00:00What was it like tapping into your roots?
00:02There is something very sacred about revisiting roots and ancestry that is in that performance.
00:09And I just was curious if you feel the same way.
00:12Oh, yeah, it's liberating.
00:13But I feel that way every time I do August Wilson.
00:16Because he writes our experience from a very, and makes us have our own autonomy and our agency.
00:25It's not filtered. Our images or who we are are not filtered through a white gaze.
00:32The only thing it's filtered through is us.
00:35He writes us, who we are.
00:38He may write even a part of African-American life that we don't even want to see.
00:43Because nobody really wants to see the truth all the time anyway.
00:47It's true. But unfortunately, that's what we do for a living as artists.
00:52But it's liberating for me.
00:53It's channeling the spirits of my father.
00:58It's looking at my mom and my aunties and my uncles.
01:02And it's honoring their existence by showing them truthfully.
01:10That's what it feels like. It's liberating.
01:12The thing about Ma Rainey is when she walked in the room, she wanted everyone to know that she walked in the room.
01:22And she wanted to remind you who the hell she was.
01:25There was absolutely no apology with that.
01:28Now, that's not me.
01:30You didn't take a little bit of Ma Rainey left?
01:32You have a little bit of Ma Rainey?
01:33There was a little bit of Ma Rainey.
01:34Sometimes, I'm not going to lie, there were times like that on the set of How to Get Away with Murder.
01:39But I'm saying that the spirit of the artist is not walking in the room and being the boss bitch.
01:47It's walking in the room.
01:49When you're an artist, you walk in the room and you just walk in the room.
01:52You know as an artist, you're always going to have the imposter syndrome.
01:57And that's just what it is as an artist.
01:59You're hypercritical of your work.
02:02But with Ma Rainey, she absolutely knew her worth.
02:06She absolutely, within the confines of this narrative, did not apologize for it, demanded it, expected to get it.
02:14And so it helped to be able to understand that all of these people are here because of me.
02:21It helped feed that power.
02:23It really did.
02:25And it helped feed me to even know how to do that.
02:28To even walk in the room and switch my hips with all that padding and the heels.
02:33It drove me.
02:35Great.
02:35You look great in good old teeth, so.
02:37Oh!
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