Danielle Brooks made her name on stage in Broadway musical The Color Purple — and nearly a decade later the big-screen version sees her contending for major film awards.
Danielle Brooks spent an exhausting year doing eight shows a week in the 2015 Broadway revival of The Color Purple. But character fatigue was never going to be an issue when the chance came to revisit her role in a film version of the musical play.
“It was the coolest thing in the world,” Brooks says of being cast in the film, based on both Alice Walker’s classic novel and the stage musical adaptation (originally produced in 2005). “Artistically it was one of the best gifts I could ever have been given. It’s very rare that an artist gets to play the same character in different mediums, to explore the character in different ways.”
In the story — first filmed, of course, as a 1985 non-musical drama by Steven Spielberg — Brooks plays Sofia, the firecracker stepdaughter-in-law of Celie, the young, mistreated wife at the centre of a group of Black women struggling against poverty, racism and abusive men in the rural American South in the early decades of the 20th century.
After getting a Tony nomination for her stage Sofia, Brooks has earned rave reviews for her work on screen, together with Oscar, Bafta, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards nominations in the best supporting actress category.
The Warner Bros film, directed by Blitz Bazawule, reimagines Walker’s story by combining joyful musical numbers with naturalistic dramatic scenes. And that approach offered Brooks a bigger palette than she had enjoyed in the bare-bones staging of the Broadway revival. “With theatre it felt like painting with 10 different colours,” she says, “but with film I felt like I had every colour I could ever want to create with at my fingertips.”
Sofia’s signature song ‘Hell No’, for example, bursts off the screen with upbeat music and the kind of dancing that, Brooks jokes, “is not my first calling in life”. The staging was the result of “multiple conversations” between Brooks, Bazawule and the film’s choreographer Fatima Robinson. “We upped the tempo and changed the energy of Sofia’s delivery,” the actress explains, “and that elevated it in a way that truly made ‘Hell No’ a female anthem.”
The new version of a key dramatic scene from the 1985 film posed a different kind of challenge for Brooks. Oprah Winfrey — who received an Oscar nomination for playing Sofia in the original film and produces the new The Color Purple with Spielberg, Scott Sanders and Quincy Jones — was on set when Brooks shot the scene in which Sofia confronts Celie (played by Fantasia Barrino) about the latter’s advice to the former’s husband Harpo (Corey Hawkins).
Brooks says that while she tried to make the “You told Harpo to beat me” scene her own, she also “knew I had to keep certain things that [Winfrey] did. I wanted her to know I was paying homage to what she created.”
Brooks also played the scene with an awareness that it would resonate differently in the #MeToo era, than it had in the 1980s. In this millennium, Brooks points out, “women are being way more vocal about the issues that we face as women”. And, thanks to a new line inserted by writer Marcus Gardley, the scene in question now has a note of “vulnerability”, suggests the actress. “That was powerful for me because I think that’s where we are as women now,” she adds. “We’re getting out of this ‘don’t share’ mentality and starting to be vulnerable.”
Career trajectory
Finding fresh takes on a scene and a character is part of what Brooks describes as “my happy place as an actor”. It is a place the Georgia-based, South Carolina-born performer first discovered while attending New York’s prestigious Juilliard School for performing arts.
Only a few years after graduating from Juilliard, Brooks got her first big break when she joined the ensemble cast of Netflix’s Orange Is The New Black, the women’s prison comedy drama series that from 2013 to 2019 helped put the streamer on the original programming map.
Playing droll, worldly-wise inmate Tasha ‘Taystee’ Jefferson in the series (winner of three SAG comedy ensemble awards) “really got my face out there”, recalls Brooks. “That’s where I started to gain more respect. People started to say, ‘Oh, she’s studied, they didn’t just find her off the street.’”
Appearing in Broadway’s The Color Purple gained her further recognition but required a punishing schedule — the stage run overlapped with an Orange season in which Taystee was a particularly important character, forcing Brooks to make do with as little as two hours sleep a night.
Small-screen appearances since then have included a powerful take on gospel great Mahalia Jackson in award-winning TV movie Mahalia and her recent stint in Peacemaker, the superhero streaming series from creator James Gunn and Warner’s DC Entertainment. There has also been reality television (she hosted the Netflix house makeover series Instant Dream Home), some modelling, a music EP and more theatre (starring opposite Samuel L Jackson in a recent Broadway production of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson).
Brooks has also found time for roles in the independent film arena, with credits including festival entry Sadie, Alfre Woodard-starrer Clemency and Chris Morris/Jesse Armstrong satire The Day Shall Come.
“Variety is number one,” explains Brooks of her priorities for indie projects. “I’ve always had that mentality of wanting to stretch myself,” she adds, noting that she once played Queen Elizabeth II in a Juilliard production of musical revue Ionescopade. “Southern Black girls do kind of get put into boxes within television and film, and even theatre. I want people to know that we can actually do way more than you think we’re capable of.”
Next up for the impressively versatile Brooks is the shoot for Warner Bros’ Vertigo and Legendary’s live-action video-game adaptation Minecraft, in which she will star alongside Jason Momoa, Jack Black and Wednesday’s Emma Myers.
Brooks says she is “really open” to further opportunities that might come along in the wake of The Color Purple, which opened in North America on Christmas Day and had grossed $59.4m in North America at press time. She adds, though, that at this point in her career “it’s about connecting with the right energy to create work and enjoy the process. Sometimes you get a great script but the energy isn’t right, there’s egos involved, people aren’t respectful. I’m not here for that anymore.
“Yes, it’s important for me to continue to work on scripts that bring characters to life that are breaking the mould for people like me. But who I’m doing that with is also important to me now.”
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