Taking new approaches to well-known characters
Most of Fences cast reprised roles from Broadway revival
For the actors in Fences, everything was the same and everything was different.
Most of them were reprising the roles they had played in the 2010 Broadway revival of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1983 play by August Wilson, but most of them had to approach the material in new ways as they moved from stage to screen.
With a screenplay by Wilson, Fences, opening Sunday, is still the story of Troy Maxson (Denzel Washington, who directs), a former baseball player in the Negro Leagues, now a garbage man, living in 1950s Pittsburgh
His community is made up of wife Rose (Viola Davis), his brain-injured brother Gabriel (Mykelti Williamson), his sons Lyons (Russell Hornsby) and Cory (Jovan Adepo) and his friend Bono (Stephen McKinley Henderson).
With the exception of Adepo, all of the actors in the film are returning to their onstage roles, including Washington and Davis, who took home Tony Awards for their work in the play. Still, no matter how many nights you’ve performed a show onstage, shooting a movie is an entirely different experience — though not for the reasons one might expect.
“In a theatre, there is a relationship between the actors and the audience,” Williamson says during a cast interview in which he’s joined by Hornsby, Henderson and Adepo. “In a movie, there’s a relationship between human beings, at a more intimate level.”
“We’re talking, just as we’re talking now,” Hornsby says, gesturing around the room at his castmates. “We’re living the story.”
That led many of the actors to experience the material in entirely new ways during the filming.
“I was watching Russell do a scene he had done night after night on Broadway, and it brought me to tears. It brought me to my knees,” Williamson says. “Because it was so intimate and closer to truth than anything I had ever seen before.”
It helped, the actors say, that their director has experience acting in both the theatre and movies — and that he’s Denzel Washington.
“Denzel’s skill set is he knows when to talk to us and when to stop talking to us,” Williamson says.
While Washington was their leader, the actors all agree it was the shared experience and their dedication to the material that produced the film’s searing emotional resonance.
“This play is, in the end, about family,” Hornsby says. “And with this (experience), it was a family.”
“We all realized what precious air we were breathing,” Henderson says. “We all knew that our roads led us to this.”