day in a lot of ways. Our adaptation, which was directed by John Doyle in 2015, it was stripped down, it was bare stage, just wood as you saw, just chairs in our imagination. The audience had to go on that ride with us in our imagination. With film, being actually in Georgia, feeling the hot Georgian sun, being on plantations, seeing slave houses behind us, actually holding a 10-pound baby and having to be careful with that child, it opens up the world. Now I felt like I was painting with an endless amount of colors.

I've enjoyed stepping into both, exploring Sofia so deeply with eight shows a week for a full year of my life. I know her very much inside and out, but there's so much more discovery now when you have everything that you need.

Doreen St. Félix: I think of Color Purple as being the epic of our time, especially both you and I are Black women. My copy of Color Purple, I got from my mother, who then gave it to my sister, who's older than me. Then I read it. I think what's interesting is, as you age with the story, you maybe feel your identification shift.

Danielle Brooks: For sure.

Doreen St. Félix: Celia is the heroin, and then she's been described as beleaguered. She comes from an environment that's completely shaped by abuse. Then she's able to go through kind of like a feminist awakening. I was wondering, what's your relationship with the character having grown? Since being in the revival in the mid-2010s to now being a mother, having been married.

Danielle Brooks: Yes. My life has changed a lot. When I stepped into this role in 2015, I was 25. I was very single, which I kind of needed to be, shooting Orange is the New Black and doing Color Purple at the same time. The life experience was different. My confidence was different because I'm also still coming off of a lot of nos. It was very interesting playing Sofia because when I had become Tony-nominated, I had imposter syndrome. I immediately was like, I don't understand how I'm in this position. The audience is going to see me as a fraud. How could this beautiful thing be happening to me? Which is super odd because I did do the work. It's so crazy how our brains work. It was singing hell no every night that pulled me out of that fear.

[MUSIC- The Color Purple: Hell no]

Sofia: All my life I've had to fight

I had to fight my daddy

I had to fight my brothers

My cousins, my uncles too

But I never, never, never, never, never, never thought

I'd have to fight in my own house.

Doreen St. Félix: What's Hell No about?

Danielle Brooks: Hell No for Sofia is about obviously saying hell no to the abuse. Saying hell no to gender norms, and to the oppressor, and really finding your power. For me, every night it was about saying hell no to my fears, saying hell no to this notion that I'm not enough, that I'm not worthy. That's what I was fighting, battling every day on that stage.

[MUSIC- The Color Purple: Hell no]

Sofia: I never know

But if a man raise his hand

Hell no

Hell no. Hell no. Hell no.

Danielle Brooks: Now, playing her, having become a mother of a beautiful four-year-old girl named Freeya.

Doreen St. Félix: She's the lock screen on your phone, right?

Danielle Brooks: She is the lock screen on my phone, yes, wearing purple. Then becoming a wife now, learning what commitment means, which is so crucial to the story when it comes to Sofia and Harpo. I just really love when I think about her being so radical, these are women that are coming straight off of slavery. For her to really try to break the cycles of abuse within her marriage. This is a woman who had six children when kids were being killed, thrown into the seas or snatched away from them, as we've seen with Celie's character. Yes, there's pieces that I've definitely taken with me now playing Sofia.

Doreen St. Félix: I am interested in your relationship to your castmates. I was reading, I think you, Fantasia Barrino, and other people were involved in a talk a couple of weeks ago. During it, Fantasia, who also was in the musical-

Danielle Brooks: Yes.

Doreen St. Félix: -described playing Celie as a cross. It's been a cross that she hasn't always been able to carry. I wonder about the psychological state of exactly what we were just talking about, bringing your life experience to bear on these characters. What was the space like between each other, given that pretty much everyone had either performed in the musical before, or at least had a really deep emotional relationship to the text? What was it like when you guys were filming?

Danielle Brooks: Spiritual, from day one. The first day we shot the last scene, which is us around the oak tree, which Ms. Oprah calls "the angel oak tree," which you can truly -- I mean, we're in Savannah, Georgia. There are truly slave houses right next to us. You can see them.

Doreen St. Félix: It's the most haunted city in America.

Danielle Brooks: It's so haunted. I mean, I live there now. I was born in Georgia and I grew up in South Carolina, so I get it. You can't help but think about the brothers and sisters that might have been lynched on those trees. You know there's a spirit. Taraji said so beautifully when we were there, "Do you feel that? If only that tree could talk." It really did start out very ancestral, because what we know is that this thing that we're doing is so much bigger than ourselves.

The healing that has taken place, not only within the cast, but also that permeates to the audience. I remember being in the theater, and when we're singing the final number and we say, "Amen"-

All Singing: Amen.

Danielle Brooks: -and audience members are holding each other's hand. They didn't even know each other, and they are grasping for each other's hand and crying because there's a healing that truly was happening and that is now taking place again. I've known Colman for a long time. Sorry, I'm getting emotional, be1cause there's just so much to be grateful for being that today I can call myself a Golden Globe nominee. I think about the journey and running into Colman Domingo on 42nd Street.

At the time, I was having so many odd jobs trying to pay my rent, and going up to him, and him saying after me expressing, "I hope there's a place for me in this industry. I really don't see it," and him encouraging me and saying, "No, you've got to keep going. I don't know you that well, but I can tell there's something in you. You have to continue to go." I am just in awe of how this journey with The Color Purple has come so full circle for me.

After getting blessed with so many jobs that I've had, this is still, in my 11-odd years of being in this industry, my first studio film. It's a cutthroat business. That's one of the first things I learned, was like, "Oh, this acting thing that I just deemed as fun play, my therapy, my happy place, there's a business attached to it. It's not always fair, and it's not always kind. It's definitely not for the weak." The fact that I've just gotten to this point in my career when I've wanted to give up and throw in the towel, I'm grateful for my journey. I'm sorry I'm crying.

[laughter]

Doreen St. Félix: No. You're making me cry. Did you or the cast members develop relationships with performers who had done the roles before, whether it's in the film or in the musical?

Danielle Brooks: Yes. I've definitely formed a bond with Ms. Oprah Winfrey once she called me on that Zoom to personally pass the baton.

Oprah Winfrey: I am here, representing all things purple, to tell you that you are our Sofia, Sofia.

[laughter]

Danielle Brooks: A lot of people are like, "How do you have any pressure? You played her for a year." Ms. Oprah was there almost every day on set.

Doreen St. Félix: Oh, really?

Danielle Brooks: Yes, watching the most iconic scenes, but huge shoes to fill. I feel like she really allowed me to be the cobbler of my own shoe.

Doreen St. Félix: Right.

Danielle Brooks: She still held my hand through the journey because Sofia, as we know, as you said, is not an easy character to play. There were moments where you have to shoot things over, and over, and over again, and you think that you've shed that scene, you're done with that scene, and then they come back two days later and they're like, "We want you to shoot it again." This is the dinner scene.

Doreen St. Félix: What was the dinner scene?

Danielle Brooks: The dinner scene was pretty much, it's almost like the 11 o'clock number, it's the final big hoopla, everyone is coming into their own at this moment in Sofia's life. Her spirit is pretty much dying. She's a shell.

Doreen St. Félix: Because she's just been in jail for many years because she refused to work for Miss Millie and talked back.

Danielle Brooks: That's right. The world has now killed her song, killed her spirit. Taken her song and killed her spirit. She finds that strength again in that moment. When Celie stands up for herself, she begins to find her strength again.

[music]

David Remnick: That's Danielle Brooks, who's in the new film of The Color Purple. She's speaking with Doreen St. Félix, and she'll continue the conversation in just a moment. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We'll continue now with the conversation between Doreen St. Félix, a writer on culture for The New Yorker, and the actress, Danielle Brooks. Brooks cut her teeth on the show, Orange is the New Black, and she went on to have a key role in The Color Purple. She played Sofia in a 2015 stage revival of the musical, and she plays the character again in the new film version directed by Blitz Bazawule.

This new version is pretty different from its predecessors in some very interesting ways. Doreen says it reflects the concerns of its millennial director and cast, that it's got a feeling of magical realism. The pain and the trauma are still there, but it's undergirded this time around by a sense of joy. Here's Doreen, speaking with Danielle Brooks.

Doreen St. Félix: In this film, we get more of Harpo's development as a character, and it does feel like it's addressing questions of masculinity that frankly aren't really addressed in even the book and the film adaptation.

Danielle Brooks: 100%. The fact that this was directed by a Black man has opened up parts of this story that we didn't even know existed, because how would we? The perspective of Steven Spielberg is much different from our director, Blitz Bazawule. There are so many moments, like what we are now discovering with Corey playing Harpo, how that box was open, and we are brought into his world, and we are seeing who he truly is and what he's fighting against, and the relationship between his father, and him trying to fight against what he's being taught, and how Mister can't fight against what he's been taught by his father.

We get this generational lineage of trauma that we didn't see before. That was built out of conversations had with Blitz in the rehearsal process. I love one thing that Blitz did. At first, I was like, "What is he doing?" There's a famous line where Shug comes in for the first time to Mister and Celie's house. She sees Celie, and she says, "You sure is ugly."

Shug: You sure is ugly. [laughs]

Danielle Brooks: At first, I was like, "That is an iconic line. How are you going to get rid of that?" Then I realized, after hearing Blitz talk about the reasoning, "Here we go again. If he would've kept it in, perpetuating this thing where Black women put other Black women down. She's been put down enough. Is it really necessary in this rendition to continually have that happen, have a Black woman speaking ill of another Black woman?"

I really just appreciated that, that just thoughtfulness of what are we saying to this next generation. I just loved that we, I think as a collective, we're very conscious of the storytelling.

[MUSIC- The Color Purple: I'm Here]

Celie: I'm beautiful

Yes, I'm beautiful

Doreen St. Félix: The truth of the matter is that the original Color Purple is an imperfect book. That's what makes it so alive as an organism because other authors are able to come in and draw aspects from the book out more into the forefront, and then also choose to shadow away certain other things. I think the way the relationship between Celie and Shug Avery who she's the vision of glamour. She comes to see Mister. They have this off-and-on relationship. She's a jazz singer. She represents Black culture. She's a symbol of Black culture in the early 20th century.

Before, you always think of Shug as completely dominating Celie. Their erotic moment is not one that's necessarily based in love. It's based in curiosity and other things. In the film, the moment is anything I've ever seen before because it creates a montage, where their song together, Fantasia and Taraji, puts them into the world of entertainment. They're dancing together. They're imagining being on the same level field where Celie is as glamorous.

[MUSIC- Fantasia and Taraji:]

Favorite

This who they talking about

And everything they say is true too.

Doreen St. Félix: That was something I really appreciated when you think about the fact that people tend to forget that The Color Purple is a queer story.

Danielle Brooks: I love that we went there. I love that we went there. Even though everyone should see this, even though everyone will connect to it, this moment for the Black community to get to see two Black women loving on each other is so crucial. A lot of it comes from generational behaviors of self-hate, but also homosexuality being deemed as horrible, which I do not believe personally at all. I feel like because people, the aunties, the uncles, the great-grandmothers love this story so much, this is an opportunity for them to look at things a little different, really understand what love is about.

I think that's what you get with Celie and Shug. It's not the sexual portion of it, it's about the love, teaching each other how to love each other and how to love their selves. Blitz did not shy away from that. They did kiss for way longer in our version than the last. As you see, when they did the version in 1985, how much pushback they got from different organizations like NAACP. It's like, "Look how far we've come? Thank God, we are moving in a better direction." I just love that element in our story.

Doreen St. Félix: Thank you so much, Danielle, for spending time with me today.

Danielle Brooks: Thank you. I loved speaking with you.

[MUSIC- The Color Purple: ]

Rising

Like the sun

Is the hope that sets us free

Your heartbeat

Make my heart beat

David Remnick: The New Yorker's Doreen St. Félix's speaking with Danielle Brooks. Brooks plays Sofia in The Color Purple which is in theaters now. You can always read Doreen St. Félix at newyorker.com.

Like a plate of corn

Like a honeybee

Like a waterfall

All a part of me

Like the color purple

 

 

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