The Quiet Force of Danielle Deadwyler

Danielle Deadwyler took her time with Till.

She spent a week reading the script, letting the story of Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of 14-year-old Emmett Till, unfold slowly. And it took her another week to videotape her audition, which consisted of three scenes, one of which she read with her own preteen son playing Emmett. “It’s not something that you want to go about doing lightly,” she says of portraying Till-Mobley, whose son was brutally murdered by racists in Mississippi in 1955. “You don’t want to throw it together. You want to carefully, tenderly construct, and that’s what I did in stepping into it.”

Growing up in Atlanta, Deadwyler was surrounded by civil rights activists from a young age, attending Cascade United Methodist Church and interning for the civil rights organization the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. So she was keenly aware of the weight of playing a mother who, following her son’s terrible death, worked tirelessly as a catalyst for the civil rights movement and made his story a legendary outrage. “She was deeply ordinary and was projected into an extraordinary decision-making,” says Deadwyler. “But Mamie was a resister at her core.”

Just ahead of filming Till, Deadwyler had a conversation with her son, who turns 13 in December, that parallels the warning Mamie gave Emmett before his fateful trip to Mississippi. “I had to say, ‘You can be as free and brilliant and wonderful as you want to be, and yet there are these specific things that you cannot deny in the world,’ ” she says. And though her son hadn’t yet seen Till, “he knows it’s coming,” she says. “I have to have that conversation amongst other conversations about what it means to be Black in America.”

After recent standout roles in The Harder They Fall and Station Eleven, Deadwyler has found a new level of attention with Till—but she has no plans to change the life she’s built for herself and her family in Georgia. “I like quietude,” she admits. “I want a private life—that’s important so that I can see what life is like from an everyman experience. That’s important to me: It’s not about me. It’s about all of us.”