Alfre Woodard improves every movie she's in, whether it's Grand Canyon, Passion Fish or the new Crooklyn. But is she in the movies she wants to be in? Not really, because the movies she wants to be in aren't being made yet.
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When I first considered the prospect of talking with Alfre Woodard, I thought, "Terrific, she's the definition of an actor's actor: chameleonic, idiosyncratic, true." I start reading her credits: nominated for an Oscar for Cross Creek, Emmys for "Hill Street Blues" and "L.A. Law," lauded for her work in the stage and PBS versions of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf. I moved on to her other screen credits: Remember My Name, Extremities, Miss Firecracker, H.E.A.L.T.H., Scrooged, Passion Fish, Grand Canyon, Bopha!, The Gun in Betty Lou's Handbag, Heart and Souls and Blue Chips. That's when my heart hit the soles of my shoes. Why? Here's a formidable actress who seems to specialize in appearing in movies I'd watch again only at knife point. Her oeuvre includes, almost exclusively, boringly quirky and/or boringly dreary movies of the kind Hollywood likes to fool itself into believing are about "real" people. Please.
Waiting nearly 45 minutes for Woodard to show at a chic Italian trattoria in earthquake-rattled Santa Monica, I try to ignore the brand-new cracks that spiderweb the walls, thinking, "Great. Just how I want to die, crushed in a pseudo-Florentine deathtrap waiting for a serious, earnest actress." Then, in flies Woodard. Chic in eggshell-colored linen, preening a spectacular corkscrew do I'd call fusilli all'Africana, she slinks into her seat and cries, "I'm at your mercy."
With that, Woodard tears headlong into a hilariously detailed apology for being late that encompasses a description of how recent aftershocks toppled her bookshelves and de-winged one of her Emmy statuettes. By the time she lets her gaze flick toward a gold-chain-and-medallion-encrusted fellow diner a few tables away and observes, sotto voce, "Oh, honey, is that guy a Mafia don or what?" I let out a very audible sigh of relief.
Woodard wants to know why I've just sighed. "Because, I thought you were going to be serious, actor-y, and a pain."
"Hmmmmm," she muses, "serious and actor-y? I've been called serious and I've been called seriously goofy. Let me put it this way. I am a founding member of Artists to Free South Africa, and we, as people, are using our position as a microphone to get something heard that doesn't usually get heard. The State Department's tilt on things is that freedom fighters are terrorists and we're using our organization to address our community the way grass-roots groups around the country use their communities. I am an activist and sincere about that. I can be absolutely unorganized and hysterical, like I was today, or I can be completely cool and hold the ground for everybody else around me."
At a nearby table an out-of-towner is surreptitiously eyeing Woodard, obviously having recognized her. After nearly a decade or more of dozens of movies and TV shows, after working with such directors as Robert Altman, William Friedkin and Lawrence Kasdan, giving performances that have made her one of the most widely admired, least widely known actors in the business, what does Woodard make of the response she sparks from the public?
"I don't really think of myself as a celebrity," she asserts. "I don't give out anything that would make people come up and talk to me. I'm intensely private. People have always looked at me for one reason or another, but I'm never convinced that they aren't looking for some peculiar reason. I mean, I usually wear sort of an Afro hairstyle. I'm in an interracial marriage. [But] it doesn't matter why they're talking about you, it still feels like you're naked. You still have the feeling like you're back in high school or something. My husband will sometimes say, 'Alfre, you're attractive. Have you ever thought that they are just looking at you?'"
Or that, despite the fact that she seems to undergo a shape-shifting from movie to movie, perhaps these lookie Lous just like her work?
"Movies are overwhelming, they make you seem so magnified," she continues. "People see an actor and think they have a friend or an acquaintance. Especially if someone in a movie touches us, makes us laugh or cry or they just plain bug us. I mean, if they bug us, it's like we've been personally bugged by them, you know?" Here Woodard puts her arms on her hips, copping the attitude of an urban, tabloid-reading Jane Q. Public. "I can't stand that bitch so-and-so. Isn't she supposed to be pregnant? Didn't she get in a car wreck? And, ooooh, look at that--I mean, she's 35 and she's got no cellulite. Well, why doesn't she have any cellulite? How'd she get rid of it?"
While Woodard's still laughing, I ask her what she thinks of being interviewed for Movieline. She widens her eyes and studies me. "I've read stories about me that left me feeling violated, furious. From my youth, one of the things in life that I fear most is being misunderstood. I'd rather not be known. I like talking to you, but I also know how I'm going to feel when it's over: that we met at a cocktail party, did the grind and then you went out and told."
When I tell her how grounded I find her work, even when she's stuck playing a half-genius, half-moron in mush like Miss Firecracker, Woodard is quick to defend the film. "That was excellent," she says. "I felt like an Olympic runner in a relay with everyone's legs just as pumped up and strong and flexible as yours. People think that's about eccentric, high-strung Southerners? Please, that movie is toned down. That's how my family cuts up."
Why exactly does Woodard do the projects she does? "Because I have a certain way of looking at the world, certain values," she explains. "You do what's right, what's honest, what makes you feel good. I had a great childhood. I was popular, I had loving parents. But I had the constant feeling of having sand in my pants. It was because I was an artist and didn't know it. I felt like I was doing the breast stroke as a kid, being normal, but, suddenly, when I got to do my first play, it was like somebody dropped me in the water for the first time. My God, to know who you are, to know how you're supposed to earn the breath you draw. It's such a release."
By many accounts, Woodard has,since moving to L.A. in 1974, bagged most of what there is of the good and sort-of-good stuff for Afro-American actresses in these lean times--even if Whoopi Goldberg, not she, played the role Woodard dearly wanted in The Color Purple and Lonette McKee played the girlfriend role Woodard sought opposite Richard Pryor in Brewster's Millions. But does she still have to audition for filmmakers? Recently, she says, "I read for Stanley what's-his-name? You know, decadent, wacky Stanley. Tarantino, that's it. I mean, Quentin. Anyway, that was for Pulp Fiction and he was seeing me, Halle Berry, I think Annabella Sciorra and Uma Thurman. But he was looking at an array of people who looked nothing alike and weren't the same ages, so I understood what track he was on and didn't mind it." (In the end, Uma Thurman got the role.) How does Woodard feel, after all this time, about getting psyched up to see directors about parts? "Well, I dolled up when I went to read for Larry Kasdan and Grand Canyon," she answers, "because I wanted a different role from the one he was thinking of me for. But I ain't gonna jump through no hoops for anyone's private Cirque du Soleil. It's all about how the director feels in the moment or how I make them feel. See, I'm the average American person, so my only gauge when I'm thinking about a role is, 'What makes me interested?' I'm the one who's gonna be with me all the time, and if I can keep myself from being bored with what I'm doing, then nobody else can tell me they're bored with what I'm doing."
At least Tarantino and some others seem to appreciate about Woodard what I do: that she's not only a formidable actor, but a pretty much untapped source of sensuality on-screen. She shrugs it off. "When I first came to L.A., I was told I didn't look 'black American' enough, just as white, all-American girls get put through a test to see if they're the 'look,' and, if they don't pass, they play the friend or the babysitter. Darling, you have to realize, it's just in the past couple of years that the fantasy machine can admit that a brown-skinned woman who has African features could be appealing. Strong, nurturing, victimized, yes. Appealing? Very recent. [The same is true of] black men, too. Denzel makes 'em squirm whenever he touches a white woman. And every woman wants to be touched by Denzel. Oh, I shouldn't say shit like that, I should say they find him 'terribly attractive.'"
While we're on this topic, what is sexy in movies? "Movies don't tend to be really sexy, because when you set out to be sexy, it's funny. Real sexuality drips off you like vapor. You don't even know you're doing it. I have nothing against Sharon Stone, but if I wanted to do something that she would do--actually, I've never seen anything I'd want to do that she has--it would have to be really sexy for a reason. Otherwise, you might just as well be in Penthouse."
Guessing that I'm in for an earful, I ask Woodard what she thinks of the Menace II Society/Hughes Brothers/ New Jack City school of moviemaking--the "new black cinema"?
"Suddenly, anybody who falls out of a housing project or a low-riding car is getting a studio deal," she observes, eyes flashing. "I don't want to see a new film every week with crotch-grabbing, bitch-swearing and guns. I resent these movies being passed off as 'cinema.' Why is it that when most of the guys get deals with a studio, the deal stipulates that their movies have to be inner-city, hardcore, urban dredge? I'm not talking about Boyz N the Hood, because John Singleton is a remarkable filmmaker. Everybody knows who I'm talking about. Though I don't believe in naming names, I'll speak the truth to shame the devil. I'm gonna talk about the people that keep throwing money at them. Most of these studio [bosses], like the people they're making deals with, are hustlers who will do anything to put over their hustle and to pass it off as cinema. A lot of the [public's] only contact with 'other' people is what they see on TV or on the movie screen. So, if all they're seeing is young black boys with Uzis, they're going, 'Yeah, that's why I'm a racist, that's why I don't want those people near my garage or my daughter or my whatever.'"
Woodard continues, quietly fiery. "Our young moviemakers have got to learn that the conditions of these movie deals have nothing to do with African-Americans as people. They don't know they're mimicking the man. They think they're doing something all their own, when they're just getting used as sound bites and props that make the Hollywood powers-that-be, who are very insecure people, feel better about themselves. If movies are fantasies, then today they're the fantasies of men. They've never given America anything but their own private little locker-room fantasies. These men need people to behave a certain way in their fantasies, which is why women are still running around just decorating the screen. If a real woman is on-camera, she's called a strong woman. As if every woman ain't strong. These men need to keep saying, 'America's not ready for this or that,' when they're so out of touch with what the hell America is ready for.
"It's easier for the guys who run this town to imagine that black people, brown people, poor people are so completely different from them. It's much less frightening for them to project images on the screen of gun-wielding, crack-selling bangers," Woodard adds. "If [studio bosses] thought for a minute about black people, brown people, poor people as people, they would then have to admit that there isn't all that much that separates their lives, their nice houses from those 'other' people. The executives would have to acknowledge that it is only by privilege of color that they might be in the job they hold, the house they're in. That's why our best actors, directors and producers, people with wonderful stories about people of color, have been trying and failing to get audiences with the powers-that-be. But let some kid bring in a project with gang kids packing Uzis and they've got a deal. If Hollywood executives find something that makes them money, it's like a gang bang. This just pisses me off. See, now you've gotten me serious and sincere, right?"
Clearly, Woodard separates out from the pack not only John Singleton, but also Spike Lee, for whom she stars in Crooklyn. "There are guys who will not be denied. Spike could live in a country where it was against the law to speak to anybody, and he would still be making films. He's an auteur who furthers the stock of the state of the art for American filmmakers the way Bob Altman does. He's one of the few that, when you think of the history of film, you can see him writing his pages. Even when he makes mistakes, I'm excited by them. I don't know what Crooklyn looks like, but I know that Spike is really excited about it, and Spike excited is, like, a funny picture. It's a movie [where] you see black people move around in a world, not just in a low-riding car. And I'm such a bitch in it, a real screamer."
And was Lee a scream to work with? "People assume he is belligerent. He's a person in the public eye who does not try to create a persona to project. Spike speaks out. He doesn't make nice. He gets people's hackles up. Some see him as totally off target. I assumed I would never work with him, because he thinks of me as establishment Hollywood. But ever since She's Gotta Have It, I never let that stop me from approaching him. Taking this role meant I'd get to see him every day, doing the kind of work that we do. It was right and necessary. And it was good. I learned that if an actor doesn't bring the ability to think, reason, research, Spike is not their kind of director. If you're an actor who constantly needs to be assured that the director loves you, [then] no, no, no."
So, what does Woodard ultimately want from Hollywood? "Money," she answers, "to make movies. I've been on too many movie sets where the people who have been in charge should not have been in charge of a kennel. There is a point at which you have to say, 'Excuse me, I'd like to be in charge now, please.'"
Woodard and her husband, Roderick Spencer, a former stand-up comic turned screenwriter and documentarian, have developed a string of projects that have gotten attention from Harvey Weinstein at Miramax, Tom Pollock at Universal and Ted Turner at Turner Pictures. She won't go beyond generalizations, because, she says, "I want them to all at once pop, to explode," except to further note that she will either produce and/or act in the pieces.
What will her producer's motto be? "Real actors in real movies for real people," Woodard says. "See, I know from coming into contact with the public that my audience is real people, not star-gazers. They deserve to laugh at something that's really funny, not something mean about somebody else. They need to be aroused by something truly sensual and erotic, not something perverse and mean.
"I intend to hire like-minded actors. And I want money from like-minded people, not end up the whole time screaming 'Aarrrrrrgh!' because the people who gave it to me do not speak the same language."
But don't expect Woodard to do the mogul thing at the expense of her acting. "If I could take the essence of Vanessa Redgrave, Mary Alice and Geraldine Page, roll them together," she says, closing her eyes almost in prayer, "that is what I would like to be as an actor." And, with that, she announces, "I got a headache from this. I was always told, 'Don't talk about yourself, you have to listen sometimes.'"
We pause outside the restaurant to take leave of each other. "We danced and now you're gonna tell, aren't you, Steve?" she says, grinning as she waves goodbye.
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Stephen Rebello interviewed Drew Barrymore for the April Movieline.