00:00It's not about hesitations, it's about consideration and great reverence for the task, the service at hand.
00:08It came to me the same way any other project does.
00:11Here's the script, consider it, read it, let us know how you feel, submit your tapes.
00:17I'm doing everything just like everybody else.
00:19It's nothing special, guys.
00:21I mean, it's my special effort, but it's the same kind of dynamic that any other actor receives information.
00:27And it's supposed to filter how they take it in.
00:31And so I took a week to read it because I needed to.
00:34I was working on it from scratch at the time.
00:38I wanted to give it its full depth and full close read.
00:44And after having done so, understanding that it had this perspective, this precise lens of Mamie,
00:50I finally did the three scenes that were asked of me and just gave it away, right?
00:56And then, oh, Tenoya has the audacity to ask for a director's session.
01:01So then you're going more in depth, right?
01:03And it was the funeral home scene where she witnesses Emmett's body for the first time.
01:08And we worked that through and had a lot of conversations about what it means to be this iconic woman
01:15and yet give her greater complexity, reveal the flaws, reveal the challenges, reveal the confusion.
01:21And so after having those two experiences of the audition of the director's session,
01:26and then we had more conversation with other producers and whatnot in the film,
01:31they wanted to offer me the piece.
01:32And I, of course, want to carry something like that.
01:36You want to pay reverence.
01:40You want to honor where you come from.
01:43And I am an Atlantan.
01:44I am a child of these institutions, these civil rights institutions that have been, you know,
01:49critical in the freedoms that everybody in this country gets to receive.
01:55And she is a progenitor.
01:57Mamie is the progenitor of the civil rights movement in this way.
02:01Those people were impacted by her.
02:04So that brilliance that she exuded and that she was able to make the choice to do at the time,
02:13that's a birth from a black woman.
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