Widows prove they have girl power
Steve McQueen was talking about female empowerment and how he felt women ‘just got the job done’.
McQueen and the cast and crew for his new film Widows had taken over a hair salon in a rundown district of Chicago to shoot scenes with Cynthia erivo, right, who plays one of the four women brought together by viola Davis’s veronica to pull off a major crime operation.
McQueen’s thriller is inspired by Lynda La Plante’s 1983 six-part drama of the same name, about a quartet of disparate London ladies — led by Ann Mitchell’s Dorothy Rawlins — who take on a robbery set up by their late husbands.
‘No one thinks we have the balls to pull it off,’ veronica says in the new film’s
trailer, which is launched worldwide on Monday. McQueen and his producer Ian Canning have shifted the action to Chicago. Davis’s task is to discover what her husband, Liam neeson (right) and his gang were planning.
She sets up her own league of women that includes erivo (who won a tony award on Broadway for the Color Purple), Michelle Rodriguez from the Fast And Furious pictures, and elizabeth Debicki, who was already on the road to stardom before being catapulted to fame by the success of the night Manager on BBC tv. McQueen was very taken by the Windy City. In the screenplay he wrote with Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn, each woman lives in a neighbourhood that echoes her personality. McQueen, who made 12 Years A Slave, also met with Chicago power brokers. He breakfasted with valerie Jarrett, who was White House special adviser to former President Obama — since the subject of a racist tweet by Roseanne Barr. I spent time on set last year and loved that McQueen’s film was already ahead of the curve in terms of women showing power. As Canning told me: ‘Steve is an artist but also a documentarian of life. It’s also beautiful to see it underpinned by diversity and nuances of empowerment.’