00:00Many people have heard the story of, you know, how this came to be with Maria Bello at an award ceremony,
00:06presenting you with an award and pitching you this story.
00:10And can you just take us a little bit from that moment to here we are, we've finished the movie.
00:17Well, the story is that Maria Bello has been nursing this story for a long time.
00:23She had the treatment for it, and I got an award at the Skirball Center in 2014,
00:30the National Women's History Museum, and instead of presenting me the award traditionally,
00:35she pitched the movie, and everyone stood up and cheered.
00:40I think there's an important part of this story, though.
00:45And the important part of the story is, I'm saying this now because it's been eight years, right?
00:53I would say at the time, it didn't hit me.
00:56Not the story.
00:59The story hit me.
01:01The possibility of the story seeing light did not hit me.
01:05And I think that that's important to say because we are sort of thrust into this business.
01:11We're sort of thrust in the world, too, but that's a whole different conversation.
01:15But we're thrust in the business automatically assuming that something is not going to happen if it's never been done before.
01:21There's not going to be any support.
01:23No one's going to want to do it.
01:24No studio is going to give it the green light vote.
01:26And who would want to see me like that?
01:29And so I personally dropped it in my brain, in my mind, until it came back with her, Kathy Shulman, came with the script by Dana Stevens.
01:43And I was like, oh, okay.
01:46You know, once again, everything that happens with us is somehow under the headline of Miraculous.
01:53And then pitching it to different studios, coming in with a huge amount of cynicism, I must say.
02:04And here we are.
02:08And on the red soils of South Africa shooting this movie.
02:13And it was the first time that it, you know, it gave me the strength of a warrior to have a belief in my ideas and my possibilities as an actor and the possibility of other black actors, too.
02:25Younger black actors coming up.
02:28Actresses coming up.
02:30So that's the journey in a nutshell.
02:33You know, the thing about it is everybody always talks about when you're an actor, it's the first time you decide to be an actor.
02:41And it's the kind of actor you want to be, how you see your career.
02:44Nobody talks about the in-between.
02:47And that in-between conversation is something that is joyful, is satisfying, but ugly, is blood, sweat, tears, and cannot be encompassed in this conversation.
03:03But here we are.
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