Oklahoma film icon
Tulsa native Alfre Woodard continues her long career with a role in Marvel’s “Luke Cage.”
With four Primetime Emmys, three Screen Actors Guild Awards and a Golden Globe, Alfre Woodard has learned quite a bit over the years about the safe storage of her trophies, especially after a powerful earthquake rattled her California home in 1994.
“I had Emmys up high on a bookshelf — I had floor-toceiling bookshelves … and I had two (Emmys) at that point — they came down and embedded through the carpet into the hardwood. One of them crashed down to the Earth, and the other one was smushed,” she said.
“I have other awards that they weigh anywhere from 15 to 20 pounds, and I learned to not keep them up high. So, they actually sit on the floor around the house. But my floors are very clean, and I see them because we sit on the floor a lot.”
Woodard, 65, added to her status as Oklahoma’s most awarded actress when she received the Oklahoma Film Icon Award during the 2018 deadCenter Film Festival.
“It’s very attractive,” Woodard told me, studying the sleek trophy. “This one’ll go probably on the shelf above right on my desk in the office.”
The Icon Award honors Oklahomans whose success in the film and entertainment industry has drawn positive attention to the state, and the charming and talented Tulsa native spent more than an hour regaling a home-state audience of film fans, moviemakers and several of her relatives with stories from her career during “An Evening with Alfre Woodard,” which deadCenter organizers asked me to host. Our wide-ranging conversation flowed from the way her Oklahoma upbringing has influenced her to the secrets of her long career to hints about
her latest project, season two of the Marvel series “Luke Cage,” which premieres Friday on Netflix.
“I carry things that happened so many years ago, the way we do wherever we’re from, but where I lived doesn’t exist anymore. That Oklahoma doesn’t exist, but I got everything I needed from it,” said Woodard, who said she tries to return to her native state once a year to visit her family.
“I didn’t know I needed it ... and then you’re like, ‘Damn, I’m stronger than I know, I’m smarter than I know, I don’t take no BS off of people.’ You know, life stuff.”
Storied career
Since the late 1970s, Woodard has amassed nearly 120 film and television credits, including a 1983 Oscar nomination for the biopic “Cross Creek.”
Her four Emmy trophies and 18 nominations are the most for an African-American actor, with her wins ranging from a mother whose son is killed by police on the 1980s series “Hill Street Blues” to a nurse involved in the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment in the 1997 telefilm “Miss Evers’ Boys.”
“It was a calling, and I wanted longevity. So, I made my decisions that way. I didn’t try to get in ‘Booty Call 2’ or ‘Beer House 1’ or that kind of stuff. Which are fine, but you know what is lasting,” she said.
“The majority of the things that are out there that they put money into, the scripts are so regular, like any smart middle-schooler could write those scripts . ... If I’m reading a script, it’s got to be on the paper first. Yes, we stand it up; yes, the cinematographer interprets it; everybody brings their skill and their discipline to make that what it is. But, I’m sorry, the writer is queen and king, and if it’s not on that page to start with, it ain’t going where it could go.”
People person
Along with the script, she said the people involved also influence her choices. She boldly joined the “Star Trek” galaxy with the 1996 “Next Generation” film “First Contact” at the urging of director Jonathan Frakes (who also played Commander William Riker), a longtime friend who affectionately calls her his “god mommy.”
She entered the Marvel Cinematic Universe with 2016’s “Captain America: Civil War” at the request of her pal Robert Downey Jr.
“I love the heady stuff I do. I love that because it’s meaty and all, but I have so much fun doing the other thing because it reminds me . ... When we were little, they’d say, ‘Go on, get out of here, go play and you’d just be running through the yard, ‘Na na na na. OK, and now, and now we see the monster. Oh! And now we’re gonna run over here!’” she said.
In “Civil War,” she played a single scene as a mother whose grief provokes Downey’s Iron Man to face off against his fellow superheroes. Similarly, she had one memorable scene in the 2014 Best Picture Oscar winner “12 Years a Slave,” as the finely garbed mistress of a plantation owner.
“You don’t think of it as one moment. When you pass somebody on the freeway and you might catch their eye and you see them, if they were in the movie of your day, somebody might say, ‘Oh, just an extra to do it. Just, whatever.’ But that was a person with a whole life and a history before they got to that moment with you, and it will continue,” she said. “This is the truth about when people say there’s no small roles.”
Marvel ‘villain’
The versatile performer started her second foray into Marvel’s on-screen universe
two years ago when she was cast as scheming politician Mariah Dillard on the Netflix series “Luke Cage.”
“Mariah, you can call her a dirty politician. I’m the actor. I have to find the reality of that human being . ... ‘How can I be an (expletive)?’ Nobody thinks that. Everybody thinks like ‘Ah, I’ve got the solution. Ah.’ And it’s just the conflicting intentions that create the friction,” she said.
“So, I don’t think of Mariah as a villain. She is somebody who’s willing to bend the rules to get what she thinks is a greater good. Yes, the world is littered with the aftermath of people with whatever good intentions they had.”
Set in Harlem, the series stars Mike Colter as the titular character, an ex-con who has super strength and unbreakable skin after he was involuntarily put through a science experiment. One of Luke’s rivals, Woodard’s “Black Mariah” proved in Season 1 she will go to extremes to remake Harlem according to her ideals.
“Let me just tell you, it is off the chain. I was a choir girl compared to where she goes this time. And Luke gets to be the shining hero,” she said of season two.
She also gushed about lending her voice to Sarabi in the up coming remake of “The Lion King;” talked seriously
about playing the warden in a men’s maximum security prison in the drama “Clemency;” and detailed her starring turn in another Netflix project, “Juanita,” an adaptation of Sheila Williams’ novel “Dancing on the Edge of the Roof” that Woodard’s husband, Roderick M. Spencer, wrote for her.
“One thing that I love about acting is you continue to learn all your life,” she said. “Betty White is still learning stuff; that’s why she’s got that light in her.”
Plus, Woodard is continuing to add awards to her floor space, although that hasn’t proven a full-proof strategy for protecting her prizes, since her third Emmy ended up with water damage.
“It was on the floor and the El Nino came, so we had flooding . ... So, it’s like all rusted halfway up Emmy’s little dress. And then I have one that there’s nothing wrong with her,” Woodard said.
“My assistant said, ‘Let me go exchange them. If they’re damaged, they’ll give you a new one.’ And then I thought, ‘No, this is the history of my being in L.A. pursuing my goals.’ So, they’re dinged up, they’re broken, they got chipped, they’re rusting . ... You know, I am dinged up and crushed and rusty, but it’s like I’m still just gonna stand and wave that flag.”