Her family is from Athens, Georgia, about an hour and a half away. The town is changing, becoming more developed, much to her chagrin. While detailing this, she curls her pointer finger and moves it in a straight line in front of her, repeating “cha-ching.” “It’s driven by money,” she says. She’s flirting with the idea of owning land and doing nothing to it. “The Earth should just be able to be.”

And in this, there are echoes of the dispute that propels her latest film. The Piano Lesson, originally a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by August Wilson, centers around the Charles family and their prized heirloom, a piano engraved with designs by an enslaved ancestor, stolen from the slave master’s home. Its destiny is determined by the children of the man who reclaimed the instrument: Boy Willie, a sharecropper, wants to sell the piano to buy the land his ancestors worked, turning their misfortune into profit for themselves and future generations. Berniece — whose daughter practices on the piano, like Berniece did for her own mother — wants to keep it, insisting that the history it represents remain within their family. The Piano Lesson is a story of contrasts, about the different ways legacy is determined, about the ways in which we can leave our mark.

In person, Deadwyler lacks the rigidity of a character like Berniece: She is loose and goofy, prone to weird noises. Some people talk with their hands; Deadwyler employs all of her limbs, regularly exploding out of her chair. Over lunch, Deadwyler calls the film one of the best production experiences she’s ever had. “I’ve had a couple of divine experiences, and that was one of them,” she says. Just weeks after our meeting, the film would premiere domestically at the Telluride Film Festival and internationally at the Toronto International Film Festival, but she’d seen it once already. “It’s a film!” she says, hands up in the air like she’s throwing snow. “It’s a cinematic experience. It is deeply sensual.” I ask her what it was like to watch herself, and she nearly scoffs: “That ain’t me.”

Before his death in 2005, Wilson was known mostly for the American Century Cycle, a series of 10 plays chronicling the African American experience during the twentieth century. Within the Black theater community, Wilson’s productions are renowned not just for their ingenuity, but also for providing respectable, complex roles for Black actors. Wilson’s estate has entrusted Denzel Washington with producing film versions of each of the plays, beginning with 2016’s Fences. Washington starred alongside Viola Davis in the adaptation, which garnered four Academy Award nominations and one win, for Davis. Next was Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, also starring Davis, which went on to earn five Academy Award nominations and two wins. Fittingly, for a film about a family, Denzel enlisted members of his family in this most recent project: Directed by his youngest son, Malcolm, the film stars his eldest son, John David. One daughter, Katia, is an executive producer; Olivia, Malcolm’s twin sister, as well as Pauletta, Denzel’s wife, have small cameos. 

Deadwyler, along with costar Corey Hawkins, had to enter into another preestablished family, as the majority of the cast had already starred in the 2022 Broadway production. They were warmly received from the start. That safety on set helped Deadwyler dive into what the role demanded. Previous actors took different approaches to Berniece: Danielle Brooks, in the 2022 Broadway production, was sanctified; Alfre Woodard’s 1995 Hallmark TV version was nervy and skittish. Deadwyler’s Berniece is a woman possessed, so laden with the burdens of her family that she always feels at a slight remove. At our lunch, when Deadwyler says that word — “possessed” — her eyes close but for a sliver and her lashes flutter, almost as if she is possessed herself. 

The Piano Lesson’s universe is intimate and sparsely populated; Berniece is the lone woman in the family. Like her mother before her, Berniece becomes the matriarch by way of widowhood: Her husband, Crawley, was killed after getting caught up in one of her brother’s schemes. Berniece’s rage runs deep through the siblings’ arguments; in her eyes, Boy Willie has already taken enough from her. It’s the way the men in her family operate — it’s their legacy.

After her brother claims that Berniece just doesn’t understand what their father would’ve wanted them to do with the piano, she explodes. “You always talking about your daddy, but you don’t never stop to look at what his foolishness cost your mama,” she says, trembling with her entire body. It’s the first time she becomes a vessel for her ancestors — the women who had to listen without speaking. “Seventeen years’ worth of cold nights and an empty bed. For what? For a piano? For a piece of wood? To get even with somebody? I look at you and you’re all the same. You, Papa Boy Charles, Wining Boy, Doaker, Crawley . . . you’re all alike. All this thieving and killing and thieving and killing. And what it ever lead to? More killing and more thieving. I ain’t never seen it come to nothing.”

Deadwyler recognized the ways in which Berniece is tested by the men in her life, and wanted to give her a kindness, moments in which she softened. “I look at people and I understand that there’s a grace and compassion that they need,” she tells me. It’s September, and we’re at her hotel at the Toronto International Film Festival. These qualities are survival tools, especially as a woman. “Thinking about all the men who are trying to tell Berniece what to do, or trying to impose — she’s coming with a certain grace and compassion — and she’s not completely losing it.”

Berniece’s identity is yoked to the men who surround her: She is her brother’s adversary, her uncle’s caretaker. And for two other men, she is an object of affection. Avery Brown, a local preacher played by Hawkins, who’s long been pursuing Berniece, begs her to unclench her heart. Berniece is offended by Avery’s implication that she is a woman who needs a man. Her brother’s friend, Lymon, played by Ray Fisher, leads with his own vulnerabilities, and we see Berniece briefly thaw. “Lymon is probably the only man in this piece who actually puts himself in the shoes of a woman,” Fisher tells me at TIFF. 

If Crawley represents her past, and Avery her present, then Lymon is a departure, a new path unburdened by her history. Intimacy, then, comes easily, in the fearless, immediate way that sometimes can only happen with a stranger. One late night, Berniece and Lymon are preparing to go to sleep, but their bodies draw nearer and nearer to each other, as if it were out of their hands. Lymon not only gives her a gift — of perfume — but also does her a service, daubing it just behind her ear. It is the first time we see Berniece permit someone else to take care of her. She turns to kiss Lymon, and the spell is broken: She allows herself to be desired, possessed by something other than her own pain and fortitude. But only for a moment. 

Deadwyler’s design of Berniece’s interiority came out of close conversations with director Malcolm Washington. She had room for “speculative imagining,” filling in Berniece’s past beyond the source material and building bridges of empathy that brought the actor and her character toward each other. “Black family fissures — who ain’t got that? Family fissures, period — who ain’t got that?” Deadwyler asks, twisting herself in her chair in that Atlanta sun. “What becomes of us when there is an earthquake shift in your family dynamic? Those were the kind of things we were hitting on.” That preparation allowed her to fully submit to Berniece, blurring the edges between herself and the character. 

The feud between Berniece and Boy Willie culminates when the spirits within the piano are unleashed. They make themselves known largely through Berniece, transforming her into a conduit between the living and the dead. “I’m telling you, [Danielle] was somewhere else,” Malcolm says at TIFF. “She gave herself to the thing. She fully committed herself, her spirit, her mind, her body, and she put it in our hands.”

Deadwyler is vim and vigor itself, forever active: The Piano Lesson is one of four 2024 films in which she appears. (Her creative practice encompasses multitudes: She is also an accomplished performance artist, filmmaker, and poet.) She’s always been this way. When she was four, her mother enrolled her in dance school. I remark on her character’s posture, how Berniece, even at rest, stands as if she’s waiting at the ballet barre, an invisible string pulling her taut. “Everything starts with the body,” she says. “I’m very word-driven, research-driven. Then some kind of alchemical something begins when you have to think about what that means in engaging with people day-to-day. That physicality is pivotal.” It’s a dance: literally, in terms of choreographing a scene, and in the interplay between herself and the character she’s inhabiting. 

At Grady (now Midtown) High School, a few blocks away, she played softball and soccer, ran track, and acted in plays. She also worked on the school’s homework hotline television show, trying out every job. At any given time, she was a camera operator, floor manager, producer, technical director, or graphics director. Now, you can see that same rigor in her performances: her attention to all parts of the frame, the way she holds her body, her innate knowledge of where the light and camera are, where her fellow actors are in the scene. 

A conversation with Deadwyler is an exercise in reason and the intangible — she contemplates, she heightens, she self-corrects, she intones. Deadwyler has two master’s degrees (in creative writing, from Ashland University, and in American studies, from Columbia University) and approaches her work with a scholar’s focus. Robin D. G. Kelley, Deadwyler’s thesis-adviser-turned-friend, calls her an adventurous thinker. “She thinks with her body,” he says. “Even in class, she has a way of speaking without using words — not like a reaction, but a real, true intellectual response. You look at the whole of her. You look into her eyes without a single word spoken, and you can feel all those emotions completely.” 

Despite some comedic performances — a scene-stealing cameo as a partygoer in the Donald Glover-helmed Atlanta; the wily and powerful Cuffee in Jeymes Samuel’s The Harder They Fall — the actor made a name for herself in 2022’s Till. Deadwyler played civil rights activist Mamie Till-Mobley, a role that led to a BAFTA Film nomination for Best Actress. She admits that she is drawn to heavier roles. “I always got shit on my shoulders,” she jokes. “I like it, though, because you feel taken over by the role.” Black women always have to forge ahead carrying everyone else’s needs, she says. She needed to shift her thinking about the ways to carry that weight so that it didn’t break her back: “You can’t do stuff like that if people aren’t holding you in a certain way.” The sorts of projects she rejects are the ones that lack awareness of the world. “We learn from cinema,” she says. “When you make a film, are you in conversation with what’s happening in the world today?”

Whether it’s a film or performance art, all of her work is pedagogic, a step forward in the exploration of the self. “I’m wanting to be taught by the things that I do and the opportunities that I’m able to have,” she says. It’s similar to how Deadwyler considers motherhood: malleable and ever-changing, ripe for lessons. Just before the check comes, she tells me about her high school-aged son. They’re close; Deadwyler insists that the lines of communication stay open between them, that they stay honest. She hopes The Piano Lesson does the same thing: prompts family dialogues, an excavation of desires and truths. “There is some root that we all descend from, and there’s a way for these intelligences to work together to get to some other form of liberty.” 

If we can’t get it for ourselves, we are hell-bent on ensuring it for the next generation — just like Berniece’s parents did for her, just like Berniece does for her daughter, Maretha. “We always want better for our children.”